Romanticism

Romanticism was an era in which people started to appreciate nature and revolt against the urbanisation of the world around them. While in literature the time frame differs slightly, in art the romanticism era began in the late 18th century/early 19th century this was around the time that the industrial revolution was changing the natural world and country side people were used to. Along with this the introduction of scientific explanations and research of nature started to appear. This added to the start of the romanticism era as people, Like Edmund Burke, who wanted people to still be in awe of nature while still being scared and afraid at the sheer vastness of it. This was a similar feeling to a modern day adrenaline junky. As the era continued to develop and appear it was also used to revolt against social norms at the time with it being the age of enlightenment, which is to favour reason and scientific reason instead of blind faith and superstition which came from religious backgrounds and held the power of nature in high regard. Freedom was created within this era as it allowed people to express their love for things (nature) with no reason again breaking the progressive movements into the world around them, giving people an escape from modern realities. This is still common now- people using nature as a means of escape and a break from the ever developing world. Typically in older works of this era it also depicted women normally in the middle of a battle field, waving flags or looking mis places this was that start of the idea of things being out of place in such a terrifying place that in fact beauty is domineering in the environment.

Characteristics of Romanticism

The main traits seen in romanticism work, whether it be photography or art, are that they show things against all reason, like a unbelievable storm with people just standing watching it, tiny in comparison. The work tries to produce a strong emotional reactional over anything rational and reason based. To create this the producers of the work use dramatic imagery, in art particularly it was large storms, where as in photography it can be similar things (imposing weather conditions) but it can also be sheer cliff faces, the vast expanse of fields anything that is imposing and dramatic causing awe in the viewer and slight fear rather than immediately jumping to reason the work. The work askes people to search for the subjective truth which is opinion based than than logical reasoning, this celebrates the individual rather than rewarding following and industrialisation.

The Sublime

The sublime is a very subjective and personal idea for each person. Often used to describe food when food is amazing. However for the romantic movement ‘sublime’ means an array of things from terror, fear and danger to soft, beautiful and powerful which actually falls into both definitions.

The Sublime in Romanticism

To differ the most common idea of ‘sublime’ as for a romantic, sublime can be used when nature over powers man. When man in puny in comparison to the strength and size of the nature, an example being big storms. This was common in older landscape paintings, if there was a person, people in the painting they tended to be tiny in comparison to the nature around them. This has carried on throughout history to modern day, where people in the face of nature are common, dramatic photos.

Edmund Burke

Burke’s prominent work was in the late 18th century just as the French revolution began and places became more urbanised. While this was happening it was also the age of enlightenment where people tried to explain everything, however Burke wanted to just prove you can like nature just because of its emotional impact, saying that Burke went onto become incredibly important to the sublime in Romanticism.

Burke an Anglo-Irish statesman who was also a philosopher. Spending most of his career in the UK, while born in Dublin and spending most of his career in the UK he was an MP between 1766 and 1794. He published multiple books one being, Reflections and revolution in France in which he became the modern founder of conservatism in 1790 in which he showed his mistrust in the rationalism of French Revolutionaries. After and during his time as an MP he criticised the British Government for its treatment towards Americans as well as wanting to express the importance of manners and religious institutions for ones own soul and morality. He is often linked to the sublime and romanticism because he produced the book ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’ in 1757 which was the base for the English romanticism movement as it was a description of the sublime and what counts almost like rules and regulations for the sublime in romanticism. This gave English romantics a reason and proof of their movement. As Burke’s career continued he stayed as a modern empiricist philosopher, which is when people believe our knowledge of the world has come from sensory experiences, completely contrasting the idea of rationalists thoughts. Burke chose to, as common among empiricists, use scientific method to explain different uses of our passion and used he evidence form his science experiments and studies to explain the power of the sublime.

Burke’s Thoughts on the Sublime

Burke thought the idea of pain was much more powerful than those of pleasure, and that in fact the strongest pain of all (terror) was the fear of death. Saying this the sublime isn’t entirely our ‘bad’ emotions so much as anything that ‘overwhelms our faculty of reason’ making us incapable of thinking rationally. This meant he concluded the sublime was our biggest and strongest passion. Interestingly enough Burke believed that painting was inferior to poetry as he though painting tried to harness a huge idea into a clear representation but he thinks they always fail.

Edmund Burke and the Sublime

Introduction to Landscape Photography

Landscape photography the word itself comes from the Dutch word landschap, which originally meant “region, tract of land. Now a very popular genre with many different variations but it has not always been this way. In fact during the earlier time periods it was one of the lowest ranked art forms (before it became a photography genre). However as time went on into the 19th and 20th century and as the industrial revolution progressed the up and coming genre developed into the genre we know today, as people wanted to document the land before it got changed and built up.

What is Landscape Photography?

