Robert Adams (born May 8th, 1937) is an American photographer who focused on the changing landscape of the American west. His work first because popularised after he participated in the New Topographics exhibition (1975), and his book the New West (1974).

During his childhood Robert Adams liked Adams often accompanied his father on walks and hikes through the woods on Sunday afternoons. He also enjoyed playing baseball in open fields and working with his father on carpentry projects. He was an active Boy Scout, and was also active with the Methodist church that his family attended. He enjoyed being outdoors and that likely sparked his care for the natural environment, and how a lot of it is getting destroyed.

he first anticipated he would be in a career of teaching, but due to his passion for nature and how he saw it in it, he when down a path of photography. He bought a 35-mm reflex camera, taught himself the fundamentals of photography, and began making pictures infused with a love for the geography of his home state.

His vision is inspired by his joy in nature’s inherent beauty, yet tempered by his dismay at its exploitation and degradation. Adams uses photography to express his love for the landscape and to understand how urban and industrial growth have changed it, all the while insisting that beauty in the world has not been entirely eclipsed.

Photo Analysis

The photograph pictures a two-story house whose half-timber framing appears decorative rather than structural. It was taken under bright noon sunlight, the house’s shadow barely extends into its grassless yard. The house is almost covering the vast organic mountain range from behind, which is appearing much more durable that the uninspired, geometric house in the suburb. The composition creates a deadpan effect, added with the vast emptiness of the background and the lack of life. The lack of life creates a feeling of isolation, almost as a metaphor to how we are slowly isolating are self’s to the natural environment.

Other:

The New Topographics represented a radical shift by redefining the subject of landscape photography as the built (as opposed to the natural) environment. As environmentalism took hold of the public conscience in the 1970s, The old landscape photography from people like Ansel Adams, which where heroic and displaced the power of nature, where rejected in favour of how human activity connects with the natural world, rather than separating it. This means the truth of the natural world is captured, which making people understand the cruel impacts they are having on the world. 10 photographers pioneered this new way of landscape photography, and first displayed there photos in a small exhibition, in upstate NY, called new Topographics.

The Images they took showed the juxtaposition between humans and nature, and how we are constantly colliding with the natural world. They remind the viewers of the larger issue with our destruction towards the environment, as the heroic images of the natural landscape before often hid the truth. The celebration of nature continues to exist and photographer still try to capture the beauty of untouched nature. It is necessary for the causes of conservation.

Many people believed new topologies was the opposite of romanticism (anti-romanticism). Instead of trying to find the beauty in nature, by going to national parks for example, photographers of this exhibition tried to capture the by-products of Americas post war industrial expansion. Where the rise of urban sprawl and the reliance on cars are becoming a large worry.

the 10 photographers where Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel. They are tying to move away from a celebration of nature to a critique of humanity’s desire for expansion.

The image above is a very famous image from the new topographies. It has a very deadpan look, with nothing inherently interesting about it, due to its strait centre framing and blank lighting. Adams also had a very pessimistic tone towards this humans impact on the natural environment, trying to make the square and uniform mobile homes ugly in comparison to the smooth edged mountain top in the background. The harsh sun light reflecting off the mobile homes, with the dark and sinister background of a natural landscape, creates an obvious conflict between humans and nature. Many photos had basic composition, simple aesthetics and no beatification involved.

New topographics presents the American west being a landscape full of human developments, unlike how photographers of the pasted tried to present it as an untouched, beautiful piece of land.

Below are more examples of new topographics:

Photoshoot 3 – pyrenees

Other Strong photos from this photoshoot:

This is a part of the photoshoot I did In the Pyrenees. I Thought the mountains looked very similar to the mountains in the national park Ansel Adams took photos of. So I didn’t want to miss the chance of getting some photos of the vast mountain range. Here Is my favourite photo from the photoshoot:

Photo 1:

I took this while walking in the Pyrenees around early spring time. I’ve edited it to match how Ansel Adams photo turned out. He often used a red filter over his camera to make the scene more dramatic, so I replicated this in Lightroom by increasing the contrast and adjusting the highlights and shadows. I used Ansel Adams zone system, making sure there was some pure black and pure white in the image, With an even spread of the rest of the zones.

Photo 2:

Photo 3:

Photo 4:

Virtual Gallery:

Here is the link, I also edited the mountain range photo with different settings.

