Friday November 16

We could meet in Newhaven tomorrow. There's a parking area just by the Harbour Inn, Fishmarket Square, off Newhaven Main Street. See the map at the bottom of the screen.
There are contrasting environments to explore. Newhaven village itself is an old picturesque village, with a harbour and coastal views west along the Forth and across to Fife. It has its own historical photographic associations with Hill and Adamson. There is also a modern housing development along Wester Harbour, which people seem to either love or hate. It's a waterfront development that I thinks is a bit exclusive, and modern, with clean lines and enclosed courtyards.
The city, its architecture and inhabitants' relationship with the built environment is a rich source of photographic inspiration, which doesn't depend on the subject being conventionally scenic.
Horst Hamann has a fine series of pictures of cities, often using a 'vertical panoramic' format.

http://www.horsthamann.com/

Rene Burri engaged in a long-term photographic study of the work of Le Corbusier,





Raymond Depardon, also from Magnum, seemed to have a recurring interest in such apparently unphotogenic subjects as car parks, roads and the infrastructure of motor vehicles.

Raymond Depardon, Magnum Photos

Bernice Abbott created an iconic portrait of New York, in a modernist celebration of a buzzing metropolis.

Bernice Abbott

Many of these pictures are taken in a spirit of celebration, which is a good motivation for shooting, and photography into the 30s was often a celebratory exploration of the physical world and the unique qualities of the photographic process. In fact one later photographer actually said, "I photograph the world to see what the world looks like, photographed." The implication being that the world and the photograph are slightly different.
In the 60s and 70s, in reaction to photographic grandeur and visual drama, many photographers took to exploring the less majestic parts of the city, and also the things that get in the way. Lee Friedlander for example, made a consistent study of the signs, lamp posts, and general visual clutter of a modern city, often shooting in apparently random street corners and junctions of streets. 
So a defining characteristic of landscape photography is the domination of a pictorial style, related to and developing from Romantic painting, whereby the photographer tries to show a landscape at its most dramatic, magnificent and intense; and often being tempted to help reality along in the process by adding a different sky or other elements. The photographers I've mentioned here are presenting a different point of view, less lyrical, less obviously pictorial and in Friedlander's case, he is going in completely the opposite direction. Whatever the rules of the picturesque may be (and there have been rules), Friedlander did the opposite. Gleefully.

Lee Friedlander

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Photographs and reality

One of the conversations that occurred on Friday related to the question of whether Photoshop manipulation of pictures is acceptable or desirable. It's a common debate whenever photographers get together, and has been discussed in one form or another for over 150 years.

Yes, I did say 150 years, because the tension between reality and manipulation has existed since photography was invented.

Fox Talbot, one of the inventors, described photography as the "pencil of nature" and thought of the camera as a machine that created pictures by itself. The photographer was simply the operator.

Very quickly, early adopters of the new technology started to create an art form out of it  and began to adopt habits from its nearest neighbour - painting.

To establish themselves as unique and individual creators of images, they began to manipulate the image - lenses were deliberately softened to reduce their focus; the glass plates were scratched, smudged or painted on to create more painterly, less clearly descriptive pictures. 

Julia Margaret Cameron

The term for this is usually 'Pictorialism', and people like Steiglitz, Steichen and Julia Margaret Cameron are good examples. It was often romantic, and drew inspiration from paintings, myths and legends.

http://photography-now.net/alfred_stieglitz/

The Great War changed all that.

Steiglitz in particular helped developed photography beyond Pictorialism. As an aerial reconnaisance photographer he became aware of the impressive possibilities of good lenses to accurately describe reality and developed an idea that this quality was a legitimate form of artistic creativity.

In short, the idea of exploring the unique visual possibilities of purely photographic technique was an art in itself, without needing to mimic painting or to draw from myth. Modern reality, everyday subjects and a new technology was sufficient. This was a part of the art and cultural movement, Modernism, and was revolutionary - literally. It became part of the Russian revolutionary style - a new technology and way of seeing for a new political reality.

In America, a loose group of photographers including Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams (I think) gathered together to produce pictures that were as sharp and clear as could be, with minimal or no painterly manipulation. They called themselves the F64 group, after the smallest aperture - and greatest depth of field - available.

Ansel Adams in particular developed the technique of extracting the maximum amount of tonal range from a scene and reproducing it in beautifully crafted prints - it is called the zone system. He wanted to record maximum detail and clarity, and also interpret the scene visually. This technique created pictures that were both closely related to the actual scene, but also a subtle enhancement of the visual drama of the scene.

http://photography-now.net/ansel_adams/

But adding colours or taking elements from one picture into another wasn't part of the purely photographic way of seeing, with its very close relationship to the real scene. Adams was capable of creating composite pictures, but did not. 

And that, basically, is the same conversation that is taking place today, but with computer technology and its limitless possibilities. We are able to manufacture pictures from many different sources, we can change colours and enhance and improve and exaggerate at will. 

It is a choice, a decision, and in some respects, it is an ethos.

We can tap into the tradition of romantic pictorialism by creating digital artworks which are nothing like the original scene. Or we can use the intrinsic qualities of the camera - light, lenses, shutter speed, aperture, point of view to make visually appealing or challenging photographs that have a connection to the reality. When we do this, we are tapping in to the Modernist tradition.

And then there's post-modernism - but that's a whole other story.

http://photography-now.net/immogen_cunningham/index.html