Landscape photography is a documentation of the natural world around us. Landscape photography is capturing an image that embodies the spirit of the outdoors. It carries a sense of being there to see something incredible. It’s a genre you cannot limit the definition of that the entire point is to capture something beyond limits.

Landscape Photographers

David Noton – A travel and landscape photographer having grown up in different countries and now travels full time photographing all over the world while publishing the f11 photography magazine.

Ansel Adams – A photographer who started out in one special place, now featured in a lot of his work the National parks in America. He was the first major landscape photographer pioneer, leading and inspiring photographers of his generation and ours.

Galen Rowell – Colours are a huge part of his stunning work, Galen actually took up photography to document his climbing escapades. This led to him coining the term participating photography which, means the photo is defined by the athletic ability of the photographer.

16th Century – Albrecht Altdorfer

Altdorfer was a prolific printmaker, but he produced only nine landscape etchings, which date from about 1518 to 1522. These prints were the first ones to celebrate the landscape alone without having a religious or narrative background. This particular one is of the Alpine Vista and the mountains around it. Probably produced for a niche buyer looking for something unusual for the time. This was created in the Renaissance, in which the ideas of humanism, naturalism occurred with creating many ideas still influential in our modern day work.

17th century – Nicolas Poussin

During the 17th Century, we saw the rise of Classical Landscape art. These landscapes were influenced by classical antiquity and sought to illustrate an ideal landscape recalling Arcadia, a legendary place in ancient Greece known for its quiet pastoral beauty. The classical landscape was perfected by French artists Nicolas Poussin. Poussin, who in his early years focused his talent on history painting, came to believe that landscapes could express the same powerful emotions as the human dramas depicted in history paintings. From that point on, he worked to elevate landscape to a higher status.

18th Century – Pierre Henri de Valenciennes

Through both his artistic practice and his theoretical writing Valenciennes holds a position of considerable importance in the history of landscape painting of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. By painting oil sketches from nature out-of-doors. This working method became a cornerstone of landscape painting in the nineteenth century, he also taught this method to his own students, believing it was the best way to learn how to use paint.

Romanticism period- emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and nature, preferring the medieval over the classical.

19th Century – Theodore Rousseau

Theodore Rousseau was a French painter made famous for his unique landscape works and how it developed the art and photography world. He ran the Barbizon school of landscape painters, after discovering his love of nature and becoming one of the first painters to go into nature directly to paint it. At the time his work was considered unfinished but instead he wanted to keep the paintings this way, a direct observation of nature, this later helped create the landscape movement. His work used the use of natural lighting (within the painting) to highlight different elements in nature.

20th century – Ansel Adams

Adams work was the next biggest development in landscape photography, his work forced the development into the modern day style. Swaying away from painting and too using a camera to capture high contrast black and white images perfectly accurate to nature and real life. Most of is work including the above captures the Yosemite national park, a place Adams was passionate about and campaigned through his work about looking after throughout his life.

Modern Day – 21st Century

Into modern day with the introduction of social media and high quality phone cameras landscape photography has greatly changed and become largely more common. The bonus of this is there is many different and new types of landscape photography, from documentary to creating art like work for presenting. However we have never strayed too far from using photography to document the beauty we see in nature and while there are many different styles now and many different techniques to use it all comes down to a well composed, balanced image.

For this photoshoot I went to noirmor woods at around 4pm one Friday morning, Due to this woods being one of the most damaged parts of the island it was all very closed off as workers were busy chopping down trees however they weren’t there at the time so I went through and explored all the devastating damage this woods had endured due to the storm. This place had a touching place in my heart as me and my family would regularly go to this woods to walk my dog and spend time as a family. it was absolutely devastating seeing how much of the woods had been destroyed so much that we could barely recognise where we were.

Edits

Here are some of the edits I made for my photoshoot in relation to the aftermath of storm Ciaran, I have tried to create a wide variety of all different angles, shades, textures and shapes within my photoshoot to be able to have a lot of different images to edit and relate to different things.

Landscape

Landscape can be described as ‘the visible features of an area of land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal’. The term “landscape” comes from/derives from the Dutch word landschap, which originally meant “region, tract of land” but got the artistic connotation, “a picture depicting scenery on land” in the early 1500s. Landscape, like photography, is a relatively modern idea.

The meaning of landscape is the visible features of land, it’s landforms and how they integrate with natural or human made features.

16th Century

Landscape painting was only officially considered as an independent genre in the 16th century.

Landscape as an “independent genre did not emerge in the Western tradition and culture until the Renaissance in the 16th century”. Earlier work of Albrecht Altdorfer can be see during this period. –

Altdorfer’s piece, Landscape with footbridge (1517-1520), is attributed as the first pure landscape piece in oil, done in a style he developed from Cranach.” (16th Century (1501-1600)).

17th Century

Classical Landscapes emerged as a genre in the 17th century.

