on landscape

A separate reality

“This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
Taken from "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

In the last post I've made some remarks about the status of a picture with regard to its genesis. Looking back I think that I need to make some adjustments to what may seem, otherwise taken, a gigantic naivete.

A picture, or a photo, has its own reality as an artefact. Itself a picture defines a space. Its own, the one enclosed in its boundaries. As such a photo may be considered an endpoint to a process of production. At least this is what is implied by “having a purpose” or being “finalized”. A photo, however, is not exactly a finite object, it is, so to say, only one half of it. What remains is to be supplied by the viewer along the different, implied, reading axis. More, in our times, the support is no longer needed to have some very large circulation. Loosing its body has photography lost its finalization ? I'm not sure of this. Browsing trough photography blogs there seems to be a recognizable nostalgia of the print on one side and “a not totally clear” onto the other, but the line is starting to get clearer demarcating the former photographer's approach to the Internet as a device to point to something else living outside (the prints) from the ones that are interested in exploiting directly the media as a transport device for the, now incorporeal, exchange of little pieces of space.

But just to divagate from a theme ways too hot for this summer there is an other interesting question rising up laterally. Once we start to consider that of a picture a space of its own we are opening the possibility to explore it visually. This metalevel has been achieved in the early times of photography itself. The Alinari where among the first to make a successful and profitable use of photography in representing pictorial spaces. In recent times Richard Prince had a vast media exposure on the question of reuse (aka explorations, or appropriation) of ready made visual artefacts. Back in the seventies, when conceptual art was made, many photographers worked on the theme of reuse and exploration of the two dimensional world of past or utilitarian imaging. I suppose that each of those in my age has got some kind of inspiration from that. The “not Art” applied to photography at the time, however, relegated those quests to the oblivion.

So it is with great appreciation that I salute a bold move from a small Italian Art Gallery: “The Studio Glenda Cinquegrana”, based in Milan, that is trying to promote, not without merits, the works from a young Artist who is focusing, mainly, for my knowledge, on the “flatlands” of past landscape painting.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #6

2010-07-06T10:26:00.006+02:00

"When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society," Guy Debord “The Society of the Spectacle”.

A picture, it does not matter that much how produced, is itself an object. For a lot of people it may be even an object of desire. The desire to make something similarly spectacular, or beautiful or so. For others the need to have it is the most "natural" consequence. Purpose may be a good practical key for interpreting the meaning coming from the match between the photographers intentions and the addressee, as Mike Chisolm pointed out in an interesting post. To transform real things into objects of desire is an ancient wanna be dating back to Midas' King myth. The consumerist society give us only this opportunity of expression ?

Since I'm a strong, and somewhat masochistic, idealist (or if you are better a giant egocentric) I firmly believe that there may be other ways or purposes. One of them is certainly, as much as cicadas do, to mark my place in this world, as a viewer. In this case photographs are, for me, simply an outcome of a stream of conscious viewing.

Landscape photography, among other genres, has lots of roots in the need to transform places in something that can be sold. It's not a case that one of the most celebrated, Ansel Adams, landscapists started exactly from that point as he points out in his biography; certainly he succeeded. But on the darker side he also succeeded in the production of that unhappiness that may be subsumed under the “Vacation blues”, that subtle depression that takes in when the place you desired so much does not match with the projection build upon the encountered images.

It seems to me that this may be the zeitgeist of landscape photography, a profound tension among the need to built up objects of desire and the need to communicate the experience, not always positive, of looking at our world.

But getting to more amusing things, the strict followers of this blog certainly know of my personal interest in the Situationist International. Recently I've been amused by what I would call “Born Again Situationism” that seems to pop up every where, even in suspicious academic contexts. I do not have any shareable key to understand why except to read it in a postmodern light as pointed out by this paper.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #5

2010-06-29T09:25:00.000+02:00

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #4

2010-06-25T21:43:00.000+02:00

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #3

2010-06-09T07:39:00.002+02:00

Many of you certainly wonder when I will continue the series on Philosophy. Well It's coming soon. In the meantime I let you speculate on to the clockwise and counter clockwise "gestalt" of the wisterias, Glicini in Italian, (scroll down for the English version).

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #2

2010-06-04T00:28:00.001+02:00

An other quote to continue the previous post discourse:

"... What we need is a new definition. The one we find in most dictionaries is more than three hundred yeas old and was drawn up for artists. It tells us that a landscape is a "portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance." Actually when it was first introduced (or reintroduced) into English it did not mean the view itself, it meant a picture of it, an artist's interpretation. It was his task to take the forms and colors and spaces in front of him -- mountains, river, forest, fields, and so on -- and compose them so they made a work of art ... " J. B. Jackson "The word itself" from "Discovering the vernacular landscape"

In Italian, a Latin based language, the word "landscape" is rendered as "paeasaggio" from the French "paysage". The root is a bit different though, coming form "pagus", the village or administrative country unit and formerly "border milestone stick into the earth". However The European Landscape Convention endorses the equivalence in its official text:

“Landscape” means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors (EN)

"Paesaggio" designa una determinata parte di territorio, così come è percepita dalle persone, il cui carattere deriva dall'azione di fattori naturali e/o umani e dalle loro interrelazioni (IT)

I've opened this series with some pictures of a couple of kinds of wisteria. Thanks to a willing friend here is a nice, and informed, digression, scroll down for the English version.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Giardino Robert Baden-Powell #1

2010-05-31T13:48:00.004+02:00

Just a short quote for this post.

