Giblett | Tolonen
Rod Giblett Juha Tolonen Landscape photography is commonplace. Yet, despite its prevalence and popularity, it remains an under-explored subject for its political function. In this illustrated study, Rod Giblett and Juha Tolonen examine how landscape photography provides us with a view of the world that we readily take for granted. Photography and Landscape, part of Intellect’s Critical Photography series edited by Alfredo Cramerotti, is a unique collaboration between a cultural critic and a photographer that provides a new critical account of landscape photography, focusing on the settler societies of the United States and Australia. Beginning with the frontier days of the American West, the subsequent century-long popularity of landscape photography is exemplified by images from Carleton Watkins to Ansel Adams, the New Topographics and Edward Burtysnky, all of whose works are considered here. This book critiques the politics of pictures and sets out to challenge the customs of landscape photography. Giblett proposes the development of ‘photography for environmental sustainability’, while Tolonen recognizes the important role of art in enhancing our relationship with both pictures and the land. Rod Giblett is Associate Professor in the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University in Australia. He is the author of People and Places of Nature and Culture, also published by Intellect. ISBN 978-1-84150-472-8
9 781841 504728 intellect | www.intellectbooks.com
0 0Juha Tolonen is a landscape photographer with an international exhibition profile. He lectures in photography at Edith Cowan University. Alfredo Cramerotti is PhD Researcher at the European Centre for Photography Research, University of Wales, Newport. He is the author of Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing, also published by Intellect.
Photography and Landscape
Photography and Landscape
Photography and Landscape Rod Giblett Juha Tolonen
The Editor to the Reader As I Go Ahead Alfredo Cramerotti, Editor ‘Critical Photography’ series Since its origins, the relationship between photography and landscape has been political as well as representational: one way, among many, to understand photography as a visual language that constitutes itself as it takes place in every moment and corner of the planet. Photography is, quite simply and endlessly complexly, the common substrata of our daily experience, wherever we live. What underpins this book is how the making of landscape imagery throughout humankind has formed those very landscapes. The matter is not what landscape photography ordinarily means, since I believe there is little sense in identifying photographic genres. Rather, what is at stake is that places are the stuff that engenders stories, not the other way round. Between the story (of a landscape, in this case) and the image, photography acts by shaping what is both conceivable and actual. Hence my assertion that photography is often a political act, even more so when forming a collective image of a place. Although being a universal language, photography is a very complicated language; it is influenced not only by techniques and processes and their limitations, but also by the cultural and political environment in which it works. Even so, it is not the photographer who takes the centre stage, nor the subject of the photograph; it is the camera’s ability to translate and transform the material world.
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Photography and Landscape
I may be enriched by a photographic experience in relation to a landscape, or disappointed altogether, but I would not be untouched. Photographic imagemaking is a process orientated towards the future: a starting point, a moment in which something is put in motion, rather than a final recording act. It is a difference to bear in mind.
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