Garage View: bring the landscape back to photography!

It all started in 1975 with the “New Topography” exhibition at the George Eastman Museum of Photography in Rochester, N.Y. Attended by eight Americans and two Europeans Becher couple . The exhibition was not very large and it was not a great success. Moreover, according to one of the participants, it “provoked hatred. But subsequent conversations and references to it have been so frequent they continue to this day that the extent of its influence on the world’s art photography can hardly be overstated. The title of the exhibition had a subtitle: “Landscape Changed by Man”.

1. i 2. Mikhail Fridman. From the “Donbass” project. Romanticism.”. 2009-2011

Usually the landscape, which, for example, showed in his photographs unsurpassed classic Ansel Adams, represented the majestic views of the American West: the rocks, gorges, clear lakes, waterfalls. Unconquered, unspoiled nature. A man is usually absent in it, but it is his human emotions, dreams and philosophical reasoning about being that expresses this landscape. The viewer never tires of rejoicing when looking at the “beautiful.”. He knows that beauty is a rock, a waterfall, a sea, a lake and a century-old oak tree, the tradition of 19th century Romantic landscapes instilled in him.

In addition, all this spontaneous power is likely unrelated to his everyday experience. The waterfall, sea and cliffs are not visible from the window, you can only see them in a photo by Ansel Adams or a reproduction by Caspar David Friedrich. You look at them and you soar above the everyday. But even if a photographer such as Minor White, Edward Weston or Paul Caponigro shows us something less exotic, like a road leading into the distance, a cornfield or a blade of grass peeking out from under the snow, he does it so that we still rise above the bustle and unmistakably read the “beauty”.

Sunset, sunrise, lightning, romantic fog, sun glare, dramatic shadows, low horizon and other such things inform us of the author’s serious intentions. That is the real art, there can be no mistake. We see fog and become enveloped in noble melancholy, we look at a waterfall and become elated, we stare into the distance and think about eternity. Everything is clear, no questions asked.

3. Alexander Gronsky. New Mytishchi. 2010 Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery

Participants of the exhibition “New Topography” suggested as a landscape something absolutely anti-artistic. That is, boring everyday life. Typical buildings, a store, a gas station, a view of someone’s backyard, some garages, an ordinary highway, an ordinary suburban. They might have been shot more or less evenly, following the rules of composition, but where’s the art?? We see it all around us every day, what is so beautiful about it? What thoughts must the photos provoke, what impulses must they arouse, what emotions must they provoke??

The word “topography” in the title of the exhibition hinted to the educated viewer at the earlier traditions of American landscape photography. Photographers like William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and Carlton Watkins took pictures of the American West in the latter half of the 19th century, the same mountains, gorges, waterfalls, geysers, lakes and caves.

However, their primary goal was not art, but the very same topography, that is, a simple and clear photographic description, a documentary depiction of a certain kind of. They worked as part of government and commercial missions – geological, geographic, railroad, etc. p., who surveyed and described the land to make it suitable for civilized life, with roads, towns, factories, plants, and transportation.

At the time, wherever they went, they did indeed see the untouched wilderness, in all its grandeur, tranquility or hostility, depending on one’s temperament and cultural baggage.

Such was the actual reality, and they recorded it. But the American West has changed somewhat since then, something that somehow went unnoticed by Ansel Adams and his colleagues. “The New Topographers” suggested admitting: this is the landscape in which we live.

4. Alexander Gronsky. Mitino. New York, 2009 Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery

Why don’t we think of it in terms of art?? Why not begin, at last, to make artistic sense of our real world, not some past or imaginary one? In fact, from 1975 to the present day, the modern photographic landscape “changed by man” offers us two main themes to consider:

1. What exactly do we consider “art”, “beautiful”, “sublime”, “beautiful”? Why we find some objects more artistic or beautiful than others? Why do a garage and a vacant lot behind the house, shot in steady daylight, seem to us less worthy of being called art than a large tree or the sea in the light of thunderstorm flashes? Why does something exotic seem preferable to the banal?? Come to think of it, the second question can give rise to no fewer dramatic associations, emotions and philosophical conclusions than the first, precisely because it is better known to us and because we can judge it on the basis of direct experience.

5,6,7. Alexei Myakishev. From the Kolodozero Project

2. On what exactly does the decision we make about the first question depend?? What makes us call art one thing and non-art another? What informs our judgment? What shapes our artistic preferences and taste? School education? The Influence of Society? Mass Culture? At what point do the categories of the past or the century before last become so firmly established in our brains that they seem immutable and eternal?

What should the modern landscape be like, given that most people now live in typical urban homes, use public and private transportation, consume goods and spectacles, and pollute the environment on a planetary scale? How our history, memory, and our knowledge systems shape the appearance of the places we visit, look at, and dream about? How are our observations in life combined with impressions and knowledge from literature, art, and science??

What place does the artist have in all these processes?? What are the pictures he paints, what messages he broadcasts, and exactly how we read and assimilate them?? Here are the themes of the contemporary conceptual landscape. In it, just as in Ansel Adams, there may be no man, but it is impossible not to notice his presence, because it is thanks to him that nature now looks like this.

These themes can be considered both chamberly and epic. It can be the monotonous suburbs of Tokyo, like Takeshi Homma, or grandiose landfills, or oil spilled in the ocean, or red lakes of nickel waste, or fires in the desert, like Edward Burtinsky and Richard Mizrach.

It may be studies of English “corners of nature” carefully cultivated artificially, as with Jem Southam, or the peaceful views of New York’s bedroom communities of Alexander Gronsky, unexpectedly reminiscent of Bruegel. In any case, the modern landscape cannot speak only of “nature” and “feeling,” because neither of these – as they were understood in the eras of sentimentalism and romanticism – has long existed. The modern landscape speaks of politics, ecology, economics, culture, and, of course, what art should do about it all.