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July 13, 2009
Wilderness style photography traditionally defines wilderness as a land devoid of human impact, and in Australia this kind of photography does so by mixing the European pictorial codes of naturalism and the picturesque. So we have wilderness photographs that appear to be transparent windows on an unpeopled nature. An example is this picture that looks back from Cape Farewell Spit lookout:
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Golden Bay, Motueka, New Zealand, 2009
This is on the eastern side of Farewell Spit, and it looks across coastal settlements (Collingwood and Takaka) and farmland, as well as Kahurangi National Park.
David Stephenson, who is an Associate Professor at the School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia, addresses the aesthetic issues raised by wilderness photography in a paper entitled Beautiful Lies: Photography and Wilderness.
He says that wilderness photography raises several philosophical problems. First:
our experience of nature is far more complex and dualistic than these representations suggest in their avoidance of disorder, death and decay, and attendant cycles of change and regeneration. In this popular imagery wilderness is aestheticised in particular ways, through naturalistic pictorial codes largely inherited from the nineteenth century. The goal of the imagery is clearly to represent the subject as transparently (and most importantly as invitingly) as possible, facilitated by adhering rigidly to popular representational conventions. The naturalistic conventions used in recent wilderness photography include virtually exclusive use of colour, sharp rendition of detail, deep focus from foreground to distance, and generally warm chromatic values of pleasant sunny conditions. (The converse — monochrome, soft or limited focus, evidence of camera or subject movement, and inclement weather — that might result in pictures more convergent with the typical visitor experience of wilderness, are very rarely utilised as pictorial strategies.) These pictures seductively draw the eye into and rationally through the representational space, where every detail of nature’s beauty is available for consumption through the viewer’s gaze.
He says that the almost all modern wilderness photographs rely on an obvious lie—there is never any evidence of humanity in the picture. We need to begin to erode some of the largely artificial boundaries we have erected between nature and culture. Secondly, we can draw from postmodern thought regarding the inherently constructed nature of all systems of representation, including photographic naturalism.
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