Snapshots of the
landscape
“It's
about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.”
Elliot Erwitt
Kodakery,
Eastman Kodak’s monthly magazine for amateurs existed to sell Kodak products,
so you would expect it to have a broad definition of the facts. Still it was a
bit mean to publish beautifully exposed, crystal clear and tonally perfect
landscape scenes and not tell the readers these were taken by professionals,
with professional equipment, who may have spent hours in the darkroom getting
things right. How many people got their snapshots back from the lab and felt despondent
realizing their images did not at all match their experience of being at
Yosemite or the Scottish highlands?
As genres go, landscape photography was always the
most rigorous, with the highest expectations. A bit of camera shake or
misplaced focus might liven up a street scene or a portrait but landscapes were
expected to be flawless. Anything less not only looked amateurish, it suggested
a lack of proper respect for the subject. There were rules after all. Mountains
had to look majestic. What was the point to a photo of the desert if you
couldn’t evoke vast and empty space? As for the forest, it did take a bit of
skill and something better than a $25 dollar camera to get an exposure that
captured the detail in the gloom.
One way around the problem was to rely on postcard
and souvenir photographers who sold wallets with 10, 12 or up to 24 small
photos in them. They promised to get
it right and save the poor tourist from inevitable disappointment. The images
were professional looking of course, and usually quite dull to look at, the problem
being that professionals not only knew how to take a photo, they understood
exactly the type of image that represented the scene and shot accordingly.
There are some places that can only be photographed a couple of ways. Mount
Rushmore isn’t what it is without all four presidents’ heads in the frame so
inevitably it didn’t much matter who made the postcard, they tended to look the
same. Tourists on the other hand were more likely to be inspired by the moment.
Grabbing the camera and snapping off a couple of shots might have been against
the rules of good photography but the results can change the way we look at
things.
All of the photos in this post have some element in
the composition, the exposure or basic technique that their taker probably
thought made them failures. They aren’t to us. If anything, it is the mistakes
that confirm their authenticity. A decent professional would have included the
entire car in this image but the way it is cut off at the bottom transforms it
from nice but predictable composition to something that catches the eye. Some
people would find the poor framing intensely irritating. That is also why they
work.
The structures in this photograph look like Martello
towers, possibly in Canada. My guess is the photographer realized that a
photograph was necessary but this was the only one that could be taken from the
deck of a boat. Technically it is a failure. Aesthetically it captures
something that would have eluded the most competent professional. The crooked
horizon and the slight overexposure give it an abstract feeling professionals
might have seen but could only achieve after a few hours in the darkroom.
Sometimes we can’t be absolutely sure whether what
we are appreciating is a mistake or an interpretation. Had the photographer
conceived of the image before shooting or was everything left to hope and
chance? The way the sea wall dissects this image suggests the photographer
wanted to capture it as a line slicing across the frame, but did he or she
envision this result, or something else altogether?
Jean Cocteau once advised aspiring novelists to
rewrite the great classics and in their failure they’d discover their
originality. The same could be applied to amateur photographers. We should set
out with the intention of capturing an intrinsically Edward Weston image of the
landscape and when we get the results back, rather than complain about the
obvious shortcomings, value them for all the elements that don’t belong to
Weston because they are now ours.
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