The honesty of wilderness photography

[the_camera_poser]

This article has interesting food for thought....

http://www.utas.edu.au/arts/imaging/stephenson.pdf

[Clownfish]

Although he lost me as soon as he brought post-modernism into it.

[tasadam]

This guy is wrong on a few fronts.

In Tasmania, Olegas Truchanas, Peter Dombrovskis and their heirs have continued this association of views of untouched wilderness with conservation aims.

Hear-say. His opinion. They have to an extent, but not "only". Do all photographers that follow Dombrovskis and Truchanas focus their photography on "conservation" aims? What about the concept of being able to show somebody, through a photograph, that a remote wilderness location might just happen to be beautiful? Even without human influence...

Oh boy...

Almost all modern wilderness photographs rely on an obvious lie—there is never any evidence of humanity in the picture. So while rationally we must deduce that if a photograph was made, a photographer must have been present (along with all the paraphernalia of their profession), the pictures always pretend the reverse.

Keh?
1. Does it not stand to reason that if someone was looking at a photo devoid of mankind influence, someone was there with a camera?
2. Where is the "lie" in this image? What mankind influence would he like me to add to this scene to make it less of a "lie" to him?

Does this denial of a human interface serve to separate humankind symbolically from the rest of nature, and subtly perpetuate in the cultural imagination an antagonistic nature-culture relationship?

The denial of human interface from within wilderness photography is due mainly to the definition of "wilderness", is it not?
Could he be confusing "Wilderness" photography with "Nature" photography, and including mankind and our activities as a part of nature?

Can we truly identify with nature and care for it, until we see (and represent) ourselves as a part of it?

Clutching at straws a bit here, I think.
My life and my place on this earth is far less significant that all the beauty that nature has to show in Tasmania alone, let alone the rest of the world. Perhaps he needs to take that view with him into the wilderness.
When I go out there, I am a part of it. But I am there as a visitor, and it is as it was as it will be, but for my being I can now show others what beauty is there with my photography. May it be there for all time, without human evidence.

While wilderness photography embraces the nineteenth century view of Nature as God...

His interpretation, I gather. Certainly NOT mine.

Not all wilderness photographs have to be transparent windows on an unpeopled nature.

They're not.
Examples from us?
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1823
January - late 19th century, early 20th century the forest was all but bare, stripped for firewood to feed the brick kilns. Is that the "human interaction" he is looking for in wilderness photos of today? Perhaps he should go take Plantation photos and call them wilderness. (ok, a bit harsh perhaps).

March - person in the photo - I am sure that pleases him.

May - human interaction - a cairn on a mountain, and a track in the distance

August - standing beside a boat shed to take that photo, I gather.

OK for me, wilderness photography is to show nature, as nature intended.
If that means to him we as humans are part of nature and wilderness, well, sorry.

Disclaimer -
My opinions only -I do not pretend myself to be some high-and-mighty wilderness photographer, despite my aspirations. However I do know what I like and I do know how I like to capture it. (Post processing I am still perfecting).

[tasadam]

Note to self - don't apply to the uni for a Photography degree. Might have trouble passing after that.

[the_camera_poser]

lol- it takes a lot of stomach to take some Uni classes, or not much backbone.I had an archaeology class in my Master's Degree that was nothing more than hour after hour of mind-numbing attempts at politicizing and brainwashing the class.

I tend to agree with you though Adam- at least here in Tassie pure wilderness photography can be found, because there's real wilderness.

[Clownfish]

Postmodernism reiterates that all representations, however naturalistic, are fictions.

This was where I knew that we were dealing with a *&^%$#! of the first degree.

Post-modernism can crap on all it wants, but like Dr. Johnson kicking the stone, "I refute it thus!"

Seriously, I sometimes think the world would have been a much better place [without a certain generation of French philosophers]

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[the_camera_poser]

Brett- I just put it out there for public dissemination- I wasn't making a stand or stating an opinion.

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[Clownfish]

I think I might now understand what post-modernism means

Then you're doing better than a lot of very intelligent people I remember back in art school, someone asked a visiting lecturer about Post-Modernism, because they couldn't make sense of it, and perhaps it hadn't translated properly from French. He replied that he was fluent in French and had read it in the original, and even in French it was gibberish.

the suitable fate of philosophers

Oh, I wasn't talking about philosophers generally, only about post-modernist/post-structuralist/post-whateverist philosophers, who have been accurately described as "giving *&^%$#! a bad name'. The post-modernists have actually done a tremendous amount of cultural damage, especially in education. If you've ever wondered why kids are told in English class that tv sitcoms are just as valid as Shakespeare as "texts", blame those twits.

