Altered or Unaltered?

Written by: Ryan Nemeth

Scanning the format of landscape photography these days I cannot help but notice two distinct categories of photographs. The first category of photograph is generally a depiction of scenery or unaltered or uninhabited land, a more accurate description of this image is raw scenery rather than landscape. Although not always true, I would categorize this type of image as an objective look at the land. These images are steeped in romantic expression as they are suggestive of pristine landscapes both unaffected and untouched by humans.  This type of image is also suggestive of what was and what should be? Thus, unaltered images of scenery generally serve as a reference point to contrast a world and space that is now occupied. As Frank Gohlke stated, our affection for land runs deep, national parks and pristine community spaces occupy a huge part of our psychological connection to land. Thus, many of the images that bear an association with these pristine spaces reinforce the notion of human beings disconnection from land. Images of this type are also highly suggestive of what has been lost, which I would argue is what makes images of this type so relevant to the viewer.  I believe that good landscape photographs occupy this psychological space within the mind of the viewer. Thus, romantic images of scenery often generate a sense of longing in the viewer and it is in this tension through emotional provocation that meaning and value is often constructed.  

The second defining category of landscape photograph depicts altered and inhabited space that is a derivative of the constructed landscape. Although not always the case, these images are generally much more subjective and interpretive in nature. It is within this category of image that the viewer is induced to move from the concept of raw uninterrupted land and scenery to an understanding of an occupied world. I believe that images of this type inherently occupy a more pragmatic and realistic space within the minds of viewers as these images tend to depict objective realities in regard to human interaction with land.  As J.B. Jackson pointed out, “a landscape only exists as something imagined, created, used or viewed by a human being. Therefore, there is no pure before image, only an endless sequence of afters.  A man altered landscape is therefore a record of construction and disruption both social and physical, beneficial or detrimental”. Jackson’s insights help to make a clear delineation between the two distinct categories of photography centered on the subject of land. Thus, there are romantic images of unaltered scenery and landscapes or altered depictions of land.  

This being said, Jackson would have argued emphatically that these two categories (scenery and landscape) of land based photography are inseparable and must coexist together. For Jackson, Landscape implied the coexistence of both human and natural underpinnings. Therefore, no deep channel separated the human world from the natural. Landscape was both technological and biological, an economic product and an aesthetic object, full of intentions and yet always the product of chance.  Landscape is nature forged with steel, through electric illumination, and atop asphalt.  Jackson believed that through these constructions, “humans deliberately create space to speed up or slow down the process of nature.”

As Jackson was aware, most students of the subject believed otherwise. On the one side of such schemes stood the romantic notion (of writers like Henry David Thoreau) that we are part of nature and should value natural powers above human creation. Romantics favored picturesque cities whose roads and buildings rambled along the swells of topography and the grains of local materials. On the other side was the humanist/pragmatic attitude (of those like Thomas Jefferson) that the human shape is supreme and that we must control nature. Pragmatists advocated for the gridded plan where right angles clipped, hedged, and hacked back natural color, texture, and form in the guise of reason and utility.

Both philosophies, Jackson realized, while at opposite ends of the spectrum, used a priori reasoning. That is to say, they first defined a relationship between human and natural, and then applied that definition as the basis for appropriate environments. Such reasoning, according to Jackson, was flawed. Excluded in such deductive thought were the unpredictable freedoms of the individual spirit and senses. As he wrote: “All that we can now do is produce landscapes for unpredictable men where the free and democratic intercourse of the Jeffersonian landscape can somehow be combined with the intense self-awareness of the solitary romantic.” Landscape had to satisfy both functional demands and reflective aspirations, therefore demonstrating physiological and psychological requirements.

References:

1. Gohlke, F. (2009) Thoughts on Landscape. Tucson, AZ: Published by Holart Books.
2. No author, (2010) New Topographics. Gottingen, Germany: Steidl Publishers and Center for Creative Photography in cooperation with the George Eastman House.
3. Schwarzer, M. (2014) Selected books by J.B. Jackson. Retrieved from: http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/6/selected-books-by-j-b-jackson.

Defining Landscape

Written by: Ryan Nemeth

Being that I identify myself as a landscape and environmental photographer, I find it worthwhile to actually try and elaborate on the term landscape. I feel that the term  landscape is most often taken out of context when applied to the field of photography.  My perception is that this misunderstanding can be squarely attributed to the term’s multifaceted and somewhat subjective definition.

