Framing Ideas
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Columbia College Chicago Framing ideas Landscape and Place abOut this guide This resource is aimed at integrating the study of landscape photography into secondary and post-secondary fine arts, language arts, and social science curriculum. This guide contains, historical information, questions for looking and discussion, classroom activities, and suggested readings related to images from the permanent collection of the MoCP and is aligned with Illinois Learning Standards Incorporating the Common Core and can be adapted for use by younger students. A corresponding set of images for classroom use O. Winston Link NW 1345—Ghost Town, Stanley, Virginia, January 31, 1957 can be found at www.mocp. From the MoCP collection. org/education/resources- is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization accredited by the American Alliance of for-educators.php. Additional Museums. The museum is generously supported by Columbia College Chicago, the images and biographies of the MoCP Advisory Committee, individuals, private and corporate foundations, and artists featured here can be government agencies including the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. The MoCP’s found on the MoCPs searchable education work is additionally supported by After School Matters and the Llyod database at http://www.mocp. A. Fry Foundation. Special funding for this guide and the MoCP’s work with k-12 org/collection.php. The MoCP educators was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. 1 Framing ideas Landscape and Place Contents American Landscape Photography: Historic Context | 3 Timothy O’Sullivan Mark Klett Ansel Adams Eliot Porter O. Winston Link The New Topographics | 5 Robert Adams Lewis Baltz Additional Views | 6 Joel Sternfeld William Christenberry Bob Thall An-My Lê Christina Seely Suggested Viewing | 9 Questions for Looking and Discussion | 10 Activities | 10 Research and Compare Photograph a Landscape and Depict a Sense of Place Writing about Place Suggested Reading | 12 Learning Standards | 13 2 LandsCaPe and PLaCe If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement… –James Agee, from Let us Now Praise Famous Men Landscape photography is a form of documentary photography that describes the geography of an area or conveys and evokes a sense of place. Artists working in this genre might document the built environment, vernacular structures, nature, or evidence of the presence or impact of people on the land. timothy O’sullivan mark Klett Cañon de Chelle. Walls of the Grand Cañon Goat Lake Ice Cavern, Sawtooth Range, Idaho, 1981 about 1200 Feet in Height, 1873 From the collection of the MoCP Not held in the MoCP collection american Landscape Photography: historic Context In the middle to late nineteenth century, photographers including Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Carleton Watkins traveled on survey expeditions for the U.S. government and the Union Pacific Railroad exploring and documenting the vast American west. Their works often emphasized the sublime grandeur of the landscape as a symbol of national pride and strength, and exposed Americans to this vast new territory to encourage the adventurous to uproot and settle the west. Trained both as a geologist and a photographer, contemporary landscape photographer Mark Klett established his artistic perspective on the Western American landscape as the chief photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project (1977-79), which revisited scenes documented by the photographic surveys of the West in the 1860s and 1870s . Throughout his career, Klett’s work has continued to connect to the work of the early American landscape photographers, but also considers land use since western expansion and notes the passage of time. Klett photographs with a large format camera to capture the landscape in precise detail and often includes a human figure in the scenes he photographs, as earlier photographers did, to provide the viewer with a sense of the grand scale of the western landscape. 3 ƒ ansel adams eliot Porter El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, California, 1956 Aspens in Early Spring, New Mexico, 1957 From the Collection of the MoCP From the Collection of the MoCP In the early to mid-twentieth century, photographers created some 2,400 images along 2,500 miles of track including Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter emphasized through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and North the beauty of the America landscape using large format Carolina that capture the importance of these trains cameras and advanced darkroom skills to create highly in the landscape of the rural communities they linked descriptive photographs that depict an oftensublime and in the lives of their inhabitants. Townspeople often view of beauty in nature, often by avoiding evidence of participated in the creation of the images as playful actors what had become by then pervasive human presence within each scene. Link was an exceptional technician who in the landscape. In an era of rapid development, their