Landscapes & Literature

One form of escapism is often in the form of books. Sometimes, these books will often be set inside a landscape, be it a real life landscape with fictional characters or a fictional landscape (The Lord of the Rings fictional world of ‘Middle Earth’ as an example).

In Bill Brandt’s book, ‘Literary Britain’, he has taken photographs ranging from landscapes to houses and castles and has put these images alongside various pieces of prose, poetry etc. However, these texts are to be used as merely small and helpful clues to try and fully understand what the picture is trying to get across.  The text becomes second place to the image itself, an example of this style is detailed below.

                                                                Withens

Emily Bronte

‘Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff’s dwelling, “Wuthering” being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed. One may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house, and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong; the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones’

Wuthering Heights

 

On its own, the image is an emotive and powerful image of a single house on a hillside. If one has read the book that the passage has been taken from, it fires up their imagination and transports them to that particular place inside their minds.

The image below is a bit darker in tone as it depicts two gravestones in a landscape. The text that accompanies it is from ‘A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland’ by Dr Samuel Johnson. As I am not familiar with this book, I am going to analyse the image instead.

                                                    The Graveyard at Strath

Linking this into the idea of escapism, it speaks to me that the only way that you can almost truly ‘Escape’ into a landscape is to be buried in it. When we go on holiday, it is often for a few weeks and the sense of escapism is more down to a psychological feeling (obviously physical as well, but predominantly psychological as we still take our troubles to a landscape).

 

 

 

 

Notes and images from: 'Literary Britain', Bill Brandt

Fay Godwin - Rambler Photographer

‘Godwin shows through her texts, her photographs and her actions how men write themselves over the landscape and how they succeed in repelling boarders at the boundaries’

                                                                   - Essay by John Fowles (Fay Godwin, ‘Land’)

Fay Godwin is often celebrated as one of Britain’s greatest landscape photographers, but her images often deal with wanting to sustain ancient patterns of use or passage (Rambling in other words). With Fay Godwin’s work, she is able to one hand, craft a beautiful and sublime landscape image and with the other, tell a much more subtle but often darker story about man’s influence on the landscapes around them.

If we take the image below as an example, we see that the sun is shining the trees casting rays of light on the ground. A beautiful image which some might say is very spiritual. But in the darkness of the trees, we are presented with a gate barring us in (or out). My point is, is that even though landscapes are portrayed as being ‘Free’ and ‘Open’, they are gradually becoming more and more restricted and fenced off to us.

                                   Fence, Parkend Woods, Forest of Dean, 1985

In many ways, we have ourselves to blame for this. The image and quote below adequately sums up man’s arrogance towards nature and the landscape.

                                  Quidchurch Mine, Staple Edge Wood (1985-86)

‘If you were a farmer in the Forest of Dean and you had your field of corn, and I wanted to start a mine in the middle of that field of corn, there’s nothing in the world you could do to stop me. We can mine for coal anywhere in the Forest of Dean except gardens, churchyards, and orchards’.

Donald Johns, Chairman of the Commoners’ Association

 

Basically, we can do what we want in the landscape, but we can’t interfere where man has been before. Even though it seen as a preserver of the landscape (among other things), English Heritage also restricts us. Although in some ways, this is a bit of a double edged sword for them, they seek to both protect the landscapes for us, and protect it from ourselves.

Perhaps this sense or notion of 'Escapism' that we often seek, is not that of a physical one, but an escape for the mind instead.

 

 

 

 

 

(I meant to put this quote in my last post as I felt it sums up todays modern attitude towards both photography and landscapes as a whole: 'The photograph dates; makes past, inalienably now dead. ((This is why I dislike my piranha-fish tourist photographers, because they so often photograph in order not to have to look; as if having recorded for the future that they were there is more important than the being there')) - Essay by John Fowles, Fay Godwin 'Land')

 

 

Notes and second image from:

• 'The Secret Forest of Dean', Fay Godwin, with an introduction by Edna Healey
• 'A Dream of England - Landscape, Photography and the Tourists Imagination', John Taylor
• , Fay Godwin, 'Land', essay by John Fowles, and introduction by Ian Jeffery

First image from: http://www.djclark.com/godwin/landmarks/im08/index.html

Last Quote from: Fay Godwin, 'Land', essay by John Fowles, and introduction by Ian Jeffery

The Groups of Tourism

The logic of tourism is often divided into two almost unequal parts: the space occupied by the host culture and what that space becomes when it is invaded by tourists. Tourists themselves can be split into three groups:

·         Travellers

·         Tourists

·         Trippers (weekend holidays)

(There are also ‘Armchair Tourists’ who seek escapism from the comfort and safety of their living rooms)

These separate groups of tourists have different ways of viewing when it comes to the landscapes; Travellers are more dedicated and seek to gaze upon the landscape, Tourists are the middle ground and often merely glance at the landscape. Finally, Trippers are concerned with a superficial gaze of landscapes, they see in blurs, snapshots and fleeting blinks (their photographs serve as a more permanent reminder of their time).

