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July 1, 2012
Landscape photography is still very strong in Australia, even though the social landscape has become the center of the focus whilst the natural landscape has retreated to the background in contemporary photography. It is generally accepted in critical discourse that there are two main styles of landscape photography, which are often termed aesthetic (meaning a focus on natural beauty ) and documentary (meaning evidential).
Liz Wells, in her essay Landscape, Geography and Topographic Photography, (2006) which was presented the University of Plymouth’s, “The Rural Citizen: Governance, Culture and Wellbeing in the 21st Century” conference, explores the ground of the credibility of contemporary topographic practice. The paper is part of a larger book project entitled Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity in which she argues that visual interpretations of land reinforce social, political and environmental attitudes.
Wells argues in her paper that the credibility of contemporary topographic practice rests not on photo technologies (chemical or digital), nor on the expressive abilities of photographers as artists who frame their work in terms of pure photographic seeing (it is unmediated). Instead it relies on the integrity of photographers as artist researchers, especially when they adopt a systematic approach to image making as a form of research and by careful consideration evident in the presentation of results. This highlights the methodology of the photographer.
Wells argues that there has been a historical cultural tendency to view photographs as unmediated in both the nineteenth (naturalism) and twentieth century(modernism). Photography has lost its early reputation as an objective “memory machine”, and that in turn its claims to fact, truth and objective memory have been found wanting.
She says that today we longer believe that pictures of ‘landscapes’ are fit only for benign consumption, flavoured perhaps by fantasies of ownership or escape. Since the 1970s, at least, the genre has been the subject of searching and fruitful interrogation by postmodernist and feminist scholars and practitioners as well as the environmental movement. This is part of a long and intricate history of the mistrust of the mechanism of representation.
Thus contemporary photography in Australia can be seen as a rhetorical art practice that engages with land, landscape and place with its imagery contributing to inflecting our understanding of ‘Australianness’; contribute to in the sense that they either enhance or displace previous understandings of space, history and place.
The emphasis on methodology (systematic and research) would take the form of developing a knowledge of the way that history has transformed space into place, and an analysis of the subject matter under investigation. Taking the picture represents only the starting point around which the construction of meaning revolves.
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There is also a mixing social and natural landscapes with people.