There's another perspective, too, that the Transatlantic photographers - and their buyers, for that matter - won't like to know. It's my view that in Europe, at least, there is a long-held impression that the New World is woefully lacking in cultural values. I add that this is my observation and not my personal opinion.
As a direct extension of that, not least because of a sense of envy (of pretty well everything, in fact, hence the Schadenfreude about Wall Street) that pervades much of European thought, America and its art, in which landscape photography is a big player, is never fully given its deserved place in the scheme of things. There is a sense of suspicion about much of it, from paint to photography and cinema, the latter being particularly suspect because of its overwhelming power in the world marketplace. You could say that the midgets are revolting...
But, from a personal perspective, which is something else again, I share part of the thing about landscape photography, but for different reasons. I learned long ago never willingly to hang photographs alongside paintings. Mediocre paintings will win any battles of comparison. Where paint offers, at the least, some show of artistic prowess, landscape photography seldom does, particularly in colour. It simply doesn't smell the smell; it's forever just a magazine page, a travel document torn from a brochure or a travel agent's wall.
But, if you venture into black and white, display a human figure doing something, or just existing in its own space of white, you have already taken a step out of reality and towards, if not exactly into, art. The finest colour print fails to do that: it’s forever just a photomechanical reproduction of what’s imagined to have been there all the time. You can play with it, twist it about in PS but even if you do it to retain or, rather, create a newer improved (in your view) version of the reality that you began with, it’s still seen to be what it is: just a photograph.
Maybe that’s why some of the American landscape shooters of the past also sell in Europe: they used b/w and are safely dead.
Colour photographs of people. I don’t think that they are ever art. They certainly are commercial in the sense that they sell actors and models and almost everything you can think about, but I wouldn’t hang one anymore either. At home, I have several paintings that I inherited and also two of my own colour landscape snaps in contradiction of what I wrote earlier. They still hang because my late wife liked them. I have some of my own b/w women and that’s it. Starting with an emotionally clean slate, I would dump them all and use my old fashion shots, but I don’t even have a damn negative left! I can’t win that one.
Perhaps it’s simply that b/w is seen to be artistic whereas colour is thought to be the province of commerce. I certainly think like that now – most stock agencies peddle colour for a reason.
Rob C