“I have first of all to confess to a considerable dislike of photography as everyman practices it. I detest the sight of bands of tourists armed with cameras, and snapping everything, like so many piranha-fish”

                                                                  - John Fowles (essay in Fay Godwin’s, ‘Land’)

Within these three groups, there is still continuity in the way that the English landscape has been viewed that has changed, which is one of a ‘Stable England’. Even though, everything is not necessarily stable, overcrowding and tourism becoming more commercial has (in my opinion) cheapened our views on the landscapes somewhat.

Before the advent of photography, there were poems and accounts of landscapes, so more often than not people would have to use their imaginations. In the early days of tourism, the viewing of landscapes were for the chosen few (the wealthy in other words), but with the lowering cost of travel, these landscapes became easier and cheaper to access.

                                      Peak District, England, 1989 (Martin Parr)

 

The Grand Tour of the 1700’s was a time when young men would seek enlightenment through travelling, nowadays, this notion of travelling is often to seek to escape for a week or two. In a way, this turns a landscape into a cheap commodity, something one is entitled to see (a ‘Human Right’) whereas the likes of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton fight against this somewhat.

“An object cannot compete with an experience (There are no words in nature)”

 

 

 

 

 

Notes from: 'A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist's Imagination', John Taylor

                    : Fay Godwin, 'Land', (essay by John Fowles, Introduction by Ian Jeffery)

Image from: http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=SearchDetailPopupPage&VBID=2K1HZOH6RPAS8&PN=34&IID=29YL53ZM319E

Last Quote from: 'An Object Cannot Compete with an Experience', (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, UEA, Norwich, 16 Feb to 29 April 2001)

The Art of Walking - Richard Long and Hamish Fulton

Although most people will travel to a landscape to often merely see it, there are a few who go to landscapes to be inside of them. The likes of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton are often less concerned with the images and art that they create; in fact, it almost becomes a by-product as it is the pleasure and the journey of the walks that they go on, which is paramount.

Richard Long and Hamish Fulton are not landscape photographers, more artists whose work is in the landscape and their journey to that art. Richard Long often makes different forms of art be it, a photograph, or map and text or a sculpture. What he creates in the landscape often reflects what he feels it needs; if the landscape needs a line of stones or a circle of twigs he will make it. The landscape might need a straight line down the middle, inviting the viewer onto his journey (they are traces of staying and passing, the straight line is movement, whereas the circles are a form of staying). There is no special reason, aesthetic or political to make his art, he just feels as an artist, that he has a desire to make it. In a way, his work is designed to be impermanent. The fact that the sun captures the way the grass has been trampled, speaks to our own existence on this planet in that we are fleeting moment in time.

 

Hamish Fulton works along the same lines, in fact the essay written inside the catalogue ‘An Object Cannot Compete with an Experience’ (a 14 day walking trip to the mountains of Japan with a company of people) sums up both of these artists styles:

“Walking is many things to many people,

From essential transport and pilgrimage to recreation

 

As an artist

I have chosen to make art about

The physical experience of walking

 

My walks can be

Short and ritualistic or quite long and demanding

They can be alone or with a group

I can walk from my doorstep

Or from the ground of an international flight

 

Walking is spiritual not material

And in theory at least

The resulting artworks could be produced in any medium

From a frosted glass window text

To an expedition video.

 

In the course of travelling I have noted

The following philosophical propositions

 

An object cannot compete with an experience

(There are no words in nature)

 

Walking into the distance beyond imagination

(Walks are like clouds they come and go)

 

The price I pay for not mimicking nature

Is that I am able to recover all my walks in words

(Written words in the artwork

Can describe verbal silence on a walk)

 

Walking transforms, Walking is magic

(A walk must be experienced it cannot be imagined)"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes and Images from: Richard Long:R.H. Fuchs

Essay from: An Object Cannot Compete with an Experience (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, UEA, Norwich, 16 Feb to 29 April 2001)

Escapism

“... escape into fantasy, far from the frustrations and shocks of social life. Yet nature lovers see otherwise. For them, the escape into nature is an escape into the real”

                                                                                   - Yi-Fu Tuan (Escapism p.24)

Over the years, humans have created something called ‘Middle Landscapes’. This is the middle ground between wild nature and the bigger cities, both nature and the city are jungles, confusing and disorientating. A ‘Middle Landscape’ can often seem more real (more what life should be like) compared with the extremes of wild nature and the cities and many landscapes qualify as ‘Middle’ such as, farms, suburbia and gardens. The most important by far (economically) is farmland. Workers on a farm will work, live and die there, so ‘Escapism’ doesn’t apply to them, but outside visitors often see them as blending into the landscape. They almost become figures in someone else’s vision of what they feel that they want to escape to. This merging into nature is enhanced by another common perception that the quality of their location and way of life is, ’timeless’.