... when I was photographing in Vermont, photographing the landscape, I didn't know what the landscape was ... I mean the landscape was picture to me. What I was trying to find was the ideal landscape that I'd seen in other pictures. I could never find it, but it was the landscape I was looking for. And so somehow even though I was trying, sometimes, I could never see the real landscape. I could never see the landscape that was there.I was always seen through this haze of other pictures, that in some ways I was trying to reproduce, or reproduce the feeling of it.
"Thoughts on Landscape" by Frank Gohlke

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #14. February 2010

2010-05-25T17:23:00.003+02:00

Last week I took a small vacation away from the blog. As usual in Italy the months preceding summer time are the ones where every body decides to do things (just to stop a few months later and resume operation in the late autumn). This generally ends up leaving a short time for everything. In some ways it is a habit coming from the times when life was marked by the seasonal vacancies. But, wherever it may come, it is a clear manifest of our incapacity to act in a socially organized way. But just to make something useful out of this post I like to point you to a book that I'm reading with great joy: "Thoughts on Landscape" by Frank Gohlke. The book consists mainly in interviews, intros and a few articles, the paperback edition is more than enough for quality. But even in the, somewhat, unordered collection, the book contains some very interesting thoughts expressed in plain and straight concepts. His interviews are touching in a sense I have rarely found in a book containing writings from a photographer, even in words he is clearly motivated by a search for a truthful expression of his visions and experiences. In books written by photographers we got used to a posthumous kind of rational reconstruction of their acting, it is not the case here. Gohlke may even seem to be the incarnation of the conscious landscapist. Something, I bet, many of us, aspire to be.

"I just love the way things look, all things, even if they're awful things. You know, the necessity to make moral judgements about whether this or that thing is desirable comes later, but what I'm motivated by, first of all, is just a fascination, a love for the fact that things exist in the world; they have a certain appearance and that it's possible with a camera to create a picture out of those appearances, and if you do it right, even to suggest that those appearances might have certain meanings or implications for us.
Frank Gohlke"

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #13. February 2010

2010-05-18T02:08:00.002+02:00

Blurb and an old flame. Part three

Some handy references for those willing to adventure into the LaTex land. To start with some motivations here is an advocacy article: LaTeX isn't for everyone but it could be for you. For a first intro see A (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. But the fastest way, if you want to experiment with it, is to install a version of "xelatex" on your computer, it is available for all most any operating system, and give it a try starting from the files mentioned in the last related post.

But even if your more interested in using your wysig have a look here for some ideas in the design of the book: tufte-latex, LaTex users will find it ready to use. Have a look at the pdfs available and mainly to the one that focuses on the book style.

In my first try, for blurb, I want to put the image slightly off centre. How to arbitrarily position an image into a page is a thing that is not present in Eric's example. The task may be addressed via the package named, quite obviously, "photo" that lets you manage the picture as a "float" object, the package is available in every LaTex2e distribution. Anyway you may find it here or in the CTAN TeX/LaTex repository.

Adopting a Logo.

2010-05-14T07:44:00.005+02:00

When it comes to the net and mainly to the web, Art, and specifically Visual Arts, exhibit a love/hate behaviour. On one side it is quite clear that the reach that the media allows is hardly beat by anything else. However the relation with the audience is some how one way. Been shown is partly the nature of a visual artefact. But behind the “being shown”, profound differences in motivation are at work. Maybe there is little to say here, It is still the old “web as entertainment” against the “web of sharing” that is pressuring, interestingly enough the “web of selling” is usually left off. But in this case I would like to stop on the idea of the “web of sharing” as in the intentions of the web “founding fathers”.

One of the basic ideas is that the “audience” makes the Internet. And that is true and easy to appreciate. What is not always so clear is that the visitor is making the first move and you have to give something back for his/hers effort. Art world, in this model, seems instead more inclined to denial. Yes many of you may say that it is already enough to share a look at the images, as much as a nice woman shows of her ankles. It is not a case that many contemporary artists even deny themselves from the net or show off pictures of sizes so small that even a stamp collector would not be interested in them! Perhaps it is the way in which new technologies get adopted and evolved in time. But still the art world does not seem to have left the old gallery model where Art, in the form of commodities, is displayed as an object of desire.

The flaw in this model lies in the way the audience is composed over the web. If we look at the most frequented internet places we'll discover that it is the interactive one that in the last decade took over. Instead of a passive viewer there we have and individual that expresses feelings and experiences reusing and sharing what was seen. It is the anti (post) structuralist “ready made” practice taking over in recursive expressive motion. I'm quite aware that this may be considered rather naive. Times of scarcity generally rise the question of how to fill the stomach too.

Given this wonderful airy intro I'm finally getting to the point. I have been looking for a logo for my photo activity for some time . Given the hight costs I was oriented towards an in house solution. That was till a few days ago I've came across this nice initiative named TOBERND/YOURHILLA where the Artist Didier Falzone decided to give away some abstractions derived from the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher in the form of usable logos. I liked them a lot but more I liked the form of the gift. A logo does not necessarily explain or, in a pornographic way, describe. It must be first and foremost an object of interest. So after a few very nice mails I was able to have my own. Well, there are many emotional and utilitarian sides in my choice, however, I think that the Artist deserves a lot of appreciation for either the content (the logo itself) either the action. I have to give thanks to Hippolyte Bayard for bringing the thing to my attention.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #12. February 2010

