What is shown in a landscape picture?

2-5pm, March 24th 2010

H8A from 2-5pm, University of Wales, Newport

"Landscape is a privileged form of the signification of longings and desire (social, political, economic, ideological and highly personal) on to a mute landscape environment."

David Bate: Photography, The Key Concepts

Six practicing photographers/artists will present short presentations of their current work in order to generate responses to the many and diverse approaches photography has taken towards the land and landscape. This informal seminar session will function as a platform to discuss and share research interests between colleagues from UWIC and UWN and to identify any possible future collaborations.

Speakers

Tim Freeman will talk about his Photomontage/Graphic work that has been evolving over the last few years and deals with concepts of the pastoral in relation to contemporary landscape. Spatial elements such as the urban and the rural and temporal elements of the pastoral (a return to an
idealised past) are both central to the work. Recently the work has begun to move away from the montage toward a more straight photographic image in which contradictory elements such as the urban and rural are more subtle. The conceptual background to the work is born of the current Eco-critical
re-appraisal of Romanticism explored by Greg Garrad and others.

Mal Bennett: GigaPan consists of three technological developments: a robotic camera mount for capturing very high-resolution (gigapixel and up) panoramic images using a standard digital camera; custom software for constructing very high-resolution gigapixel panoramas; and, a new type of website for exploring, sharing and commenting on gigapixel panoramas and the detail that can be uncovered within. He will talk about my experience with this knew technology and the possibilities it offers for landscape photographers.


Chris Short: As an art historian, photography is a relatively new form for his research. There are two points of focus for his presentation: his photographs of the sea/ surf culture in South Wales; and a project he is proposing to the National Botanical Garden of Wales. The former attempts to address the limits of representation and move toward the concept of the sublime; the latter picks up on research I've done on the work of Wassily
Kandinsky and his concept of the unity of all things.

Helen Sear will talk about her current work in progress "Beyond The View" where figures and landscapes are woven together through a process of erasure in the computer. Using the formal clichés of both landscape and portraiture she explores the idea of the screen and the image as a net or trap, and the camera as having inherently male qualities as demonstrated in C19th topographical photography. Whilst drawing attention to digital processes designed to remain invisible she utilises them as essential to and not in conflict with the subject matter of her pictures.

Ken Grant is a photographer previously engaged in long-term work based around a community he knows closely. Since 2004 he has lived in South Wales, and -whilst continuing with these interests- he has begun to make quieter, less peopled photographs that nevertheless are an attempt to comment on those living in a post-industrial landscape. He will show two ongoing pieces of work, one being made in Wales, the other in Italy, that are attempts to respond to particular communities through the land itself.

Clive Landen will talk about the connections he is unravelling between found fragments of C18th and C19th pottery in a local unnamed stream in the forest of Dean, and the surrounding landscape. These excavated fragments reveal a social and cultural history and often depict popular and populated pastoral scenes. Set against the contemporary "worked" landscape new relationships are beginning to emerge.