May 27th, 2013

Recently I came across what Robert Adams (an American photographer) wrote about landscape pictures.  He wrote that these pictures can convey to us three kinds of information: geography, autobiography, and metaphor.  "Geography" refers to what I've heard described as a "sense of a place."  It helps us to have a sense of what it is like to be in a particular place.  "Autobiography" means that when someone paints or photographs a landscape, something about that person comes through.  And how can it not?  A completely impersonal making of a picture is difficult to imagine; at a minimum, I choose to include that tree but not that building, him instead of her, the mountain but not the river.  And I make such choices based on what I see or imagine when I'm making the picture.

"Metaphor" is more difficult to get at.  Adams suggested that metaphor conveys the significance of a place (not just its geography).  We see more that just the geography.  He quoted Robert Henri:  successful landscapes "seem to be moments of revelation when we see the transition of one part to another, the unification of the whole.  There is a sense of comprehension"  (it's not just all a "booming, buzzing confusion").   That word "comprehension" is worth paying attention to: when a landscape picture works, we prehend (get, grasp) the whole of what is being presented: the whole is shown to be more than just a sum of the parts.  But Adams added that landscape as metaphor reveals how a landscape fits with one's life experience.  It helps us to rediscover and reevaluate where we are--I'd say it helps us to see where we fit in to that whole that the landscape uncovers for us.  Landscape pictures, wrote Adams, record a mystery; they record Form.  (This discussion by Adams of the metaphoric aspect of a landscape picture seems to me another way of what I try to say in my own writing about what I am attempting to do when I make a photograph.)