2010-05-09T18:25:00.003+02:00

Blurb and an old flame. Part two

The first impact of blurb, with regard to the practical help the site hands out, is of dismay. "Hell another site for Adobe devotees" was my exclamation. Just to say it plainly and once: I think that Adobe is exercising an unfair use of its dominant market position both in pricing and in sloppy quality of the software. But, fortunately, while Photoshop may have no rivals, Adobe's tool for desktop publishing has some fierce rivals in the Open Source world, and, much more important, on Linux (I'm a linux user and programmer till the day one when in circa 22 posts I've got it's former version in the usenet news). The simplest and easiest one to use is Scribus; to start out I've made some experiments with it. The Metrics from the blurb calculator were easy to adapt after having grasped the intricacies of blurb margin and boundaries settings (the mentioned paper model helped a lot).Scribus however is a wisyg and that means that it is quite easy to get to a first draft, but it requires a lot of clicks and it is short on automation. Yes there is a templating engine but it seems best suited for short brochures. Changing the style of an already made book requires a lot of repetitive and not automated work. Till now my needs always have been of pure text pdf writing. For that I've always resorted to an other tool: TeX/LaTex, in my opinion the best publishing software ever made and fully available in the open source free for the entire humanity. Unfortunately TeX/LaTex is a bit uncomfortable to use for a total end user. Mainly you operate it from the command line, you may as well resort to and interactive shell, but I think that at the end the command line version is simpler to use and after some exercise it is easy to make a set of automated scripts that in a few steps will reassemble the entire book. So I decided to do some googling to find out what was available from the LaTex community for composing books and photobooks targeted at blurb. As for almost everything in the TeX/LaTex world I did not come away empty handed. To begin with you may start from this resource that Eric Jeschke kindly made available in a true open source spirit. The post comes complete of a downloadable archive containing the basic scripts and the picture of one of his books. You may either study the way in which the metrics is laid out or simply assemble his book till you are sure to have a fully functional LaTex setup. There are two supported formats one to build up a blurb pdf and one to make a web version for the web.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #11. February 2010

2010-05-05T10:03:00.003+02:00

For a definition of "Dèrive" see here. For the entire ongoing series of detours around the Garibaldi building site see here.

Blurb and an old flame. Part one

It's my turn to get interested in photo books. Frankly I have some doubt, on the ethic side, about the opportunity to participate in the great consumption of natural resources that the photographic allows. Digital, for me, represented a renewed interest in the thing for its seemingly low profile in resource hungriness. But there is a side in which its undeniable that an Art object needs to be an object of desire too. So online books in some ways seem to be a sort of sustainable compromise. The great advantage is that in the end only the strict demanded ones get printed and thanks to the parallel pdf version the option in circulation may not suffer from any restriction.

After having evaluated several services I finally landed to blurb for my first attempts. I'm aware that it may not be the best one. But it seems certainly the most frequented one in photographic realm.

Having made the first step the second one that comes in immediately after is how to do it. As a Humanist with a romantic side, I've always loved well composed and printed books. It is incredible the amount of knowledge involved in a book design, in our era of wysigs it is easy to forget about it. Every thing seems easy and only a matter to test and try. The results, however, are not always so good, as you may easily find out by yourself by looking at several previews available online. Plus I have a personal dismay for the huge amount of time that the test and try practice requires. So I went to a library and bought an old book making manual, just at least have an idea of what was needed and discovered the joys of the material practice of the cut and paste, no not the one you perform with a computer, but the one you make with a ruler and a cutter to build up a model of what you are looking for.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #10. February 2010

2010-04-29T09:19:00.002+02:00

For a definition of "Dèrive" see here. In the last months I've mainly focused on the preliminary phase of photo making, that I've called "inventio", a term borrowed from Leonardo Da Vinci's "Treatise on Painting" (as you may know anachronism is another obsession of mine). The way in which a photographer borders his/hers performing space certainly constitutes an important part of his/hers identity.

In the meantime, while busily reading philosophy contributions to the topic of physical/conceptual space bounding, I've came across this interesting study on mazes, labyrinths and tracking from BLDGBLOG.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #9. February 2010

2010-04-26T19:55:00.005+02:00

Milano Navigli Vicolo dei Lavandai

In the post closing the series on the PASM (Parco Agricolo Sud Milano) I have left you with a quote that focused on "LANDSCAPE AS DOCUMENT". In case you where interested here is the, almost, complete article: "THE MONUMENT AND THE BUNGALOW", courtesy by Google books. The article is divided in two parts. The first one, of general scope, focuses mainly on to the ways to approach landscape reading, the second one is a live example, that I have found of great Interest for Italians too, that, as immigrants, left their native country, in great numbers, for the "new world", as my father did.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #8. February 2010

2010-04-22T17:34:00.011+02:00

Philosophy what's the use ? After all Kant was formerly a Geographer

With this post I'm starting my first instalment in philosophy as anticipated here. But first some general advice: I'm not getting into what Philosophers may have said about photography or painting or any kind of visual form of expression, in general such approach, except in particular cases, never gave me any interesting outcome; the job of the philosopher is way too far from practice for my taste. But Philosophers too have to delimit their field, and the way they do it is so much like what we, photographers do, framing out contents. More or less this is the same approach I've taken with Geography, even if, in that case, we were dealing with the science that has as an object the same as a Landscape Photographer has: land's surface.
I'm not even getting into deep and academic contortions (a promise that I'm not so sure I'll completely comply with). Anyway I'll try to keep an homeopathic approach and give only some fast snapshots where possible.
It's fortunate that in these days any inhabitant of the western world had the opportunity to devise the profound meaning of the word "immanence". The eruption of a volcano, with all the consequences for the aerial traffic, may be considered an accurate display of what is immanent to us.Setting the border among immanence and the rest was one of the preoccupations of Immanuel Kant as well discussed in his essay "De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis" included in his "Inaugural dissertation of 1770". In the essay, "Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World", in English parlance, Kant introduces the process of going from an abstract whole to the different particulars (indefinite) composing it and vice versa. As in his style he starts with the general assertion to proceed demonstrating and expanding it as much as if it was a theorem.

