For this photoshoot I went on a walk by people’s park and the little woods next to it and took around 100-150 photographs. I mainly focused on the trees and photographing them from different angles as I liked the way they looked and thought they’d make interesting images. I changed my camera setting to monochrome because it makes everything look simpler and in my opinion the greenery looks better in black and white.
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Best Images
As said in my Romanticism blog post, landscape photography is the art of capturing pictures of nature and the outdoors in a way that brings your viewer into the scene. From grand landscapes to intimate details, the best photos demonstrate the photographer’s own connection to nature and capture the essence of the world around them.
Major landscape photographers include Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Fay Godwin and Don McCullin.
The term “rural landscape” describes the diverse portion of the nation’s land area not densely populated or intensively developed. Landscape photography is a type of photography that captures the beauty of nature, bringing the viewers into the scenery, setting, and mood in these outdoor locations. Landscape photographs also typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man-made features or disturbances of landscapes. Landscape photography is done for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most common is to recall a personal observation or experience while in the outdoors, especially when travelling.
Edward Weston
Edward Weston was an American photographer between 1886 – 1958. Weston began to make photographs in Chicago parks in 1902, and his works were first exhibited in 1903 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Three years later he moved to California and opened a portrait studio in a Los Angeles suburb. In the 1930s, Weston and several other photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard van Dyke, formed the f/64 group, which greatly influenced the aesthetics of American photography.
In 1937, Weston received the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer, which freed him from earning a living as a portraitist. The works for which he is famous–sharp, stark, brilliantly printed images of sand dunes, nudes, vegetables, rock formations, trees, cacti, shells, water, and human faces are among the finest of 20th-century photographs.
Weston made his last photographs at his beloved Point Lobos, California, during the decade from 1938 to 1948, 1948 being the year he was stricken with Parkinson’s disease. Point Lobos was only one of his subjects, though he returned to it again and again. His career spanned crucial years in American photography, and a restless pursuit of his art created a body of work that ranged over nudes, still lives, industrial scenes, portraiture, landscapes, and any other subject that touched his visual imagination.
Eliot Porter
Eliot Porter was an American photographer known for his richly coloured images of the natural world. his interest in nature was fostered by his family from a young age. He began photographing his family’s island property as a youth in Maine, before going on to study chemical engineering at Harvard University. After graduating in the mid-1930s, his brother the painter and art critic Fairfield Porter encouraged his latent interest in photography and arranged introductions for him with both Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz.
In the early 1940s, after having committed to pursuing a career in photography, he moved from traditional black and white film to the new Kodachrome colour film used by magazine photographers. Throughout the following decades, he published a number of photography books, including In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (1962), capturing the disappearing wilderness of America as well as the Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, and East Africa.
Throughout Porter’s career, he travelled and photographed locations of cultural and ecological significance. Among the locations that he photographed were Utah, California, Maine, Antarctica, Iceland, East Africa, Mexico, Egypt, China, Greece, and Czechoslovakia.
Image Analysis
I have selected this photo as I think that even thought its just sand dunes there are many different components to lookout throughout the photo. As you can see in the foreground there’s different dips and ripples in the sand that has probably be made my the wind which contrasts to the smoother sand in the background on the higher sand hills. I like how it seems the different textures in sand slowly decrease as you look further into the photo, for example in the very front theirs different lines which kind of looks like veins or roots that have appeared in the sand, here there is minimal shadowing and if their is any its more grey then a harsher black which is what is in the background. Towards the back of the sand dunes they are smooth like they have been untouched for years, but there is a dip in the sand which is facing away from the sun so it causes the shadow to be a deep black which immediately draws everyone’s eyes to it because its the darkest shade in the photo.
Landscape photography is the art of capturing pictures of nature and the outdoors in a way that brings your viewer into the scene. From grand landscapes to intimate details, the best photos demonstrate the photographer’s own connection to nature and capture the essence of the world around them.
Landscape photography is especially relevant in jersey where no matter where you go you are surrounded by scenery such as agricultural, coastal or sea views.
Justin Minns is a landscape photographer from Creeting St Peter, England. He incorporates weather into his work to create intriguing atmosphere using fog, sunsets/sunrises, changing tides etc. He uses different angles to create unique POVS of normal scenery such as beaches and fields. He also uses long exposure to create a cool effect on moving water over time as seen on the below picture.