For this photoshoot, I really wanted to use the merge HDR method, so I set my camera to shoot 3 photos, each with different levels of contrast (as it will effect the shutter speed). Then In light room I merged the images together to get a higher dynamic range with the photos. This means the images would look more like what the eye sees (as eyes have every high dynamic range). This would allow me to get images very similar to Ansel Adams who’s images also had life like dynamic range giving a drama packed image. I went to Plemont just before the golden hour so the lighting and contrast would be very powerful. Also, the cliffs are very tall and dramatic, which will help make my image more interesting. Here are some good photos with the editing process:

Photo 1:

I took this image from the side of a bridge, keeping a visualisation on how I want the end photo to look like. I wanted the house to look insignificant compared to the large cliff sides of jersey. The dark and sinister cave below shows that humans don’t have the same power as nature.

I bumped up the contrast to make the scene far more dramatic from the textures of the rocks to the now visible clouds. However, Increasing the exposure too much left the highlights being to over exposed and the shadows being under exposed. I felt like the rocks could do with some more detail so I increased the texture which automatically adjusts certain sections of the image for me.

Photo 2:

Here I combined the 3 images below to increase the dynamic range of my image, each with a different exposure level:

below is the final image after the HDR processing:

I wanted to use visualisation again for this picture. I knew not to take photos with the sun in frame as it can make the image look less exiting if not done on purpose. I also saw some surfers going into the water before taking the photo so I waited for them to get in a nice position before capturing this image. The eyes are brought away from the dark rocks and towards the surfers, placed on the rule of thirds. This means the viewers eyes are always drawn to the surfers (focal point).

I wanted to bring the clouds out more in the photo so I increase the contrast and decreased the highlights and whites. This also gave the rocks some more detail. However, I believe that in photoshop It might be better as I can add detail to the image without the surfers blending in with the sea.

Above is some of the damage that people witnessed the Morning after the storm.

photoshoot:

For this photoshoot I went around St.Catharines woods in Jersey, as there where still lots of debris (e.g. fallen over trees) which I could capture. However, Its very difficult to get wide shots as the wood is in a valley, making close up shots the only option here. To capture the sublime I went around, looking for scenery that was very destroyed, yet still beautiful, showing how even a huge, dangerous storm can be beautiful.

Here are the photos I picked out and edited:

1st image:

Here, me and my family just entered the forest where we believed we could find some damage still left after storm cereal. The rain just happened to have stopped and the sun came out, allowing the path to ‘glow’, creating a warm and divine feel. I only bumped up the contrast slightly, allowing the road to glow more.

2nd image:

I found a broken tree, with 2 wide stretching branches growing outwards. The photo itself is not that interesting but with some editing (e.g. using the zone system in the style of Ansel Adams), I can bring this image to life and create depth in the complex textures of the trees and the stubble on the ground.

Here was the first edit I tried using light room, However, I wanted more control over the highlights and shadows is areas where the intensity is lost (especially in the Brocken tree). So I imported the image into photoshop so I can select areas where I don’t want shadows.

I edited the tree stump with the dodge and burn tool, to bring out the detail but reduce the exposure slightly. I also went into the B&W settings and reduced the amount of blue colour to make the sky more dramatic:

3rd image:

I dont think these are my strongest photos however, so to represent the sublime and romanticism, I will be retaking photos of cliffs sides around Jersey.

Here used a photographic method to increase the dynamic range of my photos, I will apply this method on my next photoshoot.

It works by taking 3 or more photos, one with a exposure unit of 0, and other photos with a higher and lower exposure level (the aperture is kept constant but the shutter speed changes). You are now left with multiple photos of the same scene that capture every detail of the image (including the darkest shadows and the brightest parts of the sky). To make sure each image is taken is in the exact same place you use a tripod and a external shutter release. Then you follow this process:

Collect the images with different exposure levels.

Use HDR merge (High dynamic range) and set Deghost to high (removes ghosting effect that is caused from wind normally).

The image on the right is the HDR merged image and looks much more vibrant and full of life.

Born on February 20, 1902, Ansel grew up in a house situated on the dunes west of San Francisco. In his early life he proved to be a ambitious musician. However, once he received his first camera in 1916, he slowly transitions from a musician to a photographer. He created his first visualized photograph in 1927,  Monolith, the Face of Half Dome. This photo shows the mountain rising from an ink-black sky, its face illuminated by a dazzling midday sun just out of frame. Though Ansel initially made an exposure using a yellow filter, he immediately swapped that for a dark red filter, which darkened the sky and produced the deep shadows and bright light we recognize in the final image. He met many photographers that influenced his work, and changed his style away from the ‘pictorial’ (photos that look like paintings) and more towards the ‘straight photography’. And by 1935, he was famous in the photographic community.

He was apart of the sierra club and eventually because the sierra clubs official photographer – the worlds oldest environmental preservation societies. He proposed improving parts and wilderness areas, becoming known for both an artist and a representative of Yosemite national park. In his time, he managed to prevent the building of a dam in the national park (kings canyon), by convicting congress to preserve the natural environment. He was considered on the Americas most influential conservationists and received a presidential medal.