"As the analysis of a substantial composite terminates only in a part which is not a whole, that is, in a simple part, so synthesis terminates only in a whole which is not a part, that is, the world"

I do not think that there is any necessity for a further explanation. Here he gives us a dynamics of thought. Prosecuting he introduces a concept that may surprise many of you, and, hopefully, make some resonance with a key concept in bidimensional representations, that is, albeit in a finite domain, our whole.

"... Similarly, a substantial composite being given, we easily attain to theidea of the simple parts by the general removal of the intellectual notion of composition; for what remains after the removal of conjunction are the simple parts. But accordingto the laws of intuitive cognition this is not done, that is, all composition is not removed, except by a regress from the given whole to any possible parts whatsoever — in other words,by an analysis again resting on the condition of time ..."

Some of the more affectionate readers may remember Constable's idea that time, in a landscape painting, is what it takes, for a viewer, to scan (appreciate) the artefact. The same applies when we study our subject, always presented to our senses as a whole or as a composite ? What's the difference ?

" ... But since in order to a composite a multiplicity, in order to awhole, the allness, of parts is required, neither the analysisnor the synthesis will be complete; hence neither by theformer will the concept of the simple part emerge, nor by thelatter the concept of the whole, unless either can be gonethrough within a time that is finite and assignable ... "

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #12

2010-04-17T12:12:00.002+02:00

I'm closing the series here, just to avoid the peril to go on indefinitely. I suppose that almost any reader of the blog had its ratio of greeneries. Going to urban for a few time. But on closing let me cite this short extract from the book "everydayamerica. cultural landscape studies after j. b. jackson" (lower case as in the book cover), page 86 "LANDSCAPE AS DOCUMENT": "In sum, landscape is a historic document that tells a story -- actually multiple stories -- about the people who created the landscape and the cultural context in which that landscape was embedded. ... The ordinary landscape is, after all, the only lasting record written by the overwhelming majority of the earth's population ... The landscape created by ordinary people is the main historic record they leave behind -- records written on the face of the earth."

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #11

2010-04-15T16:04:00.003+02:00

Click here to follow the whole series. Or here to browse everything published about the PASM (Parco Agricolo Sud Milano). Click the Image for a larger view.

The problem of derivatives and visual expression levels

One of the deepest problems that an Amateur Photographer Artist -- an exact match in my case -- faces is that of the so called derivatives. A problem that, generally, does not bother the professional one, after all he is in a business, and therefore, the object must be defined previously in a contract. Sometimes the problem gets to a level of such anxiety that the poor APA has a complete block. However if we look carefully, as usual when in doubt, to history, of imaging in this case, and even of general expression, we will see that the need to always make something new and totally original, occupies only a small slice of - historical time: the modernist one. Fortunately or not, those times have passed. Consider, for example, the case of the novel writer, he certainly has no need to always come up with a new written form, well maybe he will modify some rules a bit, succeeding only if he/she is very clever, to better adapt to her/his style, but in the end, to be understood, she/he needs to write in the conventional way, or so to say derivative. Or do you think, getting to landscape painting, that Canaletto even considered for a second that he was making derivatives of Caspar Van Wittel ? I think that he was more interested in representing a place, to derive a painting to sell to somebody interested in the semantic referent, whatever it was, and the more he did the more the money came in. Canaletto, as much as Van Wittel were lavishing their art, and applying techniques, to tell something. As much as in writing I like to think about photography, or in general in imaging in the same way. Someone may be more interested in poetry than in telling tales. Someone will look to make a single picture of great force, someone else a meaningful sequence. An Artist's audience could be that of other Artists as well, for a Landscapist, that of the Garden Architects, just as an example.

I'm not saying with this that modernism was wrong, history is never right or wrong, it has been, full stop. Instead I think that in the anxiety of making new things the expressive horizons have been enlarged a lot. And yet many of those novelties have not been completely put to use, sometimes even forgotten under the pile of the ones coming in later. Now it may be, I suggest, the time to harvest all that grew up in the last century, and before, instead of consuming ourselves, if not the world in some cases, in the search of the new for the new. Well, that does not mean that there must be no more research, each of us will do it anyway, at least to learn how to use expressively the instruments of precisions that we have. Anachronism, see a previous post here, may be a real source of ``novelty''.

There are also some solid cognitive foundations in this discourse. Given the exponential growth of the number of images that we deposit in our memory it may be almost impossible to speak or even think of newness in imaging any more. Just as an example I've read recently about the increase in image processing speed of human visual sensor system. As measured in some neuro sciences experiments (I've twitted about it a few months ago) the number of processed images per second in a few generations bumped up from 60 (for subjects forty years old or older) to 200 per second (for subjects in their twenties).

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #10

2010-04-11T17:32:00.004+02:00

Click here to follow the whole series. Or here to browse everything published about the PASM (Parco Agricolo Sud Milano)

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #9

2010-04-07T19:19:00.014+02:00

Approaching the PASM (Parco Agricolo Sud Milano)

At first my knowledge of the PASM was limited to what I saw passing by a car on the Highways that cross it: a large collection of cultivated land and factories. It was only when I started to go there by bike that my knowledge of the place progressively expanded in a very material sense. So after some few short exploratory trips I decided to explore the place photographically. The aim was, and is, to understand if a subjective, and consequentially expressive, kind of landscape photography could be of actual use in describing my experience, as a viewer, there inside while preserving, or better, convoying, the needed informations to represent the place.

