The monumental and breathtaking grand vistas seen in technologically advanced sublime landscape photography aiming to objectively warn about the fragile state of the earth, raise the question of...Show moreThe monumental and breathtaking grand vistas seen in technologically advanced sublime landscape photography aiming to objectively warn about the fragile state of the earth, raise the question of whether landscape photography could offer a less heroic, yet ethically engaging counter language that facilitates a responsive involvement with our environment. The research introduces the concept of a non-representative “minor landscape photography” as a change-seeking approach to camera technology that regains the ideological erasure of subjective technological vision. In that sense, minor landscape photography rejects the humanist ideology of objective vision that conceptually excludes the observer from the field of vision. Assisted by an elaborate case study with photographers that are critically involved with landscape representation the research investigates three counter perspectives to “unsee” the authoritative, all-seeing eye of disembodied vision. In a performative process of embodied unseeing, the perspectives operate on reduced visibility with photographs that consciously act as mediating surfaces between the observer and the world. Ultimately, in favour of a non-oppositional, multi-perspectival and transformative liaison with contemporary technology and its subject matter, the research emphasises the ethical promise of minor landscape photography to inform a “world that is yet to be.” In times of environmental concern, the ultimate rejection of technology’s repressive magic and its static “view from nowhere” invite camera technology to assist in the formation of a liberating, life-informing and eco-conscious landscape photography that empowers accountable “views from somewhere” to evolve.Show less
In this thesis I will explore a set of landscape photographs made by Uchida Kuichi (1844-1875) in the 1870s. Uchida had become photographer under a Japanese master who had received education in the...Show moreIn this thesis I will explore a set of landscape photographs made by Uchida Kuichi (1844-1875) in the 1870s. Uchida had become photographer under a Japanese master who had received education in the field of chemistry from a Dutch institute in Nagasaki. He was requested to document the Meiji emperor’s grand tour of Japan in 1872. The pictures Uchida took were not a reportage in the modern sense of the word. Uchida Kuichi’s landscape photography shows the synthesis of early modern ideas about landscape depiction in a modern medium. The photographer seems to have made deliberate choices to soften the innate quality of this medium to produce ‘modern’ or ‘western style’ depiction with a vanishing point perspective, and he has avoided using a downward looking point of view. His landscape photos mostly have a level point of view and the vanishing point perspective is ‘flattened’ by stressing the horizontals and/or the vertical lines. Instead of linear perspective, depth is created by having large objects in the foreground. His landscape of the Nagasaki bay is to be understood symbolically, suggesting a harmonious relationship between modernity (a modern steam factory and foreign trading steam ships) and tradition (a Shinto shrine and a traditional village), while the gaze of the two traditionally dressed men under large pine trees (a traditional symbol of auspiciousness) is out towards the sea that in de Meiji era was opened. Thereby, he seems to have underlined the “Japaneseness” of the landscape in an era where the idea of state or nation was upcoming. The series can be read as showing a national landscape where modernity was firmly rooted in tradition, with the emperor – whose gaze was materialized – as the personification of continuity.Show less