(I realise this is all a bit OT, but I get very cross about Post-Modernism; it's one of my pet peeves ...)

[photohiker]

This article is an excellent example of why we should resist over-analysing things that we do.

He has clearly ruined his own ability to enjoy these simple pleasures and now tries to justify or even mandate this mind-mutilation for the rest of us.

What a killjoy.

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[Clownfish]

One possibility, though, is that it could be the limitations (if that's the right word?) of the photographer?

Sometimes wilderness shots with people tend to look a bit like the ol' holiday snaps; maybe it reflects the photographer's discomfort with photographing people.

This isn't to say that that necessarily makes them a bad photographer, not at all. Photographing people well is a gift. I've seen some photographers who just seem to have some indefinable quality that sets the subject at ease and produces brilliantly natural portraits. On the other hand, doing some work for a client once, I was supplied some portrait shots by a very well-known landscape photographer. Now, this person is an absolute genius landscape photographer, but their portrait shots were frankly pretty ordinary.

In other words, a lot of us leave people out of the shots 'cos our shots look crappier when the missus and kids are waving hello in the foreground

Another point to consider: if the photographer is walking solo, why would they be in the shot?

(unless of course, they set the timer so they can take their picture standing on a frozen tarn )

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[Son of a Beach]

If he's trying to suggest that a wilderness photo with no people in it is a lie, because there's a person standing behind the camera that is not in the picture, that's a weird thing to say. Surely the picture is of what's in front of the lens? Not what's behind it.

I honestly think that most nature photographers are simply trying to capture something beautiful in a picture, not trying to make a political statement.

Incidentally, in the photo competitions here, my wife almost always prefers the rare shots with tents in them. She thinks it makes them look more real, or more adventurous, or more personal, or something like that.

[photohiker]

I'm with you Nik,

We go into the bush, see something and photograph it. To get that photograph, you had to go there, and the fact that there is no-one in the photograph clearly states to the viewer that "there were very few (or no) people there in the bush with me". After all, it's not like you have to wait for them to get out of the way or anything.

Looking at it from the backwards 'a wilderness picture without human evidence is a lie' viewpoint, a wilderness picture with such evidence is just as much a lie because the human presence is transient. If you went back there in a plane, it would be gone.

Should we all wipe our wilderness area memories too, because they too are full of lies, consisting of the most memorable moments, often the highpoints of our trips into remote areas.

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[photohiker]

Probably the most interesting thing is the vitriol directed at the author for dare floating the assumption that wilderness photography is more like propaganda than reality. Especially given the frequently stated rules of how to play nicely on this site.

I disagree. With you. And the author.

When I take a photograph of wilderness, I am attempting to capture a reality, not propaganda, not lies. I take it how it is, the same as any other photo I take. In fact, the images I make are just a shadow of the reality of being there, but it's the best I can do, and they work brilliantly as a crutch to keep the fading memories standing.

The author is designing a value based framework for his personal disapproval with the way people have been taking photographs of nature and wilderness since Ansel Adams. That position will probably be argued to death in esoteric academic networks. On the other hand, I'm just a relative simpleton and life is easy because I do not involve myself in consciously deciding the Stephenson acceptable content of a photo, I just amble along until something about my surroundings penetrates my slow witted conscious to the point that I take out my camera and do the best I can with my non-academic capabilities to capture it.

[Clownfish]

My main bug was not so much with the author as with Post-Modernism, which he cited as validating his thesis. I don't have much good to say about a philosophy that insists that even the Gulf War was a fiction (Baudrillard).

[tastrax]

So what do we think of his photographs?

http://www.boutwelldrapergallery.com.au ... Stephenson
http://www.bettgallery.com.au/artists/s ... /index.htm
http://www.bettgallery.com.au/artists/s ... /index.htm
http://www.johnbuckley.com.au/exhibitio ... index.html

[tasadam]

So what do we think of his photographs?

http://www.boutwelldrapergallery.com.au ... Stephenson
http://www.bettgallery.com.au/artists/s ... /index.htm
http://www.bettgallery.com.au/artists/s ... /index.htm
http://www.johnbuckley.com.au/exhibitio ... index.html

Photography, or art?
Pretty expensive too!
http://www.bettgallery.com.au/artists/s ... wedge2.htm
http://www.bettgallery.com.au/artists/s ... wedge1.htm
Up to $15,000 for a bunch of dead trees?

Haven't had a good look yet.

[Clownfish]

At a quick glance, pretty good.

The star drawings were quite interesting; mixing star trails with the sort of imagery you see from particle colliders.

