The Great Wave, the most dramatic of his seascapes, combines Le Gray’s technical mastery with expressive grandeur. He took the view on the Mediterranean coast near Montpellier. At the horizon, the clouds are cut off where they meet the sea. This indicates the join between two separate negatives. The combination of two negatives allowed Le Gray to achieve tonal balance between sea and sky on the final print. It gives a more truthful sense of how the eye, rather than the camera, perceives nature.

This ongoing body of work consists of staged landscapes made of collaged and montaged colour negatives shot across different locations, merged and transformed through the act of slicing and splicing. The resulting photographs are a conflation, ‘real’ yet virtual and imaginary. This conflation aims to transform a specific place – initially loaded with personal meaning, memories and connotations – into a space of greater universality. In dialogue with the history of photography, ‘Constructed Landscapes’ references early Pictorialist processes of combination printing as well as Modernist experiments with film.

Image Comparison

Both could be described as landscape pictures. What kinds of landscapes do they describe?

Gustave Le Gray’s describes a coastal land scape with waves crashing on a dark gloomy day. Dafna Talmor describes a calm and quiet landscape from the dark warm colours coming from the ripped areas on the photograph.

What similarities do you notice about these two pictures?

A similarity that I notice is the sea is in both of the images, in Talmors image the sea is hidden within the rips and darkness of the photograph. The images are both also very dark and gloomy and ominous.

What differences do you notice?

The difference between these images is that Gustave’s photograph is a landscape and Dafna’s image is an abstract image. The landscape image has soft gentle lines whereas the abstract image has sharp hash edges.

What words/phrases best describe each of these landscapes?

Ominous, dark days, seas, sharp, cold

In which of these landscapes would you prefer to live? 

Gustave Le Grays, as the photograph is more inviting