The appeal of landscape

Meiji Shrine garden, Tokyo

I admit to being very late to the game in landscape photography – it’s something I’ve not really done seriously until pretty much this year; I suppose the main reason was a solid lack of opportunity. When you live in the tropics, then your shooting hours are limited: light is great in the morning and evening, but weather usually conspires against you with pollution, convection rain, or just general haze. Travel opportunities have changed that somewhat, however I think my quest to create images that are the kind of art you’d want to hang has lead me to look at new subject matter. This of course in conjunction with the ongoing quest to find subject matter that makes the most of the immersive experience of the Ultraprints and vice versa.

Somewhere near Pantai Morib, Malaysia

On a more general level, I’ve noticed that landscapes tend to get a generate a strongly positive response in general from a typical audience; I can’t blame them, since I too must feel quite drawn to these kinds of scenes in the first place to have the desire to photograph them – and keep photographing them. The question is of course, why? I suspect we must go back to look at human psychology again to understand what drives emotional response.

There is of course also an answer at a very superficially obvious level: visually, they appear different. If you live on a farm, a big sky landscape is probably not going to be quite as appealing as if you live in a downtown apartment. (This may of course be different if you’re talking about a tropical rainforest, or something totally different to the usual environment of the farmer.) My audience is increasingly urbanised, which tends to explain the bias towards landscape images over urban ones.

The current environment for most people – the city – is an unnatural one, existing only in the last few hundred years, and certainly not even in the same form it does today; it’s quite possible to visit any major city in the world and find that nature of any sort – even a solitary tree – is a fairly rare occurrence. There are some cities which integrate greenery better than others into their plan, but for the most part, the concrete chaos dominates. At an immediately conscious level, we may be used to it – we may feel out of place in nature, even – but I suspect at a deeper, evolutionary level – we miss our trees. It’s why people still actively seek parks and other (somewhat) natural spaces to pass the time and relax; and we still keep plants in our homes*.

*Or try to; we managed to kill an Ikea houseplant that lived happily with no watering in a warehouse, and gave up after that.

Arboreal window

We need our nature fix, then. And it’s clear that a landscape photograph gives us a way to get this vicariously; the ability to travel to another place – and possibly time, though most landscapes may be time of day dependent, they are era/year/epoch independent – and if nothing else, experience a little vicarious escapism. I don’t think this necessarily requires living nature, since landscapes that are predominantly mountains or water or canyons or rocks tend to have a similar effect; perhaps we just get bored of human-derived faux-order and need to find something fractal after a while to satisfy our inner caveman. It of course no coincidence that most landscapes tend to lack the frenetic chaos and energy in the constructed world, and as a consequence leave us feeling calm and relaxed after viewing them. Even a small slice of green that may be perceived as ‘natural’ is enough – the previous image, for instance, evokes a summer wood in England; it was in fact shot in Regent’s Park, in the centre of London.

Untitled mountain, Queenstown, New Zealand

It comes back to the experience again: the more immersive and different it is, the more likely it is to be positively received. I did a little experiment a few weeks back where some people saw my landscape images first digitally, and then in print; there’s no question that the printed image had much greater impact because it was both a stronger experience, and because looking at an Ultraprint conveys far more information than a reduced resolution version of a digital file, that probably carries no more than 1% of the information of the original scene. A photograph or print will never be able to reproduce the entire experience of being there – it is limited to affecting a single sense after all – but fortunately that visual one is perhaps the most dominant, assuming of course that there is no physical pain associate with viewing the scene (perhaps you needed to climb a cactus to see it, for example).

The more realistic the image, the better the print, the closer we get to that immersive escapism – you can view the scene at a comfortable distance and get lost in it, like another little world. I suspect that the Ultraprint’s ability to provide this experience is its strength and weakness: I need to find subjects that are actually interesting enough to for the audience to want to get lost in, and soothing/ comfortable enough that subconsciously they are willing to let go and suspend disbelief – if only for a moment – to feel as though you’ve exited the print and are looking at the scene instead of looking at an image of the scene. There is a subtle but critical difference there: for instance, no matter how high the resolution and printing ability, if the content of the image itself is not easily believable or feasible – e.g. highly tone mapped false-color HDR, or even black and white in many cases – the experience breaks down. The image is no longer at transparent window into another world where the audience can escape.

Sunset shadow, Queenstown, New Zealand

Personally, I’m still at the point in both my photographic journey and personal one that the appeal of a forest, or canyon, or mountains, or trees, or a nice little corner of a stream is still strong because it’s not something I experience often. I don’t tend to see many snowy mountains or alpine forests in my part of the world, for obvious reasons. Rainforests are more common but still enjoyable (one good thing about prints it that no matter how immersive the experience, you don’t ge the same irritating insects). I do wonder if and how long it will take before I get bored of this and no longer experience that sensation of visual saturation and inspiration when visiting one of these locations; the kind of feeling that pathologically compels me to make an image or ten. Do lifetime landscape photographers experience a certain sort of over saturation or jadedness? Or is it something that never loses its appeal because the infinite possibilities in varied light, weather, living elements etc. Perhaps somebody in the audience who has shot a lot of landscape can weigh in.

Some of you may of course question my constant desire to deconstruct things and understand why; to which I respond that this understanding is absolutely necessary in order to produce a better, stronger image. We must understand ourselves and our vision before we can seek to consistently make things that use that vision to touch us emotionally, or even at a much simpler level, to know what we enjoy shooting – and why. What this means is that for the foreseeable future, you’ll be seeing quite a bit more landscape work from me; at least until I get bored of it or find something else more interesting to photograph. Now, I’m going to turn it over to the audience now: if landscapes appeal to you, why do you think that is? MT

__________________

Take your photography to the next level: 2015 Masterclasses now open for booking in Prague (9-14 Mar 2015) and Lucerne (17-22 Mar 2015)

__________________

Limited edition Ultraprints of these images and others are available from mingthein.gallery

__________________

Visit the Teaching Store to up your photographic game – including workshop and Photoshop Workflow videos and the customized Email School of Photography; or go mobile with the Photography Compendium for iPad. You can also get your gear from B&H and Amazon. Prices are the same as normal, however a small portion of your purchase value is referred back to me. Thanks!

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the reader Flickr group!

Images and content copyright Ming Thein | mingthein.com 2012 onwards. All rights reserved