These landscapes were influenced by classical antiquity and sought to illustrate an ideal landscape recalling Arcadia, a legendary place in ancient Greece known for its quiet pastoral beauty.

Nicolas Poussin was a prominent Classical Landscape artist-“Poussin sketched in the Campagna, the countryside around Rome, and from the late 1630s began to paint landscapes. He brought a powerful discipline to the composition of his paintings, which enhanced the solemnity of their subjects.” (17th Century (1601-1700)).

Late 18th/19th Century

Landscape paintings it eventually gained the prominence in the late 18th century with the rise of Romanticism. These artists sought to celebrate nature over industrialisation and emotion over reason. They often depicted landscapes to show an appreciation for natural landscapes, away from urban expansion and industrialisation.

Theodore Rosseau- “In the 1820s he began to paint out-of-doors directly from nature, a novel procedure at that time.” (19th Century (1801-1900)).

JMW Turner was an English Romantic landscape painter whose “expressionistic studies of light, colour and atmosphere where unmatched in their range and sublimity”.

JMV Turner’s became known as ‘the painter of light’, because of his increasing interest in brilliant colours as the main constituent in his landscapes and seascapes. His works including water colours, oils and engravings. JMV Turner was born near Covent Garden in London and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789.

Photography

Though the earliest evidence of landscape photography was taken between the years 1826 and 1827, it was an urban landscape photo taken by a French inventor by the name Nicephore Niepce.

Around the mid nineteenth century, the invention of photography revealed that cultures were prepared to form knowledge, beliefs and fantasies through optical and reproducible images. During this time, industrialisation began a process of changing where people lived, according to how people worked.

Within such broad change, more specifically, economically advanced industrial nations, railways introduced unmatched speed of travel and early forms of international tourism developed. Images from distant places influenced how familiar places came to be depicted.

As processes of work and travel altered through modernisation/distance began to characterise human relations to place. Land became increasingly perceived as landscape, and landscape increasingly encountered as picture. Photographs became established amidst a variety of forms of landscape pictures.

HDR in images:

These landscape images are enhanced with HDR (High-Dynamic-Range imaging) using a tripod to taken in a steady photograph and include many of the wonders presented on the image such as the the sunset the different autumn coloured trees, the pink toned and shadowed rocks to the reflected lake in the centre and general middle of the photograph.

The tripod holding the camera in place will ensure that the photographer will be able to use the lowest ISO and a proper aperture to capture everything you need presented in focus (The shutter speed doesn’t matter for HDR photos unless you want specifically to create a much longer exposure). The HDR setting is useful when you can have difficulty/trouble balancing a photo’s light.

It is obviously used to and designed to capture high-contrast scenes and bringing them to ours eyes more convincingly.

What does Landscape mean?
Landscape art and 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 human-made features or disturbances of landscapes.

History and Traditions of Landscape Photography

Artists have been painting the landscape since ancient times.

Landscape gained in popularity as a genre due to many factors such as Romanticism. Originally, it was looked as a religious significance, but it also became a method of self-expression with the emotions of the photographer and or painter shown on the painting/photograph.

Before the renaissance, (a period in history and a cultural movement marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, covering the 15th and 16th century), Landscape Art wasn’t really recognised as a genre in its own right.

In the 17th century the ‘Classical’ landscape evolved . These paintings were influenced by classical antiquity and sought to illustrate an ideal landscape recalling Arcadia, a legendary place in ancient Greece known for its quiet pastoral beauty. Even though Classical Landscape was a new genre, it was not yet popular within the hierarchy of art genres.

In the late 18th, early 19th century we start to see more landscape art coming about as a result of the industrial revolution. During this time, Landscape became more accepted by the academy.

Because industrial revolution had just come about, it made people long for their old life. This made people appreciate nature more, leading to people wanting to celebrate romanticism and showing love to it.

Pierre -Henri de Valenciennes – 18th Century

The very first photography that we know of was taken in an urban landscape during 1826 or 1827 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce.

Storm Ciarán, known in Germany as Storm Emir was a European windstorm that severely affected parts of Europe from late October to early November 2023. Part of the 2023–24 European windstorm season, Ciarán impacted north-western Europe and killed 21 people, eleven of whom were in Italy and four in France.

Is Storm Ciarán a tornado?

CLEMENT, England – Amid the chaos of hurricane-force winds, massive hail and torrential rain that swept across northern Europe during last week’s deadly Storm Ciarán tore through the small island town of St. Clement, researchers have determined.

There was severe damages to homes and properties as well a people getting injured and having top leave their homes.

Due to the storm there was school closures, trees down, broken buildings and damaged properties there was winds up to 100mph which damaged Jersey quit a lot.

Here is some examples:

Here is one of my edited photos in Lightroom , inspired by the storm..

Here is a before and after.