Ansel Adams and the “group f/64” rebelled against the pictorialism photography. Ansel Adams states below what the mission of “group f/64” was, and how revolutionary it was: “It was devotion to the straight print, paper surfaces without textures that would conflict with the image texture. It was a belief in sharpness throughout the photograph. Good craft, in other words. F/64 is a small stop on the camera that gives great depth of field and sharpness.

He’s now considered to be the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century. His popularly has only increased after his death, as it shows the countries remaining fragments of uninhabited wilderness(especially national parks), which is only becoming more rare as time moves on.

monochromatic photography:

Monochromatic photography is a style of photography that relies on the use of one colour, in one or more shades, to create an image. Ansel Adams used monochromatic images in Black and white to bring out depth and high contrast in his images. Using one colour allowed Adams to focus on light and shadows, as well as lines and shapes. This can create an image that is highly stylized and that has a unique and memorable look.

Visualisation:

Ansel Adam began visualising his whole photo after he starting taking photography seriously. The idea behind this concept was to visualize in your minds eye the end result that you were trying to achieve prior to actually taking the photograph. An example may be finding the best camera angle, or the sort of light that will bring the best out of the scene, Or for professionals, Envisioning the whole image, creating an imaginary image in your head of the whole composition, colour, leading lines, and more. Of course, Some areas of the photograph may not look like how you envisioned it, so Ansel Adams might of changed the lens, colour filter, burning (increases exposure) and dodging (decreases exposure in areas).

The zone system:

The 11 zones were defined to represent the gradation of all the different tonal values you would see in a black and white print, with zone 5 being middle grey, zone 0 being pure black (with no detail), and zone 10 being pure white (with no detail). 

When Ansel Adams spitted his image into different zones, He was able to visualise how the scene in front of him can be translated into black and white film. By doing this you wont leave out any detail as there would be less pure black and white in his images.

Photograph analysis – The Grand Tetons And The Snake River

Taken in 1942, in the Grand Teton National Park, It strikes the viewer with a sense of power created by nature.

This 1942 photograph was originally conceived as part of The Mural Project for the US Department of the Interior, which Adams worked through one trip during the fall of 1941 and another in May and June of 1942. The project was initially planned to celebrate the US’s National Parks system in a suite of large-scale mural-sized prints, that would have lined the walls of the Department of the Interior building, separate from, but in concert with, the pre-existing painted WPA murals already installed.

Adams offers a masterclass in compositional balance, The bright shimmering river that swerve from the bottom right on the image, all the way to the centre, which acts as leading lines towards the mountains. This is juxtapositioning with the craggy and dramatic peaks of the Tetons, Topped with brooding storm clouds, giving drama in the image. The storm could break within seconds of Adams taking this photo, or it could pass, giving the viewer a sense of tension when seeing the image.

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) is an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. For most of the Western world, it was at its peak from approximately 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and nature, preferring the medieval over the classical.

Romanticism came after the age of enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason). which was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith. People who where with this art movement believed in science and facts, which likely helped lead to the very quick change in parts of the world caused by the industrial revolution. The romantics directly opposed these views.

The industrial revolution was the biggest influence in sparking the popularity of this art movement. Romanticism revived medievalism and juxtaposed a pastoral conception of a more “authentic” European past with a highly critical view of recent social changes, including urbanisation, brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. It granted a new importance to experiences of sympathy, awe, wonder, and terror, in part by naturalizing such emotions as responses to the “beautiful” and the “sublime”. Romantics stressed the nobility of folk art and ancient cultural practices.

Many Romantic paintings had colours that tended to be soft and warm, with a focus on pink, red, and pastel shades. Techniques like blending, layering, and brush strokes can create a dreamy, romantic effect, as well as expressive compositions, vivid colours, and dramatic contrasts of light and dark. This created a focus on individualism, an emphasis on nature, emotion over reason, freedom of form, and an exploration of the Gothic and unknown.

John Constable

John Constable (born June 11, 1776, East Bergholt, Suffolk, England—died March 31, 1837, London) one of the first artists of the Romantic movement to create landscape paintings drawn directly from nature rather than the idealised and dramatic depictions favoured by other artists of the period (the age of enlightenment). Constable moved away from the highly idealized landscapes that were the expected norm of the period and instead favoured realistic depictions of the natural world created through close observation. 

In this oil painting Constable has constructed the painting so that the viewer stands on the near bank of the river and the size of the image (it was another six-footer) in conjunction with the carefully rendered fall of light enables the viewer to feel that they could enter the scene. The image highlights the glory of nature without resorting to artifice or exaggeration and reflects Constable’s determination to paint the truth of what he saw.

