Chocolate Box?

I was surprised to see on the cover of April’s British Journal of Photography (not yet updated on line) the text “Forget the chocolate box aesthetic and tune in to the new landscape photography with a message to tell“, because I thought that anyone with a serious interest in photography (rather than producing coffee table landscape books that sell rather well) had abandoned that kind of thing a few generations back. And in any case those few well-known guys who make a good living from schmaltz are hardly likely to throw their meal ticket away.

Is this I mused, a sign that BJP are now marketing themselves at the hopeless and helpless amateurs who are still immersed in the kind of pictorialism that went out of style with the rise of modernism now almost a hundred years ago? (Something I date in photography from the publication of Paul Strand’s work in the two final issues of Camera Work in 1916-7, though it took a while to spread from that point.)  Even Ansel Adams, arch-priest of large-format mountain worship, was seldom choc-box though perhaps more often pop-corn. And some of those later Edward Weston landscape’s were almost chillingly classical.

But turning to the article, it seems the “new landscape photography” they were referring to was really something very old by now, brought to public attention in 1975 by the ‘New Topographics‘ show and widely discussed here at the time by photographers with articles appearing in the US magazines that many of us read as well as ‘Creative Camera‘ and doubtless even the BJP.

I don’t find Eugenie Shinkle‘s article reflects the situation and the thinking among photographers, at least not those I knew at the time. The British landscape photographers most admired were people including P H Emerson, Paul Nash, John Piper, Edwin Smith and – rather different in his style – Bill Brandt, none of whom was in any way affected by Minor White and at least two who were certainly in part under the spell of Eugene Atget, perhaps a forerunner of the “neutral stance” of the New Topographics. To suggest that this was in any way “a moribund European landscape tradition” seems ridiculous.

Minor White was not particularly well-known at the time in the UK, and although parts of the USA were full to the gunwales of his disciples, I think had relatively little impact here. One reflection of this was the problem that I had in getting to see a copy of his “Mirrors, Manifestations and Messages“. The only copy that could be located in a library in the UK was in the British Library Lending collection itself and I had to sign away my soul to the devil before being allowed to take it home.

Raymond Moore certainly appreciated White’s work, along with that of others such as Callahan and Siskind, and made the pilgrimage their with his work – which was recognised, seized upon and shown in the USA.  I think he had a more profound and open vision than the better known Americans, particularly in his late work, and had he moved to the States would by now be considerably better known and respected.

I had the pleasure of going in a group with Moore and other photographers to the show ‘23 Photographers / 23 Directions’ at the Walker Art Gallery in 1978. The work which interested us all – Moore included – was largely that by Lee Friedlander, Lewis Baltz, William Eggleston, Steven Shore and Robert Adams (3 of them in the New Topographics show and the other two sharing some of what was described as their neutral stance) and we had very little time for some of the others (the Bechers were also in both shows, but perhaps we found their work less interesting.)  We had all seen the work of all these photographers in reproduction, but for some of us it was the first chance to see the actual prints.

A year or two later I had the experience of sitting at the feet of Lewis Baltz (absolutely literally if not entirely metaphorically) as he looked through the page proofs of his Park City. Along again with a group of photographers. Most interesting to me was the work he showed us by other contemporary American photographers working in both black and white and colour, most now well-known. Several were later in Sally Eauclaire’s New Color Photography (1981) and other books.

The New Topographics are now part of the tradition rather than news.  It’s still an interesting show, and one of several in that era that changed the face of photography.  But perhaps the article and the cover tease might more accurately have said “Show that shook up British photography thirty years ago.”

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