PhotoPedagogy
  • Home
    • About
    • Contribute
  • Threshold Concepts
    • Threshold Concept #1
    • Threshold Concept #2
    • Threshold Concept #3
    • Threshold Concept #4
    • Threshold Concept #5
    • Threshold Concept #6
    • Threshold Concept #7
    • Threshold Concept #8
    • Threshold Concept #9
    • Threshold Concept #10
  • Resources
    • Teaching Resources >
      • KS3-4 Resources
      • Post 16 Resources
    • The RPS >
      • Squaring the Circles of Confusion
      • In Progress
      • Science and Photography
      • Exhibition Visit Activities
      • Sugar Paper Theories
      • Space Steps
      • Altered Ocean
    • Representing Homelessness
    • Blog
    • Class Photobooks
    • Starting a new course?
    • Photo Literacy
    • Photography writing
    • Articles
    • eNewsletters
    • Newspaper
    • Links
  • Shop
  • Contact

Constructed Landscapes

KS3-4 lesson plan:

How have photographers constructed landscape images? What can they tell us about our relationship to nature and photography?

By Jon Nicholls, Thomas Tallis School

The inspiration for this project came from Dafna Talmor's practice and the publication of her photobook 'Constructed Landscapes' in 2020. Dafna's work, her relationship to photography's histories and a growing awareness of the climate crisis have have all contributed to designing a project which attempts to explore how photographers have created unusual and provocative visions of the natural world. This has been a feature of photographic practice since the middle of the 19th century.

​Photography is often thought of as a documentary practice - a faithful means to capture a recognisable view. However, photographs are abstractions, two-dimensional objects that flatten things and which put an edge around observable reality. Some photographers have deliberately engaged with this aspect of photography. We now know that human vision is not as straightforward as it may seem. 

Some initial questions:

  • What is your relationship to the natural world?
  • Where would you go to see a landscape?
  • Why do people take pictures of nature?
  • Can photographs help us to change the way we see things?
Picture

What is a landscape picture?

What do we expect to see in a landscape image?
  • What do you see in your mind's eye when you hear the word landscape?
  • Make a list of the first 10-20 words that pop into your head. What words do we associate with landscape?
  • Do a Google image search for the word landscape. What kinds of pictures appear?
  • What would be your ideal landscape?
  • Describe the landscape you see when you look outside (either from your classroom or bedroom).
  • Have you ever taken a landscape picture? If so, what was it like and why did you take it?
Picture
Picture
Early landscape photographs were inspired by paintings. The landscape tradition in art stretches back to ancient times. Landscapes in art have been treated differently across the world. The word landscape in photography refers to both the genre of landscape images (pictures of the natural and urban environment including seascapes and cityscapes) and pictures which are wider than they are high (landscape format, as opposed to portrait format).
In his book Useful Advice for Photographers, Ivars Gravlejs offers 80 tips for making successful images. Several of them deal with landscape photographs. Gravlejs  is poking fun at 'How To' advice books and also drawing attention to the 'rules' or conventions of photography. What are the rules for making a good landscape photograph?
The graph below shows that the word "landscape" has grown in popularity considerably in the last 20 years or so. One theory suggests that the invention of digital photography, especially the use of mobile phone cameras, has created more and more interest in landscape photography. But how many of us make landscape photographs that question our relationship to the natural world?
Picture
Google Ngram graph showing use of the word 'landscape' in a sample of books written in English and published in the USA.

The Idea of Landscape

What is the purpose of a landscape picture? When you look at landscape images it's useful to ask some questions:
  • What has the artist/photographer chosen to include in the composition. What might be excluded?
  • What relationship might the artist/photographer have to the landscape depicted?
  • What is the vantage point (high, low, straight on etc.) from which we are looking at the landscape?
  • How distant or close are we to the landscape?
  • What ideas, feelings or moods are communicated by the choices the artist/photographer has made about the way the landscape is represented?
Here are a couple of examples of the ways in which landscape images convey particular ideas (click on each image to find out more):
Roger Fenton - The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855
Richard Prince - Untitled (Cowboy), 1989
This video explores the politics of landscape art. It contains some difficult language and ideas but it's a brilliant overview of the ways in which landscape pictures contain (sometimes hidden) powerful ideas and messages.
As well as being universal, land is able to be shaped and so it is particular, contextual, cultural, has a history. It can be used as it is but it rarely is. It is usually manipulated, moulded and, of course, depicted [...] every day we all depict the land in some way even if it's just visualising directions [...] Land is always political [...] The contours are sculpted by the hands of history.