The image here is really pleasing to the eyes, with its leading lines from the river, the wide open space of green, brown and yellow meadows that run of the frame, the blue sky that reflects a nice tint on the river, and more. The image gives a feeling of safety , making the views want to actually be there, instead of the grimy, melancholy towns and cities.

Niagara USA – Thomas Cole

The American painter Thomas Cole makes his name as a painter of sublime scenes, vast landscape of the American interior showing nature at its most dignified and impressive.

This painting shows the vast Niagara falls with very small native Americans in the foreground. He does this to show a diminished presence in scale and reinforces the false idea of the “vanishing Indian” and is meant to signal impending transformation rather than acknowledge their stolen sovereignty. The people here look almost lost and puny in the vastness of there environment. To be a romantic is to find relief from the pressures of modern industrial life through nature, which this painting displays very well.

The Sublime

The Sublime definition is of very great excellence or beauty. However, in Romantic art it means something slightly different – Sublime Art is Edmund Burke’s 18th-century theory that defines art as that which alludes to an immeasurable greatness beyond comprehension.

In “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757) it noted that there were certain experiences which supply a kind of thrill or shudder of perverse pleasure, mixing fear and delight. He shifted the emphasis in discussions of the sublime towards experiences provoked by aspects of nature which due to their vastness or obscurity could not be considered beautiful, and indeed were likely to fill us with a degree of horror.

We are observing something that is potentially dangerous, but we can gain pleasure knowing that we are observing it from a place of safety – meaning shows the sublime. There is an initial feeling of fear or distress, followed by pleasure, once the subject realises that the object that is posing these feelings is not a real threat. Burke claims that the most powerful passion is that of fear because it comes from an apprehension of pain.

Roger Fenton

 (28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) was a British photographer, noted as one of the first war photographers.

The most compelling of his views of the English, Welsh, and Scottish countryside call to mind the paintings of Constable and Turner as well as Romantic poems by William Wordsworth that celebrate man’s ties to nature. Fenton possessed a particular sensitivity for the play of light and atmosphere in the natural world, a subject he explored throughout the decade of his career with as much determination and success as he did architecture.

What is a landscape?

The term comes from the Dutch word landschap, the name given to paintings of the countryside. all the visible features of an area of land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.

History of the landscape genre

Like most genres, Landscape as a genre first appeared in art. It was very niche and unpopular at first but slowly grew into one of the biggest genres.

It first became the subject of artists paintings in the 16th century in the neverlands but was not very popular compared to the art from Italy and France.

In the 17th century the classical landscape was born. 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. Many people described it as being pastoral simplicity and was the place to go for many landscape artists.

In the Late 18th century, landscape art finally became accepted in the academy because of the artist French Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. In 1800 he published a groundbreaking book on landscape painting, Eléments de perspective practique. The book emphasized the aesthetic ideal of the “historic landscape,” which must be based on the study of real nature. The success of the book pushed the Academy to create a prize for “historic landscape” in 1817.

Landscape kept gaining popularity through the 19th century, This is likely due to many people moving into less rural areas, caused by the industrial revolution. This made many people miss there old life in the country side, so they would turn to art to remember the old life.  Barbizon painters such as Théodore Rousseau and Charles Daubigny became less concerned with idealised, classical landscapes and focused more on painting out-of-doors directly from nature—a practice known as plein air painting. The 19th century also saw the birth of landscape photography, which would greatly influence the landscape painters’ compositional choices. Gustave Courbet (an  Impressionists) pushed the boundaries of landscape painting even further.

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. Ansel Adams captured the country’s attention with his breath-taking views of the wild beauty of the American West.

I decided to lay out my favourite final images in a virtual gallery here:

Evaluation:

Overall, I think this montage of images does a good job of presenting classic masculine ideas. With the colour grading and high contrast, It makes each image stand out. However to improve on this next time I will need to organise this montage better (e.g. diamond cameo) And I feel like the top middle photo does not match any other photo so I will need to take more specific body part photos. I had a little bit of inspiration from Claude Cahun (with the camera work and editing), but I feel like I should of stepped more into her style of bold, outgoing photos.

I think this image links very closely to Duane Michal’s work, by showing the insecurities of a person with there identity. It shows how modern masculine expectations can make a person insecure in themselves. I feel like the foreground model isn’t in frame enough to make it obvious to the viewer that there are 2 different photos.

I think this image links fairly closely to Cindy Shermans work linking to the male gaze. However, I edited my photos to have a rosy red colour grading to them, breaking the norms of gender identity with a feminine colour. The bright, glossy lips of the subject take the viewers attention away from the ‘manly’ body in a strong looking pose. By taking the viewers attention towards the lips you are making more ‘feminine’ traits a focus in the photo, conflict the binary opposites of masculinity vs femininity.