The technique of constructing landscapes is one that has been used in many instances and for different reasons. Whether for practical or artistic reasons, the artists have been exploiting their medium for many years.
The first example of this that we see is the work of Gustave Le Gray, taken near Montpellier, France in 1857, titled The Great Wave. This image’s origin was in Le Gray’s struggles to create an image that was equally representative of the darker regions of the scene and also able to capture the wild movement of the sea without it becoming entirely blurred. This led him to choose to use two different exposures in two different images – one of the sky and one of the sea. He then of course had to merge the two together to form the landscape we see in the final photo. Owing to its period, this process would have been lengthy and complicated; involving manipulating the actual negatives to fit together and look seamless. This was therefore a pioneering image for Le Gray and as the first of its kind, it has inspired artists through time.
‘Since its first discovery, photography has made rapid progress, especially as regards the instruments employed in its practice. It now remains for the artist to raise it to its proper position among the fine arts.’ – Gustave Le Gray, 1856
One example of an artist inspired by Le Gray’s image could be Dafna Talmor, whose series of Constructed Landscapes II employs the same physical cutting process in a darkroom. Her images are made up of other images taken in different locations (still on film despite their recency) before being cut up and spliced together to form these collages.
“Blurring place, memory and time, the work alludes to idealised and utopian spaces.” – Dafna Talmor
This technique does inspire the question of a new possibility to photography – can we use photography to create a new medium of art through both physical and digital (examples seen in the work of Andreas Gursky) manipulation?