The Best Photograph I Never Took.

It was probably 1975, or it could have been early 1976. It was probably a Saturday. I was in Stockport walking down Wellington Road South towards the square. I had a camera loaded with black and white film. I was looking for scenes to photograph. A flâneur with a machine for seeing.

 

By coincidence, there was a bride and bridegroom walking up the hill in the opposite direction. They looked as if they had just got married and were heading towards a reception. The bride wore a white dress and the groom a dark suit. I don’t know how they came to be walking there, but behind them a line of disused a coal-staithes extended from the station and stopped short of the main road. These Victorian brick structures were coated in coal dust and the contrast with the bride’s white wedding dress was marked. I thought of taking a photograph, hesitated, and then the moment was lost.­

 

They passed me and carried on up the hill. Even today I think that if I had taken a picture, it could have been one of my ‘best’. The scene was redolent of northern industry. The coal staithes had been built to allow railway wagons to empty their loads into horse-drawn wagons beneath them. They connoted industrialisation, and a huge northern heritage now lost to globalisation. The nearby christie's hat works is now a museum.

 

The couple were roughly my age. How have they fared in the post-industrial 21^st century? Perhaps he has spent the last twenty years driving around as a ‘white-van man’ and perhaps she works in an office looking at spreadsheets on a computer screen. Factory work was never all that great anyway. Regardless of these clichés, the non-existent photograph of their newly married selves would have gained curiosity value over the years. The coal-staithes would now appear quite archaic and the choice of walking away from a wedding might be seen as prosaic. The staithes were demolished in the 1990s and replaced by a Mc Donald’s.  

 

It is no use regretting the lost opportunity. To get the ‘right’ view I would have needed a telephoto lens, not to avoid confronting the couple, but to change the perspective so that the coal staithes loomed in the background. You have probably seen this compressed perspective effect in numerous National Geographic features. Huge moon setting behind the Eiffel Tower. Huge moon setting behind the Taj Mahal. Huge moon setting behind an oil derrick in the Gulf of Mexico. Huge moon setting behind a launch-gantry at Cape Kennedy. You get the idea.

 

If I had taken the photograph with a telephoto lens, what would the picture have looked like? I imagine that the scene would have been a medium close-up of the couple and the coal-dust encrusted brickwork of the staithes would have largely filled the background. I think that a gust of wind blew the bride’s veil up into the air for a moment, its pristine cleanliness contrasting with the century of grime behind her. Perhaps they would have been looking at each other. Perhaps one of them would have looked at something outside the frame as if contemplating the future. The image could have been read that way, even though he or she might just as easily have been watching a relative cross the road. Some of the most iconic photographs are successful because they invite us to read things into them that are not really there. To get a range of glances and expressions I would have needed a Nikon motor-drive camera to take multiple frames in a few seconds. In those days I didn’t even know such a thing existed. It would have cost more than my motorcycle.

 

The image could have been a minor classic, or not. To believe that such a picture could say anything meaningful about the lives of the people in is to believe in a tradition of documentary photography that seeks to explain life from within 24mm x 36mm frames and instances of 125^th of a second. We partly live our lives through metaphors and the young couple were starting their new lives by literally walking away from their industrial background. The documentary tradition of photography excuses its temporary intrusion in the subject’s time and space by a faintly unctuous appeal to our sense of pathos. Out of the millions of photographs that have been taken a few have come to symbolise things that we care about, even if the people depicted in them are treated as cyphers. We have become used to the industrialisation of our perception but to take a ‘meaningful’ photograph, within the ethos of documentary photography, is rather like wandering round a field of randomly scattered words until a sentence can be read in a line that is seen from one position. We might feel pride in having the wit and perseverance to find that ideal place, but the ‘heroism of vision’ is probably just vanity.