usually photographed at night, rigging lights throughout idealized views were often circulated by environmental the scenes he photographed to create dramatic, at times organizations such as the Sierra Club in efforts celebrate almost surreal images. The most powerful and portable the American landscape and show the public what might lighting available at the time were flash bulbs that were be lost if our natural resources are not protected and good for only one use and had to be replaced each time preserved. he shot a new frame. Link also photographed with a large format view camera that used single sheets rather than In 1955 O. Winston Link (see cover image) began rolls of film so that he also had to change his film with documenting steam engine trains after he read in a each shot. Link would time the making of his images to magazine for train buffs that diesels would soon replace the train schedules and only had one chance to get each steam locomotives. Over the next several years, Link shot right. 4 ƒ robert adams Expressway near Colton, California, 1982 From the collection of the MoCP Lewis baltz New Industrial Parks #10, from the portfolio New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, 1974 From the collection of the MoCP the new topographics In the 1975 exhibition, The New Topographics: Photographs Adams’s images often in part depict beauty in the Western of a Man-Altered Landscape, at the International Museum landscape, which he often accentuates through his of Photography at George Eastman House, curator William technical skill with a large format camera and in printing. Jenkins noted a shift in a new generation of landscape That beauty is always interrupted or marred, however, photographers including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, by things such as the telephone poles and roads visible Stephen Shore, and Frank Gohlke who often used behind a grove of trees as shown in the image Expressway a seemingly detached or ironic approach to show our near Colton, California, 1982. In a 1974 statement complex relationship to the landscape. Rather than accompanying his series The New West, Adams says, “Many presenting heroic views of grand mountain ranges and have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract unspoiled nature, they photographed every day locations homes and billboards, why picture that? The question such as suburban developments where the interests of sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open man and nature frequently appear to collide. Lewis Baltz’s our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national 1970s series New Industrial Parks near Irvine California parks? One reason is, of course, that we do not live in depicts the stark man-made landscape that was quickly parks, that we need to improve things at home, and that to replacing California’s fertile agricultural lands. Robert do it we have to see the facts without blinking.” 5 Joel sternfeld Joel sternfeld McLean Virgina, 1978 Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington, 1979 From the collection of the MoCP From the collection of the MoCP additional Views In the tradition of the New Topographic photographers, Joel Sternfeld documents the American landscape noting the ironic, often destructive impact of human activity on the land. In Sternfeld’s imageMcLean Virginia, 1978, we see a fireman who appears to be shopping for pumpkins at a farm stand as a house dramatically burns in the background. Sternfeld claims that when he made this image, the farm and home depicted were scheduled to be demolished to make way for a housing development. The fire in this scene was actually a controlled burn training session for local firefighters. ƒ William Christenberry William Christenberry Kudzu and House, Tuscaloosa County, AL, 1989 Site of Kudzu and House, Tuscaloosa County, AL (view II), From the collection of the MoCP 1992. From the collection of the MoCP William Christenberry As young artist who migrated from the Deep South to New Tuscaloosa) had stayed with family over several summers. York in the 1960s, William Christenberry discovered the The book pushed Christenberry, who had been working seminal 1941 publication Let us Now Praise Famous Men in in the style of Abstract Expressionist painters, to realize which photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee that the stuff of his own life could be rich subject matter to described the lives of impoverished tenant farmers in Hale explore through his art. County Alabama, where Christenberry (who was from 6 Throughout his career (1960s to the present) Christenberry the complex and rapidly changing culture of his region. has created highly descriptive, straightforward images that document vernacular structures and changes in The MoCP owns ten photographs that Christenberry made the landscape over time in Hale County. Since the early between 1979 and 1992 depicting the same kudzu- 1970s, he has also created multi-media works, some covered house as it becomes increasingly dilapidated and realistic, others rooted in fantasy or memory, based on is ultimately razed by a bulldozer.