Paul Lakeman is a Jersey based landscape photographer who specialises in coastal shots, often through the use of a drone giving unique perspectives on jersey’s coastal line in which he uses weather and times of day to enhance the spectrum of colour in his images.
Mood board of landscape photography in jersey
My ideas
How I would like to go ahead with this topic is I would like to once again capture black and white images of the rural landscapes among Jersey. I would like to mainly take photos of areas that include loads of trees and grassy lands as I prefer the darker atmosphere that is present in the area. I prefer photographs of the woods or possibly run down/abandoned buildings. I also like to capture that of ancient castles that lay among the landscapes.
What is romanticism?
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.
What is the sublime?
A quality of greatness or grandeur that inspires awe and wonder. From the seventeenth century onwards the concept and the emotions it inspires have been a source of inspiration for artists and writers, particularly in relation to the natural landscape
What is the romantic sublime?
For Romantics, the sublime is a meeting of the subjective-internal (emotional) and the objective-external (natural world): we allow our emotions to overwhelm our rationality as we experience the wonder of creation.
Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.
Context
There were two intellectual movements that occurred between 1700s-1900s which were heavily influential for photography and art projects that were produced during the time.
The movements were known as ‘The Age of The Enlightenment’ and ‘The Age of Romanticism’.
Someone once quoted “Writers and artists rejected the notion of the Enlightenment, which had sucked emotion from writing, politics, art, etc. Writers and artists in the Romantic period favoured depicting emotions such as trepidation, horror, and wild untamed nature.”
“The ideals of these two intellectual movements were very different from one another. The Enlightenment thinkers believed very strongly in rationality and science. … By contrast, the Romantics rejected the whole idea of reason and science. They felt that a scientific worldview was cold and sterile.”
The Age of The Enlightenment (1700-1800ish)
The Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason or simply the Enlightenment) was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with global influences and effects. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centred on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
The Age of Romanticism (1800-1900ish)
Romanticism came as a rebuttal to the Age of Enlightenment and the sense of reason and order. With the progress of industrialization, many people felt that they were losing their individualism and Romanticism aimed at reversing that feeling, celebrating individuals, their connection to nature and how they experience the world.
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.
During the Age of Romanticism, William Blake became one of the most influential artists and was mainly known as an English poet, painter, and printmaker. He was largely unrecognised during his life, but is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age.
Francisco de Goya was another one of the many influential Romantic artists and was regarded as a highly influential figure in the later years of the 18th century. Francisco Goya’s paintings, engravings, and drawings depicted the political and historical turmoil of the era, thereby influencing many artists that followed after him.
Goya’s influence extends to the 21st century, as contemporary artists have also drawn inspiration from the artist’s grotesque imagery and searing social commentary.
His art embodies Romanticism’s emphasis on subjectivity, imagination, and emotion, characteristics reflected most notably in his prints and later private paintings.
At the same time, Goya was an astute observer of the world around him, and his art responded directly to the tumultuous events of his day, from the liberations of the Enlightenment, to the suppressions of the Inquisition, to the horrors of war following the Napoleonic invasion.
Both for its inventiveness and its political engagement, Goya’s art had an enormous impact on later modern artists. His unflinching scenes from the Peninsular War presaged the works of Pablo Picasso in the 20th century, while his exploration of bizarre and dreamlike subjects in the Caprichos laid the foundation for Surrealists like Salvador Dalí.
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favoured sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. Even creating a Zonal System to ensure that all tonal values are represented in the images. Ansel Adams was an advocate of environmental protection, national parks and creating an enduring legacy of responses to the power of nature and sublime conditions.
Adam was known to have quite a few problems with fitting in at school and society in general when he was a child, but the most important result of Adams’s somewhat solitary and unmistakably different childhood was the joy that he found in nature. As evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate. Nearly every day found him hiking the dunes or meandering along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very edge of the American continent. His love for nature influenced him into capturing the beautiful landscapes he saw before him in his photographs.
Adams’s technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he revelled in the theory and practice of the medium.
This theory, that was produced by him and Fred Archer, was known as ‘The Zone System’. This system is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development
Minor White
Minor Martin White was an American photographer, theoretician, critic, and educator. He combined an intense interest in how people viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies. Starting in Oregon in 1937 and continuing until he died in 1976, White made thousands of black-and-white and colour photographs of landscapes, people, and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery and a strong visual sense of light and shadow.
Through the idea of photographs as equivalents (learned from Alfred Stieglitz) and the Zone System (learned from Ansel Adams), White practiced using tonal values as a form of expression. Edward Weston also influenced White’s use of visual form as a way to express universal ideas.