Ideas of Nature

 

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Ideas of Nature

Travalgen, 1951 Peter Lanyon

From 1948 until his death after a gliding accident in 1964, Peter Lanyon created paintings which attempt to combine the abstract practice of modern art with the history and geology of Cornish landscapes. Contemporary painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko created pictures without perspective but Lanyon's paintings struggle to contain both the transcendence of surface appearance associated with abstraction and an impression of the physicality of actual landscapes. Modernism superseded the distinction between form and content but Lanyon's paintings are like medieval maps that contemplate the essence of places without the topographic precision of modern cartography. His pictures demonstrate the tension that exists between abstract art and the desire for a narrative of nature.

West Penwith, 1949 Peter Lanyon

Continual development became central to 20th century avant-garde art, a process which was already important to science, particularly after the renaissance when it was propelled by sea-borne exploration and the discovery of America. The existence of a previously unknown continent established that knowledge based solely on the study of classical texts was doomed to irrelevance. Theories within science are now expected to be continually refined and surpassed.

Corliss steam engine 

exhibited in 1876.  

From Scientific 

American

The belief that the future would be different from the past also emerged from the industrial revolution. The idea that ways of working could change without there being an end-point prepared  society to understand Darwin's theory of natural selection in 1859. Modern art also started within the new paradigm. The 1863 Salon des Refusés exhibition in Paris subverted the rigid aesthetics of of the Académie des Beaux-Arts by showing paintings rejected by their official annual exhibition, unleashing continual artistic change.

Art and science followed parallel paths in the renaissance when the evolution of perspectival drawing advanced with the development of optics, but there was a gradual divergence over the following centuries. Initially, modern art seemed to promise a renewed relationship with science, with some similarity of methods and interests. Several impressionist artists explored the perception of colour, overlapping with scientists' investigations of light. Art historians have seen links between Einstein's theory of relativity and cubist painting. (1) Art 'movements' such as futurism and surrealism were accompanied by manifestos, prompting expressions of loyalty or scepticism similar to the reactions of scientists to today's cosmological 'M-theories' such as; string theory, 'Brane theory and supersymmetry

In the 20th century science explored subatomic nature as avant-garde art became 

synonymous with abstract, or non-objective art. The ideal of objective reality was left behind as cubism, surrealism and abstraction became the most influential art movements. At the same time, nature seemed to disappear into the laboratory as examination of the processes

Paths of subatomic particles

revealed in a bubble chamber.

Created by collisions after 

acceleration by high-voltage

electricity, their paths are

constrained by intense 

magnetic fields.

behind the material world took place within conditions of vacuum, radioactivity and high-voltage electricity. 

Physics stretched the definition of nature in way that could not be depicted in landscape art. The science journal Nature that started in 1869 was concerned mostly with physics. Norman Lockyer, the first editor of the journal, had previously used spectroscopy to co-discover the gas helium in the sun 27 years before it was known on Earth. In a letter to Lockyer, James Joseph enthused about the title of the new publication: “What a glorious title, Nature - a veritable stroke of genius to have hit upon. It is more than Cosmos, more than Universe. It includes the seen as well as the unseen, the possible as well as the actual. Nature and Nature’s God, mind and matter.." (2) As a mathematician, Joseph knew that nature is more than a landscape. The word 'naturalist' became restricted to those who study animals and plants and became subtly different from 'scientist'.

Two distinct ideas of nature had emerged by the 19th century and we live with the influence of that dichotomy today. Physics showed that while the fundamental forces of nature might be invisible they are everywhere, permeating everyday reality from outer space to the wood in the dining-room table, but it is difficult to relate that level of description of nature to everyday life unless we are thinking about technology. Landscape art remains popular partly because it

Kathmandu, Nepal. 

Surveyed by an ESA

satellite, depicted in

false-colour infra-red.

expresses essentially literary ideas; the picturesque, the Sublime, virtue and providence, concepts which do not require us to attempt counter-intuitive understanding of how nature actually works.

