WHAT IS RURAL LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY?

Rural landscape photography refers to “photography in the countryside” and covers the rural environment. Landscape photography shows the spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic. Landscape photographs typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man-made features or disturbances of landscapes.

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ROMANTICISM IN PHOTOGRAPHY:

According to the article titled “Romanticism and Its Relation to Landscape Photography & Painting”, romanticism was an art form that rejected classicalism and focused on nature, imagination and emotion. Romanticism focused and emphasised on the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

WHAT ARE THE 5 ELEMENTS OF ROMANTICISM;

1. Interest in the common man and childhood.
2. Strong senses, emotions, and feelings.
3. Awe of nature.
4. Celebration of the individual.
5. Importance of imagination.

THE SUBLIME:

The Sublime is a western aesthetic concept of ‘the exalted’ of ‘beauty that is grand and dangerous’. The Sublime refers to the wild, unbounded grandeur of nature, it relates to threat and agony, to spaces where calamities happen or things run beyond human control.

The theory of sublime art was put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757.

Landscape

The term landscape actually derives from the Dutch word landschap, which originally meant “region, tract of land” but acquired the artistic connotation, “a picture depicting scenery on land” in the early 1500s. The development of the term in the Netherlands at this time was logical because the Netherlands was one of the first places that landscape had become a popular subject for painting. At this time, the rising Protestant middle class sought secular art for their homes, creating the need for new subjects to meet their tastes; landscapes helped fill this need.

The 19th century held many milestones for the history of landscape art. As the Industrial Revolution altered the traditions of rural life, the old hierarchy of subjects crumbled. Throughout Europe and North America landscape painting gained a new supremacy.

In the early 20th century, painters continued to embrace the landscape. As photography gained acceptance as an art form, artists used the medium to create interpretations of the land through pictorialist effects and, later, through formal compositions of close-up, cropped views of the landscape. In America, photographer Ansel Adams captured the country’s attention with his breathtaking views of the wild beauty of the American West. Even though the major artistic movements of the mid-20th century were no longer dominated by the landscape as a subject, the genre’s importance continued as artists responded to fears of increased industrialization, the threat of global destruction, and ecological disasters.

Romanticism

Romanticism was an art form that rejected classicalism and focused on nature, imagination and emotion (1) . Therefore, this started a new way of thinking and created a new type of art. It 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 . One photographer that comes to mind is Ansel Adams . He focused on the beauty of the world and captured that in his photos. His photographs did not include people, cars or man made objects.

The sublime

The theory of sublime art was put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. He defined the sublime as an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.

Friedrich was a 19th century German painter who painted and influenced the Romanticism movement. His paintings often featured the romantic landscapes with a small human element involved. Before Friedrich became known there were very few artists painting landscapes and the genre of landscape wasn’t at all considered as major. With the rising recognition of Friedrich, the genre of landscape became more popular and artists started to paint nature and landscapes. Friedrich’s painting look at landscapes through the lens of the “sublime”. His landscapes are often described as expansive, grand and sometimes thought to bring fear because of the thought of connecting with peoples spiritual side. Friedrich’s landscape paintings would give more meaning to just a normal landscape and would make the nature in the background the main focus of the painting, while still including a human feature. Friedrich is now often seen as the most important painter of German Romanticism.

All of these images show how Friedrich made nature and landscape more important than the human aspect of his paintings. He included a lot more nature, with trees and rocks and sometimes old broken buildings and would only add one or two people to the painting who were almost admiring the nature around them and the sky above them. Whether it was the moon or the sunset.

The Romanticism movement is one of the most influential, widespread and long-lasting artistic movements ever. Infiltrating every sector of the arts, it challenges the modern abandonment of character and vision that came with the Industrial Revolution and its urbanising consequences.

Beginning in the 1750s in Western Europe, the movement arose as a reaction to the stifling spread of consumerism, capitalism and mechanisation. It inspired a return to the innocence, idealism and wonder of childhood, and a simple lifestyle, placing a specific focus on the beauty of nature and its superiority over the human race.