Edward Weston
Edward Henry Weston was a 20th-century American photographer. He has been called “one of the most innovative and influential American photographers. He was also “one of the masters of 20th century photography”.
Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still-life’s, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a “quintessentially American, and especially Californian, approach to modern photography“
Due to his focus on the people and places of the American West. In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer known for his enigmatic portraits and use of multiple exposures. Though he did not gain much recognition during his lifetime, the artist’s haunting images of masked children have since established him as a key figure in American photography.
He first came into contact with photography in 1950 through his job of being an optical firm in Lexington, KY, which sold both optical and photo equipment. After purchasing his first camera, Meatyard joined the Lexington Camera club and learned many of the basics of the medium from another club member named Van Deren Coke.
The artist continued his education in the mid-1950s, when he attended a summer photography course taught by Henry Holmes Smith and Minor White at Indiana University. In the years that followed, he began to incorporate his interest in Zen philosophy and jazz music into his practice.
Eugene Meatyard’s collection: Zen
What is rural landscape photography?
Rural landscape photography is in many ways similar to photographing urban landscapes. The difference is rural photography is about capturing the “life” in the countryside. Of some reasons I like to think of rural as something “old” while urban is mostly modern.
Mood board
THE SUBLIME
The sublime is considered an art term, first invented by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. Although first invented as an art form, the sublime applies to photography too. It refers to the quality of greatness and aesthetic captured in a photo – for example a clear image with a range of colours and focal points is a good example of the sublime. The purpose of the sublime is to evoke emotion in it’s viewers – whether happiness or fear.
ROMANTICISM IN ART
Photography was primarily inspired by art particularly the romanticism art movement which was prominent towards the late 18th century. Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789.
Romanticism art in landscapes focuses on the sky and its surroundings however romanticism art primarily focuses on people and emotions – some of the most famous paintings depicting war or love are products of romanticism in an art form.
You will already see that the Romantic movement was broad and far-reaching. Despite the variety of individual expressions encouraged by Romanticism, there are several key Romanticism characteristics, which underlie Romantic art. These include growing nationalism, subjectivity, and concerns with justice and equality.
ROMANTICISM IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Romanticism as an art form crossed between music, painting, photography and many other art forms. Landscape photography was popular at this time, therefore, romantic landscapes were common. The landscapes focused on the beauty of nature and included a lot of running water and vast forests. Romanticism photography focuses on capturing emotion in the image hence why most landscape photos capture running rivers or a windy day and seem to stop it in time, to capture the emotion whether it be happiness or chaos in one photo.
| Luke Fowler (Differences) | Similarities | Claude Cahun (Differences) |
| Landscape photography | Photographer is included | Portrait photography |
| Photographer isn’t central in the photo | Photograph includes overlaying images | Photographer is centred in the photo |
| Juxtaposed from the top to the bottom | Both composed of two images each | Juxtaposed from side to side |
| Slightly different themes – freedom | Both in black and white | Theme is about gender identity and loss of identity |
| All the images are flat and have a full opacity | Photograph mainly surrounds one person | The opacity has been lowered on one of the overlapped images |
| Shallow depth of field | Scratchy texture | Deep depth of field |
| The landscape photography in the background is the focal point as it is fully in focus | The photographer’sface is the main focal point of the piece | |
| Includes a more complex background | Includes a plain background | |
| Includes one face which is only from the photographer in the corner | Includes 2 faces |
Both these images share a range of similarities and differences. To compare the two images, one being done by Luke Fowler and one being done by Claude Cahun, I can first of all see that both of the photographers themselves are included in the pieces, but they both hold different positions in each photo. Luke Fowler is placed in the bottom corner of his image, whilst Claude Cahun is placed in the centre of the photograph.
I have also noticed that both images include the use of juxtaposition but they both present them in different ways. Claude has juxtaposed their image from side to side whilst Luke has juxtaposed his photo from top to bottom. They both composed of two images but are both presented differently, with the sense that Luke’s are placed next to each other with the opacity all the way up on both, so that it looks like it’s one image as a whole. Claude on the other hand has overlapped two images of their face and lowered the opacity on one of them so that the one from behind can still be visible.
These images both have a similar theme to identity however, Claude explores identity more in the sense of gender identity and lack of identity. Luke on the other hand, explores identity in the way of freedom and not caring what anyone thinks of him.