Beyond the surface

Why not test your ability to 'read' a landscape photograph by looking hard and thinking about this image? You could start by thinking about what can you see? You could think about the composition and framing, the choices the photographer has made about where to place the camera, at what height, looking in what direction etc.? Think about the edges of the picture and its frame. 
Picture
James F Ryder - Atlantic & Great Western Railway. Albumen print, 1862
Now, reflect on what the message of the picture might be. You might need to think about what was happening in America in the middle of the 19th century. What and who missing from the picture? How are we meant to feel when we view the picture? Who was the picture for? Who wasn't it for? Who or what might have been damaged or disadvantaged by the making of a picture like this?

Back to the Future

Constructed Seascapes

Take a look at these photographic images (click on each image to expand):
Gustave Le Gray - The Great Wave, 1857. Albumen print from collodion-on-glass negative.
Dafna Talmor - From the Constructed Landscapes II series. C-type prints made of collaged colour negatives
  • Both could be described as landscape pictures. What kinds of landscapes do they describe?
  • What similarities do you notice about these two pictures?
  • What differences do you notice?
  • What words/phrases best describe each of these landscapes?
  • In which of these landscapes would you prefer to live? 

A bit of research...

​Read the following descriptions about the making of these images:

Gustave Le Gray - The Great Wave, 1857

Dafna Talmor - from Constructed Landscapes II

'​The Great Wave', the most dramatic of his seascapes, combines Le Gray’s technical mastery with expressive grandeur [...] At the horizon, the clouds are cut off where they meet the sea. This indicates the join between two separate negatives [...] Most photographers found it impossible to achieve proper exposure for both landscape and sky in a single picture. This usually meant sacrificing the sky, which was then over-exposed. Le Gray’s innovation was to print some of the seascapes from two separate negatives – one exposed for the sea, the other for the sky – on a single sheet of paper.
This ongoing body of work consists of staged landscapes made of collaged and montaged colour negatives shot across different locations, merged and transformed through the act of slicing and splicing [...] ‘Constructed Landscapes’ references early Pictorialist processes of combination printing as well as Modernist experiments with film [...] the work also engages with contemporary discourses on manipulation, the analogue/digital divide and the effects these have on photography’s status. 
  • How do these pieces of writing help us understand the similarities between these two photographic images?
  • What surprises or interests you about the ways in which they were made?
  • What else might you need to find out to get an even better understanding of these techniques/processes?
Talmor deliberately references the practices of Victorian photographers, like Le Gray, who made single photographic prints from several different negatives. You might want to research the technique of combination printing and approaches related to Pictorialism to get a better sense of how early photographers created complex and deceptive images. We often think of photographs as reliable images because of the way that we think they are made. But photography history tells a slightly different story, highlighting the many different ways to influence the look of the final print. You could also find out a bit more about Dafna Talmor's practice of "slicing and splicing" her negatives.

Dafna Talmor - a selection from Constructed Landscapes (Volume II)

Constructed Landscapes essay

Seeing is not believing

Seeing is not believing. It is something we do, a kind of performance [...] We assemble a world from pieces, assuming that what we see is both coherent and equivalent to reality, Until we discover it is not.
​
-- Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World
Photographs can be deceptive. We think photographs are reliable and trustworthy. A photograph can seem like a kind of proof that something has actually happened. But that's not always the case.