A landscape is, above all a composition and to outsiders, it reveals harmonies, large and small. The people who live in the landscape don’t necessarily see these as they often attend to its immediate needs. A landscape also demonstrates the advantage of distance, a close distance can show an overall structure, but from a distance, harmonies of life and environment are obvious. There is another side that many people don’t see, often the isolation of living in a landscape; it is mainly tourists who don’t see this as they merely seek to stare at famous and awe-inspiring landscapes. They look but they don’t see.

“’Landscape’ has a curious significance for human beings. The word itself is heart-warming, like ‘home’, but with a cooler tone”

                                                                                 - Yi-Fu Tuan (Escapism p.173)

 

 

 

 

 

Notes from: Escapism, Yi-Fu Tuan

Landscapes - Romanticism to Tour Guides

By the nineteenth century, the term ‘Landscape’ also stood as an antipode for the visual as well as social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The landscape was portrayed as a form of therapy, a release from the hectic stresses of modern day life. The art movements, Romanticism and Pictorialism reflected these attitudes, but often ignored the ways in which the Industrial Revolution actually impacted on the visual environment.

Romanticism in paintings defined the rural idyll. The image below by Camille Silvy, is in fact a carefully staged construction showing the myth about the calmness, the simple leisure’s and pleasures of what the countryside has to offer.

 

Camille Silvy, River Scene, 1860 

Pictorialism however, took this further. The landscape became merely the background against which stories were told. Henry Peach Robinson’s image below is one such example. As the image below, is based upon the poem, ‘The Lady of Shallot’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

 

Henry Peach Robinson, 'The Lady of Shallot, 1861'

Both of these styles contrast with today’s modern view of landscape photography. Photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Minor White demonstrated the notion of ‘Pure Photographic Seeing’, which often stressed the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the landscapes.

 

 Ansel Adams, Clouds, Sierra Nevada, California, C,1936

 

Linking back to escapism and landscape, a lot of the images in modern tour guides combine these multiple genres (drifting off a bit but, in a way tourism and escapism are one and the same, humans seek escapism and tourism is often a result of this). The images used in tour guides often show a romantic quality to the landscape, but are also fairly rooted in modern photographic views on landscapes.

 

Ben Lui

(Visit Scotland Brochure)

 

Fort Augustus and the Caledonian Canal

(Visit Scotland Brochure)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes from: Photography: A Critical Introduction (Second Edition), Liz Wells



 

Images from:

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=69960

http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=262

http://www.visitscotland.com/info/see-do/ben-lui-p333951#2

http://www.visitscotland.com/about/nature-geography/canals-rivers-lochs

Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs

Benefits and Criticism of Tourism in the 18th Century and it's Modern Day Implications

‘I suppose a little tour of Italy, will be the next excursion; it furnishes rather an additional fund for elegant amusements in private life than anything useful’

                                      - Lord Findlater to James Oswald re latters son, 1768

The idea of tourism was heavily criticised during the eighteenth century mainly on the grounds of cost, culture, dangers of Catholicism and venereal disease. Very little criticism is aimed at tourism itself, rather more in a xenophobic manner, in that people were afraid of foreign influences such as French food and Italian Opera would have on the country and tourism was seen as something of a failure to defend the integrity of British life and society.

Those who defended tourism rarely stressed the pleasures of foreign travel as such matters would have been deemed trivial. In some cases, to be able to travel, a bit of deception was often used; motives for travelling were often seeking cures for ill health, socialising, knowledge and education.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, the ‘Classical Grand Tour’ was the most dominate (young men travelling with tutors for several years to continue their education). But the latter half of the century saw a change in who was travelling abroad, whilst many still travelled in this manner, it started to include tourists not on their first trip, women, older tourists, families and people who sought shorter journeys (weekend trips). This new group did not strive for education, rather travelling for the sake of it, for enjoyment and amusement.

The Casual Tourist was born.

Because of this new found freedom and going on holiday meant not looking for education, landscapes and their wilder features in it began to be appreciated and admired.

Notes from: 'The British Abroad: The Grand Tour In The Eighteenth Century', Jeremy Black
Quote from the book, sourced from: Memorials of... James Oswald (Edinburgh, 1825), p.206