Attempts at reconciling science and art have always been problematic. The issue is not only one of a separation of concerns but also difference of vision. Evolution has provided us with senses that are just good enough for survival. Science has extended our ability to see further into the electromagnetic spectrum; infra-red,  x-rays, radio waves as well as forming images with electrons, but crucially it is through our own senses that we live. It is this aspect of existence that art celebrates.  The uncanny images of nature made by technology can be as unfamiliar as abstract art, which itself has always been on a path away from a simplistic depiction of nature.

Holger Cahill lamented the move away from figurative art in his introduction to the catalogue New Horizons in American Art (3) to the 1936 exhibition of work done under the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration: "Nature was no longer a harmony to be studied. It became something that furnished occasions for the exercise of a technique...Art in other words, had its own harmony, independent of nature. This idea was carried to its final term by the Cubists who declared that art need have no frame of reference in nature at all." Cahill did not claim that landscape art had ever been about 'realistic' observation but he wrote that before modern art "Nature had been had been conceived as a principle underlying the forms and phenomena of the visual world, drawing them into a harmonious and purposive whole, benevolent and somehow friendly to man's interests and ideals." (3)

Golden, Colorado by Eugene 

Trentham. The picture was 

reproduced in black and white in

New Horizons in American Art. 

The book posits a style of 'folk

art' as an alternative to 'European'

abstract art.

Because of the symbolic or allegorical tendency within landscape pictures, combined with selectivity favouring scenes that are beautiful, picturesque or sublime, landscape art reflects more a state of mind than reality. The values inherent in landscape art were eloquently expressed by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 book Waldron - or Life in the Woods.

Thoreau wrote about self-reliance and living in close harmony with nature. He was critical of industrial 'progress'.  For a period of time he chose to live in a hut at Waldron Pond near Concord in Massachusetts, so as to be as close as possible to the flora and fauna of the woods. His observations about the seasonal changes of plants and trees are of interest to climate-change scientists today. For Thoreau, Waldron Pond functioned as a microcosm, a miniature version of an ideal but beleaguered world in which industry and intensive farming were kept at bay.

The Weather Project by

Olafur Eliasson in the 

Turbine Hall at Tate Modern

in 2003. A representation of 

the visible surface of our

sun created by 200 sodium

lights. If the generation of 

electricity by thermonuclear 

power is ever achieved it 

will be in a machine placed

in a facility that would be

very similar to the Turbine 

Hall at the Tate. The device

will effectively be an

artificial sun created by

technology.

The building occupied

by Tate Modern originally

contained the Bankside 

power station and was

designed by Sir Gilbert 

Scott. At the peak of its

output Bankside power

station used 67 tons of

fuel-oil per hour to 

generate 300 MW of

electricity. Thermonuclear

fusion generates 

approximately one million

times as much energy as

chemical combustion.

Sunlight produced by

thermonuclear fusion in

our sun is the source of

energy for all life on Earth.

Sir Gilbert Scott was also

the architect for Liverpool

Anglican Cathedral.

The 21st century will bring to the foreground all the contradictory ideas of nature. Responses to environmental problems will be influenced by culturally determined images of nature from literature and landscape art. Genetically engineering plants to use more carbon dioxide from the air, the possibility of sequestering the gas underground, restoration of carbon sinks and the rewilding of inefficient farmland by intensification of agriculture elsewhere are as much aesthetic questions as ecological ones. The dividing line between nature and technology will be scrutinised. New forms of art are needed to comprehend the shape of the world we are creating, a cultural response that cannot be considered only in scientific terms. 

1) Laporte, Paul M. "Cubism and Science." The Journal of aesthetics and art criticism, 1949, Vol.7 (3), p.243-256

(2) https://www.nature.com/nature/history-of-nature

(3) Cahill, H, and Federal Art Project. New Horizons in American Art.  New York: Published for the M.O M.A. reprinted by Arno, 1969.

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