A classical, documentary, approach is to photograph the main attractions like monuments, historical buildings or temporarily recovered green areas (eventually for the only time needed by the inaugural ceremony). There are plenty of those in the PASM. Then there are the factories and the various and related animals and breeds. The inventory of retrievable things goes on indefinitely and a photographic approach based on the traditional documentary practice, centered around the object, as the only consensual fact, is at risk to not preserve at all the visual identity of the place. The problem is that the entire park is almost a ruin itself. The ruin of a complex and extended hydraulic system, now far less efficient than in the past. The land, in its flatness, is the result of man made interventions that stratified in time. Water too is still drained by systems put in place by the Romans, the new thing is that now several waterways, formed by the emerging waters, have been transformed into sewage (this was planned by a bunch of modernist engineers back in 1911).

So, for my documentary project, I've decided to take a subjective approach, trying to equate what I was seeing with what other ones certainly saw, albeit in a different light and a different identity, trying to preserve the emotional side without, hopefully, sliding to much in the painterly. I like to think about it as a documentation of the visual identity of the place, certainly made by the objects too but seen through their spatial relations. As far as I know only one other photographer, to whom I owe some inspirations, tried to work it out that way: Beniamino Terraneo. There has been some others that are well known, but they focused mainly on the institutional building, as it used to be in the tradition of the Alinari.

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #8

2010-04-02T16:38:00.003+02:00

Click here to follow the whole series. Or here to browse everything published about the PASM (Parco Agricolo Sud Milano).

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #7

2010-03-30T11:14:00.005+02:00

Some remarks on my own approach to the PASM (Parco Agricolo Sud Milano)

In four years, since I've started to get around there, my NEF archive of the South Milan area, has grown to a 6000 pictures to choose from, but considering that I do a lot of bracketing the approximate number of unique images is around 1800. As much as in agricultural terms the area has been photographically exploited. But almost all of the works that I've seen either focus on details or on official monuments. It's rare to find something about how the area actually looks. You have to go back to the fifties and before to find something, albeit quite different from now, that may give you a view of what, supposedly, the people living there saw, on a daily basis. That's the reason why I've decided to consistently use, as a vantage point (page 5), the common person view point, eye level, possibly without leaving the commonly used road or trail. I went there exclusively on foot or by bicycle (mountain bike). The idea, in a truly westerner fashion, is that to spend some physical energy may help to get better in touch with the place. Carlo Emilio Gadda is quoted to have said, after looking at some aerial photo of the place, that it was made on an "on foot" dimension. I do not know if it worked well for the pictures but certainly, after approximately 2500 km in a four years time span, my silhouette got far better.For a very short description of the PASM (Parco Agricolo Sud Milano) see here

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #6

2010-03-25T10:50:00.003+01:00

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #5

2010-03-22T12:23:00.006+01:00

Just some notes on the place. Imagine a huge garden of about 460 square Kilometres (287 square Miles). Cultivated since 2100 years ago. With a capillary irrigation network and an abundance of water, coming all year long from the Alps. The Roman Republic began it's massive exploitation of the area, levelling the soil, regulating the waters and cutting the original vegetation that covered every thing for centuries. Thousands of slaves from the past up to the present day. Once the brute force of the bodies today the brute mechanic means. Laser levelled slope. In the middle ages it was a place of power and abundance. Today a terrain waiting to be built. Home of the love for the horizontal in architecture, as opposed to the north European, Gothic, uprightness. The very best natural resort near Milan almost unnoticed by most of its inhabitants ... Parco Agricolo Sud Milano (PASM).

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #4

2010-03-18T18:30:00.005+01:00

Visual culture, cognition and photographers ...

The written part of almost all of my recent posts have had as a central point that is the space, his creation and the relations a viewer establishes within. More ambitiously I'm trying to position Landscape photography (and photography at large) as a conceptual space itself in a sort of recursion. A landscape is nothing other than a piece of space who's borders are settled in many ways. A landscape picture is itself a newly created landscape and so on.But, at this point, one may wonder if all of this may be something merely tangent to photography, given the commonality of vision and the related cognitive processes to all mankind. So what differentiates a photographer from the generic human viewer ? Well, in my view :-), there are at least two answers. The first, quite simply, is nothing. The second, which is the one I'm interested in, is that a photographer is a very specialized and trained kind of viewer. I would like to say a "Critical" viewer.But in our western culture the role of vision has always been questioned either by the Judeo–Christian Religion, that relied heavily on the "word" as a foundation for its beliefs, or by the most important source of modern knowledge: Science, that always saw with suspicion the mere "viewed" phenomena given the illusions that, in critical conditions, may be misguiding.Only in recent times has it been pointed out the ability to manipulate perspective may be at the base of the general paradigmatic shift which occurred in the seventeenth and sixteenth century that lent to the scientific revolution.If you want to dig deeper into the topic a good starting point may be this paper from Bruno Latour.

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #3

2010-03-14T21:11:00.002+01:00

Milan ordinary landscapes. Unexpected

2010-03-10T20:22:00.002+01:00

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #2

2010-03-08T19:48:00.008+01:00

I've have to confess that sometimes I envy neo cons for their ability to amuse and entertain people. But this time I think that the World Press Photo Jury went beyond the simple entertainment, the case reported here and here is nothing less than a nifty Comic Opera. No matter if the picture was heavily CartierBressoned the problem was the usual obliterated foot floating around that got lost after a heavy trimming that obliterated the unfortunate owner. Its interesting how the latter obliteration was considered perfectly acceptable. Can't believe it. I think that following those contests is becoming a must. Cant miss the next move to defend the magic objective automata in our hands ... But on the bright side the effect may be exactly the opposite of what desired, at least I hope so.

