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Re: [OM] TOPE: Landscapes

Subject: Re: [OM] TOPE: Landscapes
From: Winsor Crosby <wincros@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 08:35:47 -0800
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


And, of course, talking about art or photography is just as inadequate, though interesting, as talking about music.
--
Winsor Crosby
Long Beach, California

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