Landscape ecology by definition deals with the ecology of landscapes. So what are landscapes? Surprisingly, there are many different interpretations of the term “landscape.” The disparity in definitions makes it difficult to communicate clearly, and even more difficult to establish consistent management policies. Definitions of landscape invariably include an area of land containing a mosaic of patches or landscape elements. Forman and Godron (1986) defined landscape as a heterogeneous land area composed of a cluster of interacting ecosystems that is repeated in similar form throughout. Turner et al (2002) define landscape as an area that is spatially heterogeneous in at least one factor of interest. Thus, there are many variants and definitions that are applicable based on the context in which the term landscape is used. Therefore, both research applications and fields of study can skew the way in which this term is applied (McGarigal, No Date).

The long and varied careers of the word landscape in English, and of its cognates in other northern European languages, have centered on the human shaping of space and also on the dynamic interaction of actual places with mental or visual images of place. The conception of landscape has expanded from genres of painting and garden design, through the study of seemingly unchanging agricultural societies, to the entire contemporary American art scene, to applications in design and preservation movements and a growing interest in conflicts of race, class, gender, and power (Wilson & Groth, 2003).

Old English precursors to landscape, landskipe and landscaef, already contained compound meanings. In the Middle Ages, a land was any well-defined portion of the earth, ranging from a plowed field to a kingdom. The original senses of -skipe, -scipe, and -scape were closely related to scrape and shape, meaning to cut or create. The related suffix, -ship, denotes a quality, condition, or a collection. It yields a word such as township, in Old English, túnscipe, which primarily meant the inhabitants of a town or village, but, secondarily, the domain or territory controlled by that settlement. Thus, landskipe essentially meant a collection or system of human-defined spaces, particularly in a rural or small-town setting (Wilson & Groth, 2003).

The Old English sense of landscape, which was social as well as spatial, appears to have faded into disuse by 1600, when artists and their clients introduced a related Dutch word, landschap, back into English. A landscape, in this new Dutch sense, was a painting of a rural, agricultural, or natural scene, often accented by a ruin, mill, distant church spire, local inhabitants, or elite spectators. In contrast to the earlier traditions of religious, mythological, and portrait paintings done on commission for the church or nobility, landscapes were painted on speculation for anonymous consumers in emerging mercantile centers such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. As a result, the term landscape and the painting genre it described were tied to the rise of a merchant class with the power and leisure to cast their controlling and organizing gaze from the city out onto the countryside. Subsequent painting genres; seascapes, cloudscapes, and townscapes extended this sense of a scape as a carefully framed and composed real life scene (Wilson & Groth, 2003).  Thus, old English and Dutch history gave rise to the modification of the word landscape. This iteration is what persists today and the word landscape is most often associated with this pre-industrial perspective. Thus, most Americans tend to associated the word landscape with natural scenery, which is often skewed to a very romantic and unaltered interpretation of the land. Evidence of this is found in most modern definition of the word, for example:

The dictionary defines the word landscape as such:

1)  a picture that shows a natural scene of land or the countryside

2) an area of land that has a particular quality or appearance

3) a particular area of activity (Merriam-Webster, 2014).

The recent field of cultural geography, which was developed largely throughout the last half of the 20th century helped to define the term landscape in a much more comprehensive way.  The renowned cultural geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson contributed immensely to this field and almost single handedly helped to shape a more modern and rounded version of the definition. To illustrate this point, Frank Gohlke, the renowned landscape photographer stated, “John gave me an understanding of the responsibility of the landscape photographer, which is to make the invisible visible. To see clearly and unsentimentally what has heretofore escaped our attention”.   Gohlke further stated, ”Jackson and his colleaguesarticulated the obvious truth that everything in the landscape has meaning.” In this idea is the belief that photographing or asking the simple question about an object in the landscape can unlock the human history of an entire region” (Gholke, 2009).

