Week 4 Readings

A dream of England: Wastes and boundaries- John Taylor:

Gazing at waste:

• ·        Promotional photographs recall an ideal world of beauty, in which everything remains young, whole and symmetrical.
• ·        We are educated not to notice wastelands, tourist routinely avoid them- searching beyond them for ‘real’ landscape.
• ·        The assured gaze is the appropriate way of looking at the calming landscape, whereas the glance is suitable for land that stands in a kind of negative relation to landscape- in the way that tourists will pass by wasteland as accidental.
• ·        The gaze is also used to contemplate wasteland because it is so prolonged and serious. Age and decay suited photographs. ‘ a cultural critique on the mutability of earthly things is to over-interpret them’ (Wolfgang Kemp 1990: 118).
• ·        Dreary landscapes were a popular background among painters in Britiain from 1870 and continues into contemporary times, though now it is concerned with the degradation of the environment by pollution.

The gender of landscape looking:

• ·        Norman Bryson argues that gazing and glancing are seprate activities. The glance is a ‘sideways look, whose attention is elsewhere’. The gaze is not a disengaged, objective look ‘prolonged contemplative look’.
• ·        Landscape is commonly conceived to be the body of a woman.
• ·        Susan Trangmar ‘Untitled Landscapes’ turns her back on the camera, sometimes filling the frame and obscuring the view. This is a way to deny the landscape image as an open accessible view.  The position of woman is the agency which both foreground and denies conventional ways of appearing in photographs and calls into question the expectation of viewers.
• ·        The association of women with nature and men with culture has been understoof as a heirarchial dichotomy, with men as usual occupying the priledged side.

The rhetoric of violence:

• De Lauretis argues that the meaning of a certain representation of violence depends on the depiction of the gender of the violated object. The perpetrators of violence are understood to be masculine while, the victims are perceived to be female. The masculine subject is the subject of culture and of any social act. Nature is defined as feminine.

The city in photography- Graham Clarke:

• ·        Photography established itself in a period when the growth of the city and industry had already provoked a formidable literature and art in response to the increasing influence of urban areas, especially such cities as London, Paris and New York.
• ·        A panoramic view suggests control and possession by the eye. The eye imagines that it dominates a dense and disparate space whilst keeping the city at a distance.
• ·        The camera has followed the cities central icons.
• ·        Streel level both engages with the clutter of the city, its chaos and process and also celebrates its multiplicity, difference and danger.
• ·        ‘looked out on to a London when it was still and quiet’ panoramic
• ·        Street invited disunity and involves a different sense of space and a different relationship on the part of the eye of the photographer.