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #1

2010-03-04T10:31:00.007+01:00

Perhaps its some pre industrial piece of my cognitive system floating around but I'm quite sensible to seasonal changes. Can't get used to this. Photographically speaking the passage from Winter to Spring is always busy. Things happen at such a speed. Nature -- if we may still call it that way -- at the latitudes from which I'm writing is exploding of life again and it happens in a really compressed interval of time. I'm a bit late on my schedule on the theoretic neighbourhoods too. To be honest the main reason is that I've decided, before prosecuting, to have a look at Kant's "inaugural dissertation of 1770" mainly cause it seems a good liminal space in which perform a passage from Geography to Philosophy. But I've forgot how Kant is hard to read so it will take a bit more time and posts to get there. Apologies for this.

Interstitial #8. City borders. Southeast Milano

2010-02-28T20:21:00.002+01:00

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Bike path

2010-02-25T20:45:00.006+01:00

Previously on ...

It has already been pointed out that photography does not have, per se, a strong theoretical support. Its enough to get to a library and compare the number of technical or practical books against the more abstract ones, and when you find one that in some ways declares this intention most of the times it is very down to the earth to depressing levels, with some notable exceptions as the ones form Stephen Shore or Robert Adams or Andreas Feininger.

Its a fact that only in recent times Academy decided that it was worth the effort to plunge in, whatever the reasons. Perhaps its an effect of those little digital cameras every body is handling, even there. The net increase in apparently well exposed pictures may be somewhat reassuring. However the contents are generally more about historical traits of photography when not extra photographic as in the case of what is to be considered documentation.

Problem is that photography is not a theoretical or abstract domain. Photography is a practice. An it is three times a practice. One for the making one for the use and one for the fruition. Its also a fact that Academy never had a benevolent look at practice.

But we need theories. At least to have some guidance in the teaching/learning (self). Its easy to see that in my point there is a strong doubt about the value of Photography schools. One may be tempted to resort to how the education of young painters was conducted at the times of Raffaello, where the solution to introduce someone to a successful imaging practice was a bit rude to say the least. Unfortunately in our modern times we have some limitations about the degree to which a student may be beaten. So what to do ?

With the series on Geography -- I'm slowly going backward retagging where needed -- as much as in my photographic drifts/dérives, I'm trying to have a look at what is or has been produced in the visual neighbourhood trying to preserve a photographer's approach, one based on framed portions of the whole. Just the idea so to say. In other times, and with a somewhat more optimistic evaluation of the time needed, I've taken a different approach, more oriented to a deep comprehension. It may be useful but it takes time and, as in my case, if time amounts to years the difficulty lies more in the choice of the branches to follow. Its a bet anyway. Not always successful.

This wont make nobody a better photographer, or at least is a path that does not give some instant "tip". I know.

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Last year on a day like this. Birds

2010-02-22T10:24:00.007+01:00

'Unreal, unreal!' ghost helmsmen scream
and fall in through the sky,
not breaking through my seagull shrieks...
Van Der Graaf Generator - A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers

Just an update on the Journal of Visual Culture I have linked in a previous post. The Journal seems to be "reborn again" you will find it here.

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Last year on a day like this. Ruins

2010-02-18T19:29:00.015+01:00

Doctor Livingstone, I presume

I'm closing on Geography by now. Leaving you with a last contribution. While in the US the main activity in the second half of the Nineteenth Century was to go West in Europe it was Africa to attract the attention of a hungry set of several different subjects, in both cases it is interesting how the icon of the "virgin and untouched soils" became a common trait. In this work you'll find a deep analysis of how the whole image of the famous Doctor was set up including photography and, more important, the newly, for the times, introduced techniques for large scale image replication. The linked Google snippet,for the purpose to understand the formation of an anticipated landscape, is , in my opinion, more than enough unless you are interested in the specific question. More or less each European Country had its own paper built colonial Heroes starting with Cristoforo Colombo till the utterly pathetic Italian ones of the last minute. Interestingly Italy contributed to the general imagery adding some songs.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Darsena #1. The same foggy day ...

2010-02-13T13:17:00.006+01:00

Milano Navigli Darsena

Geography and Landscape Photography. Updates

I'm keeping on in this drift into Landscape forming disciplines. It may not be totally clear in which way an abstract theory may contribute its own in the shaping of the every day landscape. This excerpt from "Critical Geographies" (I'm publishing it also for the most lazy among you readers :) gives an example of expectations about the land, still to colonize, that in some ways happened.

``It is, perhaps, in those international negotiations and agreements which concern the political status of great countries, and determine their boundaries and the respective limits of their responsibilities, that the danger of inaccurate geographical knowledge is greatest, and the results of it are the most disastrous. Truly, this period in our history has been well defined as the boundary-making era. Whether we turn to Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, such an endless vista of political geography arises before us, such a vast area of land and sea to be explored and developed; such a vision of great burdens for the white man to take up in far-off regions, dim and indefinite as yet; that it can surely be only by the grace of Providence that we shall finally emerge from the struggle to rearrange the world‟s partitioning, without some deadly contest with others whose interests in these new arrangements are hardly less than our own. And I may, perhaps, be permitted to say, that just as the Providence of battles usually favors the biggest battalions, so it is likely that the widest geographical knowledge will prove the best safeguard against misunderstandings, and will at once dispose of such false estimates of the value of portions of the world‟s surface here and there as have occasionally brought England perilously close to the dividing line between peace and war. By geographical knowledge I do not mean simply that knowledge of the Earth‟s surface which we gain by surveying it. I mean also a knowledge of those ordinary laws of nature which decide the configuration of mountains and the flow of rivers, where certain influences must inevitably lead to certain conditions (Holdich, 1899, 466-7). `` From Critical Geographies pp. 144 ''The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870-1918 `` Brian Hudson 1972.

