Deborah Bright starts her essay with a quote from J.B. Jackson “I suspect no landscape… can be comprehended unless we perceive it as an organization of space; unless we ask ourselves who owns or uses the spaces, how they were created and how they change.” This preface accurately foreshadows Bright’s interaction with perspective and history.
The origin of the landscape referenced Dutch paintings and formalist concerned representations of property in space, like a windmill or house. These idyllic paintings along with other famous painters like Norman Rockwell, Bright sustains, is undeniably part of the history photographers drew upon. These formalist tendencies built up a visual repertoire for photographers eyes and lead many landscape photographers to follow in these conceptual footsteps.
My favorite part of Bright’s essay is when she blatantly argues about Robert Adams and other formalist landscape photographers “But there is no Form outside of representation. Formal orders are human arrangements and perceptions, not given essences.” I agree wholeheartedly with Bright. Representation through photography relies on context, and I believe context assumes intended perception. However - photography lies tangent to verbal context through captioning and titling of work. I have seen landscape photography in galleries, in newspapers, and online. Across all of these mediums it is in journalistic and storytelling mediums often that I discover more information about the information inside of the photograph. In a commercial and advertisement - it’s most common that the landscape is functionally used as eye candy and glitter for the product and subject to reside in.
This trend continues in video and filmmaking. In an Old Spice commercial the muscular, sexy, ambiguously exotic man brings the viewer from a bathroom to a beach. The final landscape is nearing sunset, the palm tree is swaying on the right side of the frame, and pearly sand’s only sin is from footsteps by man and horse. However, this commercial does not mention anything about this beach, imagined or not, and only intends to indoctrinate men and women into pleasuring their nasal cavities with Old Spice. Consequently, the aroma of the beach charges enough allegedly positive memories tangentially.
Dodge 2013 Super Bowl commercial “God Made a Farmer” exploits contemporary documentary photography in order to sell pick up trucks. The moments the photographers captured were authentic, were staged only if the subject’s eyes gazed back into the camera through the frame of a portrait. The only associations the commercial directly makes with the landscape is that it is where farmers work, along with their positive family values, hardworking calvinism, and endearing, honest eyes. The final frame visually gives way to its commercial backing with the Dodge truck outweighing the background farm structures almost entirely. So God made a commercial photographer.
-Cristobal Ortega
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