Day Thirteen - Another study of pictures and more (photo) contrasts

With our Wye site visits complete and a dreadful weather day, we headed off to meet up with some faculty members of the Swansea Institute and CLASI (Centre for Lens Based Arts at Swansea Institute). They've moved into nice new facilities, but they are late a few weeks in the construction and classes started today. Impromptu signage was the order of the day. I met first with Andy Penaluna, a researcher of historical retouching technologies and our gentle guide for the day, next was Andrea Liggins, the dean and a kindred photographer interested in the history of landscape photography, then an introduction to Karen Ingham, also interested in landscapes, a web-mistress, senior lecturer, and researcher. Next to be introduced was Mark Cocks, who heads up the BA in photography program, and does research and exhibition. We toured the facilities and saw painters working to finish the darkroom print rooms, carpenters finishing trim work, and an assortment of other construction tasks being performed in a chaos of activity. The new building is a fantastic addition to a bustling institute and a city by the sea (Bay of Bristol).

The contrast of ideas, location and direction between these two schools we visited in Wales might be as great as any within the medium. Theory and practice are equally important in both, yet the sense I come away with is Swansea Institute looks AT photography, while the Newport School of Art program looks WITH photography. I tend to shift between both, but it is a struggle. This is a contrast of vast proportion if you subscribe to one or the other, yet it wonderfully describes the state of the art in today's culture. To consider the growing digital consciousness driving photo technology and the current state of fine art photography (with its love affair with scale, detail, and cool visual delivery of our world), who can know where to begin or end thinking about the medium? I'm currently struggling with the same dilemma within this very project.

What's important to discuss? ...perhaps the record vs. the recorder, or the medium vs. the mediated, or the landscape vs. the picture? Who can lay claim to the original landscape which wasn't an invention of a cultural model, based on previous cultural inheritance? Who can render the true nature of a landscape as it's seen, felt, or experienced? Isn't failure or success of the above in one way or another dependent on our critical perspective? Should we despair the Gilpin rendering of Raglan Castle due to its distortion of space? (see below) When we respond to a travel brochure are we to blame the photographer or designer when our experience on holiday falls somewhat short? Could we find fault with Yosemite Valley if it pales compared to the Ansel Adams calendar image we hang on the wall?

Gilpin's rendering

Shot with a 135mm telephoto lens,
Sugarloaf is still further away than Gilpin's view

What I've found in investigating the nature of pictures, in the time before photography, is their authors took some liberties with space, color, nature, texture, viewer position, and just about anything else imaginable in a piece of art. Viewers who demanded veracity from those pictures were sure to be disappointed, just as modern tourists are often underwhelmed by actual locations compared to the grand scenic imagery glossing a brochure's surface. But really, what's happening is ignorance -- of the medium and the processes of transmitting imagery. Media literacy would be a specific area of study I'd propose become standard fare for all education levels. In my own ignorance, I was surprised to discover the Picturesque period and its important links to landscape design, appreciation, and rendering. My own education led to a discovery about the medium's history. Specifically, photography didn't create the desire to make pictures, it was already a fixture of the culture some fifty years before photography''s invention. Even the act of making 'pictures' was already established practice for those trained in the proper aesthetics.

So, if we choose to believe the image in the mirror, movie, magazine, or museum, who's the worse for it, if we all know the difference between the picture and the thing itself?

We'll be visiting a photography festival in Hereford tomorrow and then be packing for our departure. I'll continue to post some images and musings about photography for another week, but the daily gallery will probably be discontinued.

Thanks to all the visitors and readers. Good viewing and picture-making to all.

One photo from Swansea, from Mumbles towards Port Talbot.