  • ​Can you think of a time when you have doubted what you have seen, or when your eyes, vision or ability to translate what you have seen has let you down?
  • Why do we put so much faith in photography? Is it a problem that photographs seem to be so persuasive?   ​
  • Should we look a bit harder at photographs, including images of seemingly straightforward landscapes?
Picture
​Take a look at these two images, for example:
Picture
Matthew Albanese - A New Life #1
Picture
Matthew Albanese - A New Life #2
  • How would you describe these two landscapes?
  • Where do you think these images might have been taken?
  • What are the similarities and differences between these two pictures?
  • Which do you prefer and why?
Matthew Albanese's approach to landscape photography is really unusual. Here are some images which contain clues about how he makes his images:
What about this image of a terrifying tsunami by artists Cortis & Sonderegger? 
Picture
Actually, this is a cropped version of the full picture. Here's the whole thing:
Picture
Cortis & Sonderegger - Making of „Tsunami“ (by Unknown Tourist, 2004), 201
This image represents the practice of these artists who re-make iconic photographs as dioramas in their studio before photographing the whole model to reveal the artificiality of its construction.
The project is nerdy and fun, but there is a serious intent, too. What does it mean to remake an image? Is it a celebration of it? Is it a form of criticism? Iconophilia, or iconoclasm? Homage, or deconstruction? Is it a love letter to the joys of hands-on analogue manufacture in the digital era, or an absurdist parody of outdated technique?
-- David Campany
What about these strange creatures? What looks initially like documentary proof of the existence of mythical beasts is actually the work of artist Joan Fontcuberta in a series entitled Fauna:
Sometimes, artists use our belief in photography to create an alternative vision of the natural world. These images can cause us to question our feelings and assumptions, to look again at the world and the images made of it and to realise that photographs are not as reliable as we might have thought.
How do the following landscape images make you feel? Try to describe the emotions they arouse. Landscape images can sometimes remind us of the immensity, power, beauty and fragility of the natural world. Landscape photographers often try to capture epic scenes using all the tricks of the trade - dramatic lighting, wide angles, unusual vantage points, contrasts etc. Which is your favourite of these landscape photographs and why?
These images were made by Petri Levälahti (aka Berduu). He works at EA DICE in Stockholm. His job title is Senior Screenshot Capture Artist, which means that he selects particular frames from computer games to be used as photographs for marketing purposes.

How does this information change the way you feel about these images? Are these 'photographs' less moving because they have been created in a virtual environment? Is Levälahti less talented as a landscape photographer because he's not out in nature with an expensive camera?

Landscape Constructions

Constructing a landscape photograph might be different to simply taking one. To construct an image might reveal how and why it has been made. You might construct a photographic image in order to question what a landscape is. What appears natural in the landscape is often the result of careful management. We use nature to construct ideas and stories that reflect our human desires. Constructed landscape photographic images, therefore, reflect the construction of nature itself.

Here are a selection of images by a wide range of artists/photographers. They are all linked by their approach to the construction of landscapes. The artists use photographic techniques to question some of the conventions of landscape photography.

Many of them work with more than one photograph (using layering or collage to build their images). Some use unusual techniques and processes to represent their way of seeing landscapes or their understanding of the forces, like wind and light, at work in nature. Some of the artists use images to question the impact humans have had on the natural world. Some are fascinated by the ways in which we depict and consume nature, whereas others use photography to document a performance or gesture in the landscape. Some of them use analogue techniques, others prefer digital technologies, some even use a combination of both.