Painters, poets, architects and musicians all contributed their efforts to this development, and created some of the most famous pieces of art we know and love today. For example, the painters Constable and Turner produced these well-known works –

Poets produced famous Romantic poems, such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Byron’s She Walks in Beauty, exploring a revolutionary rebellion against the style of poetry from the eighteenth century which was based around epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles and songs. It broke down barriers and boiled up from serious, contemplative reflection over the interaction of humans with their environment, a dominant theme being the filtering of natural emotion through the human mind in order to create meaning.

The primary characteristics of Romantic architecture were based on the implementation of older styles in new buildings. A key theme of Romanticism as a whole was a fascination with the Medieval period – known as Medievalism. One example of this in architecture is Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin’s Palace of Westminster (The UK parliament), designed in the style of 14th–16th century architecture, specifically the Gothic style. The old-fashioned appearance of this building defies its fairly late design and construction.

The musical figures of the Romantic era are famed for a far more dramatic and energetic style than had ever been seen before. This is thanks to the far more freely composed melodies, ample use of chromatic harmonies and dissonances as well as more dynamics and articulations than ever before. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Nutcracker are two of the most famous and frequently performed ballets ever, with their extremely recognisable themes and motifs (eg. Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is a very well-known melody). Additionally, Frédéric Chopin, a Polish composer, wrote his Nocturne op.9 no. 2, one of the most famous piano pieces in history, which showed its Romanticism through its excessive use of ornamentation and dynamic direction.

All of these cultural showcases of the Romantic ideology represent the widespread appreciation of the movement and its relatability to the human mind.

Moving past this era, as photography develops as a medium, we start to see some landscape photographers bringing their own interpretation to the movement. Their focus on dark and dramatic scenes align very clearly with Romantic characteristics One example of this is the work of famous war photographer Don McCullin, who photographed rural Somerset scenes following his evacuation as a result of the Blitz –

Fay Godwin, despite her work appearing to the average viewer as very typically Romantic in its appearance, went on to reject the notion of beauty and landscape, even going so far as to stating that her photography did not fit anywhere in the ‘sublime’, romantic tradition.

The work of classic American photographer Ansel Adams definitely conveys the Romantic drama and energy. His landscape images are well known in their familiar composition and depth.

What is the Sublime?

Romantic artists explored the idea of the Sublime – an overwhelming emotional response of awe that transcends rationality within the human soul, usually to nature. This is represented through abstraction, colour and light in imagery, and through the use of highly emotional language in literary works. This is an attempt to spark in the viewer/reader/listener the same feeling of overwhelming wonder at creation that the artist was inspired by.

Romanticism a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.

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

The 5 elements of romanticism:

There are five characteristics of Romanticism that all begin with the letter “I”: Intuition, Imagination, Innocence, Inspiration, and Inner Experience.

Common features of Romanticism also include looking to the past as well as to nature for guidance and wisdom. 

Sublime

The definition of sublime is”of very great excellence or beauty.”.

The Sublime is a western aesthetic concept of ‘the exalted’ of ‘beauty that is grand and dangerous’. The Sublime refers to the wild, unbounded grandeur of nature. The Sublime is related to threat and agony, to spaces where calamities happen or things run beyond human control.

The sublime has long been understood to mean 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

The time period of romanticism

The Romantic Period began roughly around 1798 and lasted until 1837.Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.

In the 1760s and ’70s a number of British artists at home and in Rome, including James Barry, Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and John Flaxman, began to paint subjects that were at odds with the strict decorum and classical historical and mythological subject matter of conventional figurative art. These artists favoured themes that were bizarre, pathetic, or extravagantly heroic, and they defined their images with tensely linear drawing and bold contrasts of light and shade. William Blake, the other principal early Romantic painter in England, evolved his own powerful and unique visionary images.