At 13:03 3/24/02, Winsor Crosby wrote:
I would very mildly disagree in that the landscape is the last layer for
everything. For it to be a landscape it has to be the subject, not the
background. Anything in the landscape becomes a picture of the thing. A
fence or a barn in the landscape is a picture of a fence or a barn unless
it is so small as to be inconsequential, or just an accent in the picture.
But we can decide to be as loose as we want in our submissions as a
group. And who says that a landscape has to be "nice and scenic"? Isn't
that like not taking pictures of people because they do not look like
professional models who seem to represent the usual notions of physical beauty?
--
Winsor Crosby
Long Beach, California
I mildly disagree with the size aspect, and an absolute interpretation that
"Anything in the landscape becomes a picture of the thing." It depends on
how the "thing" is *used* as an object in the image. Perhaps this is what
you meant by "accent" but it need not be distant background or
insignificantly tiny. A landscape is about the environs in which the
photograph is made. Environs interact with various static (non-living) and
dynamic (living) things (or vice-versa depending on frame of
reference). It need not be purely representational as in a "traditional"
Calendar Photograph, but can easily be impressionistic or abstract, and it
can legitimately celebrate a relationship between the environs with
man-made structures or living things, including humans, that happen to be
there and tell a story about that relationship. Certainly size can become
so extreme the photograph is clearly a picture of the "thing" because it
overwhelms the environment in which it exists, but that is an extreme.
"What" a photograph is spans a continuum. A boundary line separating
"categories" if one wishes to have a taxonomy of them is, by necessity,
arbitrary. Ask 50 people where the boundaries are and you will likely get
50 different, arbitrary, answers. Thus you have my thoughts about it and
they are admittedly just as arbitrary.
-- John
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