None of these artists make straightforward or conventional landscape pictures. Click on each image to find out more about the work:
Penelope Umbrico - Sunset Portraits, 2011
Fong Qi Wei - Time in Motion, 2016
Jan Dibbets - Perspective correction – right angle with one diagonal, 1968
Photograph by Jaroslav Franta of Hugo Demartini performance - Demonstration in Space series, 1968–1969
Liesl Pfeffer - Untitled, No. 2, 2018
Andy Goldsworthy - Slate throw Blaenau Ffestiniog, Wales, May, 1980
Jeff Wall - A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993
Keith Arnatt - Mirror-Lined Pit (earth bottom), 1968
Joy Gregory - from Sites of Africa, 2016
Jiro Takamatsu - from the series Photograph of Photograph, 1972-3
Andreas Gursky - Rhine III, 2018
John Divola - from the Chroma series, early 1980s
Chris Engman - Variations, 2010
John Baldessari - Junction Series: Seascape, Landscape, Woman and Giraffe (captured), 2002
Charles Wilkin - Proof, 2019
Zander Olsen - from the Tree, Line series, 2011
Laura Plageman - Tahoe, 2020
Gary Emrich - All Consumed #40, 2017
Myoung Ho Lee - Tree #6, from the series Tree, 2008
Meghann Riepenhoff - from the Littoral Drift series, 2015
Richard Long - A Thousand Stones Thrown Into The River Yangtze, China, 2010
Abelardo Morell - Tent Camera Image on Ground, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 2011
Sarah Anne Johnson - Sunset #2 (Bedazzled), 2018
Bruno V. Roels - Looking fr Paradise (from Fake Billboards), 2018
Zohra Opoku - from Unravelled Threads, 2017
Vanessa March - Untitled No. 72, from The Sun Beneath the Sky series, 2018
Eija-Liisa Ahtila Horizontal - Vaakasuora, 2011
Daisuke Yokota - Outskirts (photobook), 2017
Geraldo de Barros - from Sobras (Remains), 1998
Nick Brandt - Underpass with Elephants (Lean Back Your Life is on Track), 2015
Sohei Nishino - New Hope Creek
Vilde Rolfsen - PLastic Bag Landscapes, 2014
Letha Wilson - Hawaii California Steel (Figure Ground), UV prints on Corten steel, 2017
Yi Dai - Inertia No.1 - from Edinburgh Scotland to London England on 31 August, 2013
Anastasia Samoylova - Tropics, 2014
Noemie Goudal - from the series Soulevements, 2018
Rachel Isabel Mukendi - Two Hundred, Yes Or No?, 2018
Scheltens + Abbenes - Cos, Landscapes, 2018
Pacifico Silano - I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine, 2021
Viviane Sassen - Wail from Umbra, 2012
Stephen Gill - Hackney Flowers, 2007
Lorenzo Vitturi - from the series Anthropocene, 2011
Maja Strgar Kurečić - from the Escape Landscapes series, 2017
Thirza Schaap - Blues, 2020
Aletheia Casey - To Dance With Shadows, 2020
Tracey Moffat - Spirit Landscapes, 2013
Denzel Muhumuza - Watch Me Bloom, 2020
Odette England - from Thrice Upon a Time, 2010
Yichen Zhou - from the ongoing series Daily Talk
Tanja Deman - from Deserted Utopia, 2010
Zeinab Alhashemi - from Urban Phantasmagoria, 2014-2016
Gideon Mendel - Floodlines, 2015-2018
Batia Suter - Wave, floor version #1, 2012
Kristina Jurotschkin - from Nothing But Clouds, 2017
Aliki Braine - Pieces of Sky. Colour photograph from cut and scattered negative, 2020
John Hilliard - Three Uncertain Whites (Winter Landscape), 2015
Hannah Fletcher - What Remains: The Root & The Radical, 2020
Beate Gütschow - HC#02 (Hortus Conclusus series), 2018
Corinne Silva - Garden State, 2015
Corinne Vionnet - Photo Opportunities series, 2005 - ongoing
Victoria Ahrens - Lockdown: A stone’s throw, 2020
Liz Neilsen - Forest Dreams, from the Series Black & Whites, 2020
Alice Duncan - Name Unknown, 2019
Klea McKenna - Faults
Oliver Raymond Barker - Anatomy of Stone, chemigram, 2019
Liz Orton - This Connection Should Make Us Suspect
Victoria Fornieles - Meltdown, 2018
Alexander Mourant - Still from the film A Vertigo Like Self, 2019
Rebecca Najdowski - Interference Pattern, 2018
Marina Caneve - From the series Are They Rocks or Clouds? 2020
Minna Pollanen - From Nature Trail, 2012-2014
Tom Lovelace - Coastal Blocks 8, 2016
Helen Sear - Becoming Forest #7, 2017
Fabio Barile - From Homage to James Hutton #7, 2007
Stefano Canto - Scomposizioni Fotografiche, 2011-15
Martin Seeds - Disagreement iii, Stormont Estate, Belfast, 2018
Mariele Neudecker - And Then The World Changed Colour: Breathing Yellow, 2019
Chloe Sells - from She Said What
Curtis Mann - from Modifications series, 2007-10
Matt Slater - Autumnal Glimpses, No.45, 2019
Aster Reem David - Salt & Light, 2018-ongoing
Brea Souders - from Vistas, 2021
Bindi Vora - from Mountain of Salt, 2021 ongoing
Tacita DEan - Majesty, 2006
Kate Woods - Double River, 2010
Joe Rudko - Green, 2021
Fabien Barrau - Chicago 2223, 2021
Lewis Bush - Natural History Museum London reclaimed by nature, 2021
Mandy Williams - from Disrupted Landscapes, 2021
Sidonie Hadoux - from Explorations 3, 2019-2021
Antti Laitinen - Broken Landscape VI, 2019
Viviane Sassen - Axion R02 from Umbra, 2014
Alice Quaresma - New Beginnings, 2019
Marguerite Horay - from Landscape Studies II, 2019
Vltaka Horvat - To See Stars Over Mountains, 2021

Dionne Lee - Drafts, single channel video, 2016
Ed Carr - Birds in the Sixth Mass Extinction,
​cyanotype stop motion animation, 2021

Suggested activities:

  • Once you've had a thorough browse through these images, choose 2 or 3 of the artists and try to find out as much as you can about them and their work. As well as reading and making notes you could also start making your own images (still and/or moving) inspired by their work. Making your own photographs is a kind of research.
  • You could try identifying some of the themes that connect the images in this gallery above. A theme is a BIG IDEA that connects two or more art works. For example, one theme could be movement. Another could be layers. What other themes can you find?
  • Reflect on your own relationship to nature, the natural world, various landscapes and issues connected to the climate emergency. How do you feel about the future of the planet, your access to green spaces, species extinction, pollution and all the other issues related to life on Earth?
  • If you live in a town or city your experience of wide open or spectacular landscapes might be quite limited. Perhaps you remember visiting such places during holidays or school trips. Maybe you have lived in another part of the world where the landscapes are very different. Maybe you've seen images of  landscapes in films, in magazines or on the Internet that are different to the ones where you live. If you live in the countryside, your experience of landscapes might be quite different to that of town or city dwellers. You could create a collage using found images to represent what natural landscapes mean to you. 
  • You could experiment with creating cameraless images (cyanotype, luminograms or photograms) using cut and torn paper, or other objects and materials, which suggest landscape type compositions. 
  • Some of the artists included here don't necessarily think of themselves as photographers. They create performances in natural settings, sometimes referring to these as sculptures or conceptual works of art. A photograph is made as a document because the work of art is not meant to last forever. They are ephemeral. You could experiment with making an ephemeral work of landscape art like this - a walk, a dance, a performance of some sort - in a landscape of your choice. This could be a garden or a nearby park. You could use objects or simply your own body. It's important not to damage the environment but you could leave a trace of your presence. Take photographs (or get a friend to help you) of your intervention.
  • You might want to add a layer of text to your landscape photographs and/or videos, perhaps recording your feelings or documenting other things you saw in the landscape that couldn't be captured in the image(s).
  • Some artists/photographers have created landscape images from unusual materials. How can a plastic bag become a mountainside or waves? Experiment with lighting your choice of materials and framing your shots so that the resulting images are (relatively) convincing landscape photographs.
  • Do you have photographs of landscapes that you could cut up and reassemble? Some artists use collage techniques to create new types of images. You could experiment with old 35mm slides, for example, cutting, re-arranging and adding other translucent materials. These could either be re-photographed against a bright background or enlarged on a wall using a slide projector.
  • You could experiment with creating a 3D photosculpture made from landscape images. You could even re-photograph your completed sculpture and, using Photoshop or a similar programme, digitally insert it into a real or imaginary landscape.
  • How could you photograph a landscape that you've never visited or one you can only remember? You could experiment with Google Street View, perhaps revisiting the scene of a family holiday or childhood memory. You could explore the many pictures of a particular place on Flickr, a huge photo sharing site. Some picturesque locations have been visited and photographed millions of times. You could take a look at the Insta Repeat account and try to curate your own galleries of repeated landscape photographs. How has our obsession with social media and the Internet affected our relationship to the natural world?

These are just a few suggestions. There are loads of possibilities. It's important to experiment, to play, to test new ideas and step outside your comfort zone. Don't be afraid to try things you've not done before. Use your imagination and follow your intuition. How will you construct your landscapes?
Picture

Additional Resources:

Picture

Photography and Landscape

An excellent resource from The Photographers' Gallery, providing an essay by Fergus Heron and a series of curated galleries of artists' work representing diverse practice in the genre of landscape photography.

"Landscape is something culturally produced and not absolute... Natures are multiple and situated within a spectrum of changing ideas of place in which landscape photographs play a vital role."
​-- Fergus Heron
​
Picture

The Sustainable Darkroom

The Sustainable Darkroom is an artist run research, training and mutual learning programme, to equip cultural practitioners with new skills and knowledge to develop an environmentally friendly photographic darkroom practice. Founded by Hannah Fletcher and now run by Hannah Fletcher, Ed Carr and Alice Cazenave
Picture

Melanie King's Youtube Channel

Melanie King is a working class artist and curator, originally from Manchester, now based in Ramsgate, Kent, UK. She is co-Director of super/collider, Lumen Studios, founder of the London Alternative Photography Collective and currently Artist In Residence at the School of Metallurgy and Materials at The University of Birmingham.

Melanie's YouTube channel features a variety of accessible, school-friendly videos about various alternative photography processes, including those designed to make photography more sustainable.

Social

Contact

photopedagogy@gmail.com