Expectations, projections and desires operate constantly in image making. In some ways we get to a place with a set of already thought out pictures, we anticipate what we will see. The fundamentalist school of pre visualization in some ways, and in some extremes, made the anticipation a key point in landscape making. An interesting experience of how such anticipation was abruptly shut down is reported by Robert Adams about his work.To close the post here is a link to an interesting, but I still have to digg in deeper, online journal: Invisible Culture. I've got there looking for "post colonial geography" that is the object of the latest issue.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Late winter fog.

2010-02-08T15:22:00.007+01:00

On Geography and Landscape photography again.

In the previous post I've pointed out some connections Landscape Photography has with Geography, or better Humanist Geography. In a lot of cases on each side the work is in making "borders", what is in and what is out. However Geography now relies on a gigantic amount of data, and with the Internet the sources grew exponentially. While in the case of Critical Geography we are more on the side of the paradigmatic change (or several paradigmatic changes competing or collaborating) in the case of NeoGeography we land on a totally different view, that of the fun in making new maps. It is an other side, that of the quantities, but this time not in scarce ratio but overly abundant, something to play with if you like. While I was there I've made some searches on issuu and I've found this text, more on the paradigmatic side, that has a nice delineation of Geography's spaces at the beginning: "Is Geography Destiny". The title itself is full of "cosmic" interest :-D

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #7.

2010-02-04T18:32:00.010+01:00

In the last post I've left a link to the Wikipedia definition of Dérive/Drift in the sense intended by Guy Debord from the Situationist International: SI. I've read the SI manifesto 30 years ago while trying to find a way out from the heavy, for excessive ideology, Seventies. Recently I've stumbled upon them while reading an online, and free, book: Critical Geography. The book collects several articles some of which of historical importance, among them: Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography written by Guy Debord (one of the most visible actors in SI). Geography is a sibling of Landscape Photography, they share the same object: surfaces. Photography itself is all about surfaces. Both had their rise in the second half of the nineteenth century and both had a dramatic impact on the way we shaped the world in which we live. Critical Geography tries to introduce the idea that geography may be studied along different, either quantitative either qualitative, points of view as in the case of "Anti colonialist" Geography or Feminist Geography, see this entry in Wikipedia for a panoramic view.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #6

2010-01-31T12:32:00.004+01:00

Milano, Centro Direzionale Leoni

Here is an addition to my drift/dérive around Porta Garibaldi. I've added a coloured path to the map.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Centro Leoni #3

2010-01-27T19:55:00.004+01:00

I've mentioned several times my vicinity with conceptual art as a mean to have some control in what I would call the photographic performance, the one each photographer performs when taking pictures. In some ways, in landscape, the photographer's performance overlaps with land, body art and even dance as I pointed out a few posts ago.
Conceptual art introduced a procedural way to operate, to make intentional sides of the artistic practice other ways shadowed by routine doing. Conceptual art may be suspected to have a high degree of boredom associated, it is not always the case as explained in this article: "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" by Sol Lewitt that I have enjoyed reading for its clarity and concision. The intro is a pearl by itself and an important point in the attribution of a theoretical dignity to the artist's doing.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Centro Leoni #2

2010-01-24T14:51:00.000+01:00

Milano, Centro Direzionale Leoni

Recently I've posted a reference to a Minor White article on equivalence. The argument was about what to look as visually shareable among subjective views of the world. But here is a somewhat different point of view from Edward Weston. Reading and comparing the two articles a clear difference in approach emerge. While one is more passively oriented toward what comes in the other explores proactively.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Centro Leoni #1

2010-01-20T18:55:00.008+01:00

Milano, Centro Direzionale Leoni

I've casually got to this place. While I was looking at it asking myself how to render the impression that made me stop, a group of runners appeared out of nothing. At that point I could not resist. The low contrast and the smooth yellows where attracting even if the light was a bit lacking in contrast. Generally a picture classified as a landscape is expected to represent something lasting, or at least static, but this is only a cultural expectation, a projection, so to say, of our desire to possess even the time and control it. Much of the landscape freely published or taken with compact cameras or by compulsive clicking is nothing more than an abstract try in appropriating of something that in some way resonates with a memory or an experience or even an idea. It does not take that much to understand that there is a profound difference between trying to share a vision and trying to possess something.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #5

2010-01-17T20:07:00.001+01:00

One more assumption we can make about the subjective view rendered by a photographer, and this one is somewhat stronger than the one in the previous post, is that there are only subjective views even when they pretend to be objective. As I have pointed out two posts ago objectivity, as a belief, need continuous enforcement of the rules either institutionalizing the control either by punishment (as it is the case in excluding someone from a competition or firing the photographer from his workplace). But what is so important in the belief of objectivity to be defended so strenuously ? Just to avoid a position of simplistic relativism as in "the night where all the cows are black" let me say that I'm pretty aware of the need to have some kind of conventionality in every form of communication, and when it comes to matters of fact a view may be better that another one and even more objective, as in the case of "looking into a gasoline tank with a burning matchstick may be dangerous". However I do not think that protecting an Idealistic idea of objectivity may be a solution. To be honest I have no solution at all. I've found that, if read in an historical perspective, this short text from Minor White contains some interesting starting points for reasoning on what may be sharable among different subjective views.The series from Porta Garibaldi in Milan stops here by now, hope to continue it in the next weeks as soon I will have the time to get there again.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #4

2010-01-14T16:13:00.002+01:00

If we assume the hypothesis that each photo is made from an initial subjective view, an assumption not completely innocent, we get rapidly to the point where one of the main questions is "why did she/he take this ?". The relation between the photographer and what and how he is looking at something that gets represented in the photo is immediately questioned. Perhaps it has to do with the way in which we reconstruct, from a picture, the equivalence among us, the viewer, and the photographer.It is enough to have a quick look at the history of photography to see that the way in which a photographer approaches and chooses his photographic subject represents a point where major distinctions could be made.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #3