But where are the people?

[walkinTas]

A lie: a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth.

A challenging article! I think the second last paragraph is way over the top.

On the positive side I think the author is challenging us all to think a little more about our photos and in particular about what we want the audience to experience. I never really wondered if I was in any way influenced by earlier photographers. Am I subconsciously trying to represent some "imagery wilderness [that] is aestheticised in particular ways, through naturalistic pictorial codes largely inherited from the nineteenth century". Oh heady stuff!

The title is deliberately provocative, but I have to disagree. I don't believe that there is any attempt to deliberately deceive or any intention to present an untrue or false concept of wilderness among Tasmanian photographers. Nature is beautiful. Wilderness is spectacular, and even more so when it is wild and devoid of human influence. Emphasising that beauty is not lying.

And good luck to David if someone is silly enough to pay him $4500 for an unframed picture of a logged coupe (which is not wilderness).

[tasadam]

The star drawings were quite interesting; mixing star trails with the sort of imagery you see from particle colliders.

What I think he has done in them are a double exposure - zoom in on the stars, open the shutter for a while (from a number of minutes to more than an hour depending on the zoom and effect wanted), close the shutter, zoom out a bit and rotate the camera and do the second half of the exposure.

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[Son of a Beach]

I think the guy is completely missing the point of wilderness photography. I don't think most photographers are trying to tell the full story, therefore there IS no falsehood, and certainly no lie. I think they're merely trying to capture something beautiful to look at, because they enjoy looking at beautiful things (or they want to sell to other people who enjoy looking at beautiful things).

Does the author really thing that most nature photographers are trying to tell a whole story about the world and mans impact on it, or the wilderness? Sure some have used their photography for this in the past, but the overwhelming majority simply want beautiful pictures. It really is that simple (in my opinion).

Let's face it, if you had the choice between a photo of the original Lake Pedder (without the approaching bulldozers which are just behind the camera), or a photo facing the other directions showing the approaching bulldozers and the dust, mud and de-vegetation, which would you rather look at? Which one would you rather hang on your lounge room wall?

Now I know some are fascinated by engineering, and no doubt some of those will see beauty in the dam construction or the machines which are used for the work, which is fair enough, but I think the overwhelming majority would rather the pristine wilderness picture on their lounge room wall than the muddy, de-vegetated surroundings and the bulldozers.

PS. Come to think of it, maybe the news outlets are lying to us all. They show a lot of bulldozers, protesters, guns, bodies, fallen buildings, etc. Not much in the way of good news. And they ARE trying to tell a story! Shock horror!

PPS. BRETT: I think you're largely correct, in that's it's merely an academic paper, and from an academic point of view, given the parameters he's bound his own paper by, it's probably correct. But it really goes to show with some academia... what really is the point of it all? Ie, who cares?

[photohiker]

No problem with that. Just wondering what phrase in the article that you derived the term killjoy from? I did not see anywhere where the author of the article advocated against wilderness or photographs that portray the beauty being bad just that in the wilderness genre the overwhelming emphasis is on the beauty and this means that if that is all a person saw of the wilderness from a hospital bed they would not be getting the full understanding of wilderness. Similar to the view a person only seeing propaganda would form of a country or ideology.

The whole article. I read the article and disagreed with the Author's outlook and conclusions. The term killjoy I used to describe the result of excess analysis, and the presumption that wilderness photographers are lying or hiding something from the viewer. It's just not the case, and it's basically a negative value judgement of those people and their work. Suggesting that what is shown is somehow not reality. Whilst the guy seems to have great credentials in the photo/art academic scene his images do not stand up in my opinion to our established photographers working in the area. I don't really want to be overly negative about his work, and I have never seen any of it up close, but it just seems sterile by comparison to the really good work you can see in the Wilderness Gallery at Cradle Mountain for a fraction of the price (but still not cheap). A visit to a photographer website such as http://www.robblakers.com is far more captivating. Maybe the limited size on the web is an impediment to seeing his work in it's full glory, but somehow I have my doubts.

His cathedral series gives I think a very interesting insight into his work. They seem to be an exceptional effort in travel and technical capture of an amazing number of ceilings. They are more catalogue architecture capture than images that generate the sort of response I'm looking for when viewing a superlative photograph. Believe me when I say that if I was going to drop that sort of money on a photographic print, I would want it to move me.

I hope that explains where I'm coming from adequately.

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[photohiker]

Hi Photohiker so you "projected" your feelings Oh boy I must have spent way too much time reading up in my purist of the person of interest

I don't think so, I only project images.

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