I am really excited to be starting this particular unit this term, one major reasoning behind this is I'm not to fond of people so any excuse to jump a train and explore is going to be appealing to me. For a starting point to this topic, we have been given some categories to examine, Industry, Edge-Lands, Forest, Suburban, and Tourism. I have chosen forests as a centre of my research, currently living in Southampton means that I have the new forest right on my doorstep, rich in history and possibilities. However before I start photographing I wanted to research Romanticism, as the term once seemed synonymous with landscape it seemed like a fitting place to start my research.
One quote in particular by 19th
century German romantic painter, Casper David Friedrich became an integral
starting point to my research.“The original landscape is too great, and too
sublime for the majority to be able to grasp it. But the copy is the product of
human hands and so lies closer to human frailty.” Friedrich explores the contemplation of
nature, his work often symbolic and anti classical seeks to convey a subjective
emotional response to the natural world. His work deals with the sublime in nature and
this is a major theme that recurs in the Romantic Movement, which is something
I wanted to research further and possibly incorporate into my own work.
Casper David Friedrich
18th century poet, playwright and
politician Joseph Addison described the sublime as something that ‘fills the
mind with an agreeable kind of horror” It was an idea feverishly explored by artists
such as turner, john martin and Friedrich. In the Tate’s three year long research
project “The sublime object, nature art and language” explores the responses of
contemporary artists to the sublime. The accompanying essay explains that
etymologically the word was used as a way of discussing new kinds of experiences
sought by romantic artists and generated by evocations of the extreme aspects
of nature- mountains, oceans and deserts that produced emotions of the
irrational and excessive kind.
In the 19th century it was believed
that at the sublimes core are experiences of self transcendence that take us
away from the forms of understanding provided by a secular, scientific and
rationalist world view. In, "A philosophical enquiry into the origin of
our ideas of the sublime and beautiful" (1756) Edmund Burke explains that the
sublime is not linked to the beautiful. The sublime is the heightened and
perversely exalted feeling from being threatened by something beyond our
control or understanding. This places an archaic perception of the
sublime as a transcendental experience of the metaphysical.
Photographer research: Mary McIntyre:
Mary McIntyre photographs explore the subject
of landscapes. I feel that her work correlates strongly with my research so
far, she explores the picturesque and the romantic and European landscape
paintings are significant influences in her practice. McIntyre examines how painting and
photography portray and construct the landscape we see. She adopts traditional
qualities of landscape painting and re interoperates them within a contemporary
context. McIntyre’s photographs explore elements of
natural phenomena’s and our perceptions of them. By photographing in very
specific weather conditions such as mist and fog, she produces documents that
are inapible. In these photographs the landscape itself is rendered unknowable
it becomes an absent subject. McIntyre’s work resonates the beliefs held by
Friedrich, Addison and Burke on the sublime.
Lough 1, 2008