To clarify the parameters of the word landscape, Jackson traced the etymology of the word (partially offered above) and distinguished it from relative terms such as nature, scenery, environment, and place.  He emphatically suggested that our national parks and romantic ideas of unadulterated landscapes are in fact scenery rather than landscapes. Jackson, also provided compelling evidence that landscape was actually an active principal influenced by human actions and natural processes in ever changing dynamic system (Gholke, 2009). In doing so, Jackson’s unique perspective opened up the term landscape to objects and forms that were previously ignored in the American landscape and often overlooked in artist’s depictions until the environmental movement of the 1960s. 

Through Jackson’s magazine Landscape, readers were urged to examine and see their surroundings and to recognize the origins, utility and appeal of everyday objects and features such as parking lots, motels, mobile homes, gas stations, and billboards (No author, 2010). Landscape photographers should know that it is in fact a combination of scenery and these man made ubiquitous items that occupy and therefore construct our landscape. The important thing to know is that both altered and unaltered environments comprise and define the term landscape. In fact, a more objective depiction of landscape probably is inclusive of both altered and unaltered states of scenery. Furthermore, landscapes are constructed forms that occupy both physical and mental space and are thus transcendent constructions of our psyche.  Certainly part of the conversation is to understand how humans delineate their claim to what is worthy and suitable of occupying space.  The question to understand is how much of the human psyche drives the construction of landscape and the evolution of space?

References:

1. No author, (2010) New Topographics. Gottingen, Germany: Steidl Publishers and Center for Creative Photography in cooperation with the George Eastman House.
2. Gohlke, F. (2009) Thoughts on Landscape. Tucson, AZ: Published by Holart Books.
3. McGarigal, K. (No date).  What is a landscape? Retrieved from: http://www.umass.edu/landeco/teaching/landscape_ecology/schedule/chapter3_landscape.pdf
4. No author, Merriam-Webster.com (2014). Landscape. Retrieved from: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/landscape.
5. Wilson, C., & Groth, Paul E. (2003) Everyday America : Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, 2003. Retrieved from: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/marylhurst/reader.action?docID=10062321.

Understanding Place - Wayfinding

Written by: Ryan Nemeth

Wayfinding encompasses all of the ways in which people and animals orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place (Wikipedia, 2014).

The perpetual pulse of capitalism and corresponding growth in urban environments has given rise to new challenges for human navigational strategies and our concept of space.  Exploration of the subject of technological wayfaring exemplifies one more way in which the human race exhibits limited interactions with the natural world. Both the technological revolution as well as growth in urban environments, have given rise to the age of the global positioning system (GPS).  As we all know, GPS systems are well on their way to being a ubiquitous standard feature in every car and on every cellphone. Because of the widespread availability of GPS, human beings are depending on these systems for navigation more than ever.

The potential implications for this dependency on GPS are vast as neuroscientists have recently uncovered that navigational activity in fact helps to develop and shape our brains. Experts informed by this research have postulated that permanent changes could occur in the human brain as we grow accustomed to navigation driven by computers and machines.  Once we lose the habit of forming cognitive maps, it is quite possible that our sense of direction may become compromised (Hutchinson, 2009).  These findings should raise some red flags for those of us that may be concerned about the long-term effects of computers and artificial intelligence on the brain.

Iaria and McGill University researcher Véronique Bohbot demonstrated in a widely cited 2003 study that human mapping strategies fall into two basic categories. One is a spatial strategy that involves learning the relationships between various landmarks thereby creating a cognitive map in your head.  In other words, your brain produces an image of a map where destinations are referenced relative to one another on something similar to a street grid. The other is a stimulus-response approach that encodes specific routes by memorizing a series of cues. For example, a commoninternal dialogue that accompanies this approach may be, get off the bus when you see the glass skyscraper, then walk toward the big park, at the fountain take a right. For their study, Iaria and Bohbot created a virtual maze that tested both methods; they found that about half of us prefer spatial strategies, while the other half prefer stimulus-response (Hutchinson, 2009).

The idea that we carry maps in our heads is relatively new. An experimental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Edward C. Tolman, coined the term “cognitive map” in a 1948 paper showing that rats in certain types of mazes were able to figure out shortcuts to a destination a clear sign that they weren’t simply learning a sequence of left and right turns. Amazingly, a series of experiments in the 1970s suggested that cognitive maps are more than metaphorical. Certain neurons in the hippocampus, called “place cells,” were observed activating only when the rat was in a specific place. Let the animal wander through a maze, and you could watch a chain of neurons fire in a spatial pattern that exactly matched its path, at a smaller scale (Hutchinson, 2009).

