Between Views: The Claude Glass and Landscape Today

Abstract

A mirror allows us to see the impossible, both in the immediacy of the everyday and the conceptual discourse surrounding art and experience. The simplest expression of this impossibility is perhaps that with a mirror we can see ourselves and what is behind us, beyond our direct looking, all at once. More profoundly, the mirror is at the conceptual centre of the history of Western art and the paradoxes of representation. In the medium and discipline of photography, it has been particularly active in both its prosaic and symbolic roles. In eighteenth-century Britain, a particular type of compact mirror was used by artists and tourists to view and imaginatively shape the landscape into picturesque talking points: the Claude glass. This was such a popular activity that guidebooks advised of sites where the best views of outstanding landscapes were to be seen with the aid of the glass. While the Claude glass is routinely cited in tracing the prehistory of photography and widely referred to in art history, landscape theory, colonial studies, literature studies, and more, it has had limited serious consideration and is generally understood as an obsolete optical tool. This research argues that there is more to be learnt from the Claude glass. The way of seeing and shaping landscape enabled by the device has numerous contemporary parallels, including its instant picture-making ability and the use of optical technology to manipulate the appearance of landscape to conform with the fashions of the day. This project argues that a re-evaluation and expanded understanding of the Claude glass is useful in comprehending current trends in photography and its technology that allows users to filter their view and share their algorithmically coded pictures. These trends are also better understood through the embodied model of the Claude glass rather than the disembodied camera obscura. To this end, the creative output of my doctorial research investigates the photographic object through themes of cultural and natural tourism, and the blending of the fictive and the real in landscape depiction. These works reference the Claude glass physically and conceptually in order to interrogate the way of seeing offered by this historical optical instrument and how that can inform contemporary landscape photography. Imagery was captured on location locally and during travel to historically linked locations in Tasmania and Scotland, then manipulated and constructed in the studio. A variety of photographic objects have been made using different production techniques and displayed through the course of the research. The works are not meant to merely recreate the object itself but to introduce new questions around the capabilities and limitations of contemporary imaging technology by demonstrating how simple artistic interventions such as shapes, collage and reflection shift our engagement with landscape. These relationships are reanimated and made more visible by recourse to the Claude glass, which has allowed me to consider the differences between veracity and truth in photographic production and how certain imagined realities around landscape representation become true only through photographic production.