2010-01-09T17:36:00.014+01:00

Milano Porta Nuova / Garibaldi

The questions raised in the last post by Kent's comment, here is his blog Man Made Wilderness, made me try to find out an possibly short reply. I've found any. Not short I mean. Recently I followed an interesting set of speaks offered by the "CIVICA RACCOLTA DELLE STAMPE ACHILLE BERTARELLI", the site is in abandoned state. Among them I've found the one from Olivier Lugon, a very interesting photographer, who analysed the question in the light of several possible interpretative ways. The extreme endpoints are one the exclusive decision of an Historian and the other the intentional documentation of something by a photographer as part of a chain of decisions ending with him. Interestingly this is a distinction that some modern European Anthropologist, looking on our own culture as a scientific object, make between cultural artefacts intentionally left for historical memory an non intentional ones.Well this includes almost the whole spectrum of taken photos. An interesting point lies in the side of intentional documentation. In the last years with the advent of digital photography we've seen the introduction of extra medium rules to state what was a "truthful" document and what was not. It is the case of an obliterated pair of legs, if I remember correctly, and the last a "nicely" coloured village.The "conservatives" in photography felt, them too, and it was time, that no longer the medium itself was a warranty of "objectivity". To obey these rules , however, may mean that intentional documentation may be stated only as something "official" or approved by an "authorized" source. Who has the authority to state the objectivity otherwise ? The slippery side here is that rules tend to get changed to reflect the momentary common sense. In a world where every body is used to hyper saturated kodachromes a desatured photo will still be truthful ?

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #2

2010-01-07T17:44:00.009+01:00

A brief detour to the Porta Garibaldi train station. As promised, and easily predicted :-) here is the continuations of the series I've started at the end of the 2009. Recently I've seen a great deal of attempt to define the importance of photography as a document mainly for its capability to freeze a time/space point no matter what the subject is. There is a sense in which I concur: from its beginnings to take a picture it required an exposure and a certain amount of light coming form a surface. As for the rest I believe that the documentary value of a photo is something that cannot be separated from the photographer, as in the case of Aget. It is a document of a personal vision located in space and time (the photographers space and time), and as such difficult to trace back. But there are certainly other equally valid reasons that let an historian decide that a picture may be used as a document but in such case pictures are nothing more than objects themselves and the historian is simply playing the "ready made" game.

Milan ordinary landscapes. Porta Garibaldi #1

2009-12-29T09:16:00.021+01:00

Milano Porta Nuova / Garibaldi

I've taken these a few days before Christmas. No I have no exact prediction for the incoming year nor I have any expectations just looking for what will come downstream. My predictive abilities never have been so low. Anyway I can certainly predict that I will take a closer look to this area. By the way here is an interesting round table that may shed some light on the, felt, lessening of our predictive powers. See you the next year.

pmc #10. Seasonal roundabout

2009-12-19T20:53:00.009+01:00

Milano 3

I'm entering my traditional hibernation and vacation time. I'll be back in ten days. ... Well maybe a bit more .... Best wishes.

Urbana. Milan ordinary landscapes. Bicocca Greco #4

2009-12-15T10:14:00.014+01:00

This summer I've started to shift my perceptual attention in landscape photography from the objects to the relation among them and the way in which we and the objects themselves define the space we move in, perceive and interpret, this is something I've been thinking and reading about for long time but which I could not relate to an immediate perception. Each of us, human, probably have a different way to define a space based on our cultural backgrounds and personal experiences. In this study, concluded with this post, I've tried to act as a person walking along a couple of streets picturing, as a photo tourist, what caught my eye. Generally I make some studies before getting to a place. In this case the concept is the "unplanned walk" in an "unplanned place" for a fixed amount of time (2 hours circa). The idea is that a photographer is some kind of specialist when it comes to visual relation that define space, a specialist by experience. Visual experience is made "viewing" and not "reading" just to stay on a very obvious plane. Well this may be in some contrast with the canonical view that wants the photographer as a mere recorder of an already established landscape made by an Architect (or even the Creator).

Speaking of space, as a concept, I've found that this blog has some interesting analysis about it notably here and here.

Urbana. Milan ordinary landscapes. Bicocca Greco #3

2009-12-12T09:34:00.005+01:00

Right after what Norberto Bobbio called the "society of traffic lights", in Italy, it seems, we are having the season of roundabouts. We are certainly late with respect to the other developed European Countries but, as usual, we are making our best in terms of Mediterranean obsession. I'm not sure of the subtle philosophical implications but certainly it requires a totally different approach in negotiations among drivers. In visual terms roundabouts reshape the visual landscape in very powerful ways redistributing space and view points and, ultimately, for the postmodern urban reader, the centre of the roundabout is certainly an exemplary "no where land".

Urbana. Milan ordinary landscapes. Bicocca Greco #2

2009-12-09T13:36:00.010+01:00

Conjugating documentation and subjective view has always been considered a contradiction. Never the less this is what we daily experience in our approach to the world. Each time we take a picture we are documenting something, taking a fragment of time and fixating it. Even in the most abstract picture we make, we are documenting. Is it necessary to voluntarily document something to make an image more a "document" than an other ? I'm not sure. Marc Auge in its "Anthropology of the present", an effort in the foundation of an anthropological analysis of our own culture, distinguishes among "intended" historical artefacts and non intended ones, or those who's purpose is not to be used in some future as a document of a conventional present. At the end of every picture what it remains is the human, or the robot, taking it, its point of view (or the one of the programmer), his visual choices and the process till the finished image.

Urbana. Milan ordinary landscapes. Bicocca Greco #1

2009-12-05T10:57:00.009+01:00