Donlyn Lyndon, professor of architecture at Berkeley and the editor of Places, described place as spaces that can be remembered and hold memories through formal structures and events (Tate, 2007). Generally we experience notable places first hand through our own unique experiences and also second hand through the experiences of others, thus, knowing and understanding place exists through personal memory as well as collective social memory.  Places and manifestations of places are thus both projections of the mind as well as environments that occupy physical space. Attributes and associations of place are known, depicted, and shared in large part through memory and therefore memory associations seem to play an integral role in human’s ability to effectively navigate their environment (Hutchinson, 2009).

The beauty of GPS devices is precisely that we no longer have any need to painstakingly assemble cognitive maps. But Cornell University human-computer interaction researcher Gilly Leshed argues that knowledge of an area means more than just finding your way around. Navigation underlies the transformation of an abstract “space” to a “place” that has meaning and value to an individual. Furthermore, this understanding is linked to the brains hippocampus and its corresponding growth and function (Hutchinson, 2009).  

What researchers do know is that the hippocampus readily adapts to increased and decreased navigational demands in this region of the brain (Hutchinson, 2009).  What is yet to be determined is just how this will effect human development over time. Irrelevant of the suggested physiological changes in the brain, our dependence on GPS most definitely distances us from complex interactions with our environment and the natural world. I believe that this ever increasing division and interruption between man and the natural world is what we should be concerned about! Furthermore, this points to the realization that our world is rapidly become a virtual environment, which is a reason for indifference.

The combination of newer navigational instruments produces an increase in efficiency and a corresponding loss of skill. In modern navigation, with a complexity of instruments and techniques, the computational abilities of the mind of the navigator penetrate only the shallows of the computational problems of navigation. In the day to day practice of navigation, the deeper problems are either transformed by some representational artifice into shallow ones or not addressed at all. This phenomenon is important because skill, according to Albert Borgmann, is at the heart of social and environmental engagement (Aporta & Higgs, 2005).

But what if in that perfect representation of the world boundaries between the map and the territory become blurred and something important about the human experience of space becomes lost? Do some technologies encourage disengagement from experience of the land, people, and culture? It would seem that these new geographic technologies may have the potential to transform local geographies into standardized and measurable space and in so doing to suppress or diminish the spatial and wayfinding skills of local peoples (Aporta & Higgs, 2005).

GPS technology is, in many ways, the perfect device to demonstrate how human dependency on machines has the potential to divorce us from interactions to the natural world. First, it creates the possibility of orientation that depends entirely on the devices ability to portray position and movement and indicate direction of travel. Thus, engagement with local conditions becomes increasingly unnecessary. The GPS receivers answer to a spatial question (e.g., where to go) is provided by a mechanism that is physically detached from it (a network of satellites) and requires no involvement of the traveller with the environment. Although the act of physical travel will always involve some connection with the surroundings, this connection is shallow (Aporta & Higgs, 2005).  I do not think than anyone could argue against the benefits and efficiency that GPS and other navigational technology affords us but we should know that it comes at a cost, only time will tell just how sizable that cost is, buyer beware!

References:

1. Aporta, C. & Higgs, E. (2005). Satellite Culture: Global Positioning Systems, Inuit Wayfinding, and the Need for a New Account of Technology. Current Anthropology, 46(5), 729-753.
2. Hutchinson, A. (2009). Global Impositioning Systems, Is GPS technology harming our sense of direction. Retrieved from: http://thewalrus.ca/global-impositioning-systems/?ref=2009.11-health-global-impositioning-systems&page=.
3. No author, Merriam-Webester (2014). Place. Retrieved from: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/place.
4. No author, Wikipedia.com (2014). Wayfinding. Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayfinding
5. Tate, A. (2007). Spatial recall: the place of memory in architecture and landscape. Landscape Journal, 26(2), 328-329.
6. Walton, A. (2014). The Environment is (Still) Not in the Head: Harry Heft & Contemporary Methodological Approaches to Navigation and Wayfinding. Visible Language, 48(2), 34-47.
7. Widlok, T. (1997). Orientation in the wild: The shared cognition of Hai||Om bush-people. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3, 317-332.