I do enjoy the beautiful pristine landscape images that somehow manage to pretend that we are living in a untouched garden of paradise. I spent many years attempting these myself. I was quite young when I saw Faye Godwins work and was quite surprised by it. The walls and domestic animals were things I would have excluded.
Now with our environment under such stress and with my own feelings about that I seem to be more interested in discussing those stresses in my photographs than In seeking out the pristine remanants of our world.
I’m not saying that is the only valid response to the issues but it is mine. I do also think that landscape photography seems to be stuck in a romantic turning away from the realities we currently face. The masters of the f64 movement were so spectacularly successful that their dominating aesthetic continues to this day. Sometimes I think all we are seeing is f64 but in colour and with stars.
Funny thing about Godwin: when I first came across her I didn't take to her at all. Now, decades later, I find she has something that is mordantly honest. Also, that honesty is projected more strongly through her use of black/white which helps to strip away the rainbows of romanticism and show us what reality looks like when you stop and look at it instead of hurrying past as usual. The very same conclusion was reached a long time ago with war photography: use colour and you create movie trailers, and for the same reason: romance found in the glamour of a little patch of colour on an otherwise bland newspaper or magazine page. It's the well-known effect of the colour red in any picture; it's why Leica planned that dot: they wanted no bush to hide their glow.
Reduced to black and white, there's no place to hide: you either caught something or you came up empty.
The landscape is what it is, and will remain for as long as we don't destroy it. Before we manage that, we shall have destroyed ourselves, and that will allow nature the time to recover, even if with perhaps new forms of vegetation before the world becomes desert and it's too late. Ironically, by our own pyrrhic hand will we will have been proved dispensable, even if nobody will be around to realise that.
As I wrote the above, it struck me that there is perhaps a huge, underlying link between landscape and street, in that both of them really reflect the actions of man more than they tell about anything else; whilst we still exist, we have made ourselves the gods that govern the survival of everything. And probably, the destroyers of that too. Testosterone has one helluva lot for which to answer, something that struck home very forcefully as I looked at the televised graduation portrait of the pretty English girl murdered in new Zealand these past few days. What a waste; what a sin.
