Rites of passage #14 ... New topographies south Milan

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Despite its name the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano is a dense inhabited area. Agriculture has to be seen in a purely European fashion: heavily subsidized. Having lost in such a way its connection with its primeval function, agriculture, gets directed by the monetary stream that, depending on the general idea of European wealth, year after year (put in your preferred time scale), reflects the succession of different viewpoints characterizing the EEC high chairs rotations. I think that this is a "postmodern" imprint on the landscape in a deep sense. A form, derived by the agricultural intervention, who's primary function is to participate in a fund raising quest instead of responding to a need. I wont discuss this, perhaps without the heavy subsidizing there would even be nothing left. The built space, on the other side, reflects either a demand with a wish for a life in the country side either a search for less expensive real estate if compared to the northern metropolitan Milanese area. An interesting observed case is that of the transformation of old factories in small, guarded and closed villages. If, as J.B. Jackson pointed out, reading the landscape lets us glimpse into the future, those new enclosures raise some interesting questions about how human life will evolve there inside.

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Riti di passaggio. Nuove topografie a sud di Milano

Nonostante il suo nome il Parco Agricolo Sud Milano è una area densamente abitata. L'agricoltura deve essere vista in una forma puramente Europea: pesantemente sussidiata. Avendo perso in questo modo la connessione con la sua funzione primeva, l'agricoltura, viene diretta dal flusso monetario che, sulla base della idea generale di benessere europeo, anno dopo anno (metteteci la vostra scala temporale preferita), riflette i diversi punti di vista che caratterizzano la rotazione degli alti scranni CEE. Penso che questo costituisca una vera e propria connotazione postmoderna del paesaggio derivante. Una forma, derivata dall'intervento agricolo, la cui funzione principale è di accedere a raccolte di fondi piuttosto che rispondere ad un bisogno. Tuttavia non discuto di ciò, probabilmente, senza la pesante sovvenzione, non ci sarebbe rimasto nulla. Lo spazio costruito, d'altro canto, riflette sia il sogno della vita in campagna sia la ricerca di costi immobiliari inferiori a quelli dell'area metropolitana Milanese a nord. Un interessante caso che ho osservato è quello delle vecchie fattorie trasformate in piccoli villaggi, chiusi e sorvegliati. Se, come indicato da J.B. Jackson, leggere il paesaggio ci permette di intravvedere il futuro, queste aree chiuse sollevano alcune interessanti domande circa il come la vita umana si andrà ivi evolvendo.

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #13. Actual life in the PASM

I do not like the idea to connect to much the blog with the seasonal ongoing. But, having to change subjects to reflect better the various ongoing of my production, and to not mortally annoy the few frequent followers, I'm reopening the series "Rites of passage" started last year. It will go on for a couple of months intermixed with the still open other ones (trainscapes). This year continuation will be more about the newly (re)built areas in the "Parco Agricolo Sud Milano" (PASM). The "new" resulted far more difficult to approach. I'm trying to stay away as much as possible to any form of regret, or judgment, for what I have seen. "Going light", I would like to say. The questions the places pose are many though. Starting from the spatial insulation of these new loci to the sub dimensioned infrastructure, read roads and the such, but having a heavy dependence in car transportation.
... Italian ...

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Riti di passaggio. Vita reale nel PASM

Non mi piace molto connettere il blog con l'andamento stagionale. Ma, per meglio riflettere i diversi andamenti della mia produzione, e per non annoiare mortalmente i miei pochi frequentatori abituali, riapro la serie "Rites of passage" (Riti di passaggio) iniziata l'anno scorso. Andrà avanti un paio di mesi inframmezzata alle serie ancora aperte (trainscapes). La continuazione di quest'anno sarà focalizzata sulle aree (ri)costruite a nuovo nel "Parco Agricolo Sud Milano" (PASM). Il "nuovo" è risultato più difficile da approcciare. Cerco di stare il più lontano possibile da ogni forma di ripianto, o giudizio, in merito a quanto visto. "Andare Leggero", se possibile. Le domande che i luoghi pongono sono, però parecchie. A partire dall'isolamento spaziale, alle infrastrutture, leggi strade ad altro, sotto dimensionate, ma con una forte dipendenza dall'auto come mezzo di trasporto.

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #12

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #5

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

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

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Rites of passage #2

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Bike path

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

'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

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.

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. November sunrise

Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Fog

Maybe it is only a SAD effect, but Autumn is certainly the bloggers' preferred season for embroidering upon what is to be considered art or not. Just to put my two cents (European of course) in let me cite a passage from Polidoro da Caravaggio where he describes a discussion between Agostino Carracci, one of founders of the famous Bolognese school of painting, and a group of Art connoisseur of the time. They were speaking about the recently discovered statue group of the Laocoonte, but Agostino was taking himself apart, asked why he said, designing the group with great precision, that "Painters must express themselves with their hands". Now if you agree with me Photography is made with tools that are a modern extension of our hands: the camera and the computer.