Reclaiming the Landscape

Abstract

Landmark: The Fields of Photography Somerset House London, UK March 14-April 28, 2013 On April 17, 2013, dozens of ex-miners gathered at Easington Colliery Club in County Durham in the north of England to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of their pit's closure. It just so happened that this anniversary fell on the same day as the funeral of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the politician whose neoliberal policies and dismantling of the industrial unions during her term of office in the 1980s contributed to the decline of the coal industry in areas such as this, one of the worst affected in the country, and still struggling with high unemployment. Due to this twist of fate, the commemorative event turned into a celebration, and the community voiced their continuing anger and betrayal at being abandoned, apparently left to rot. A couple of days later, I visited Landmark: The Fields of Photography, the latest photography show at London's Somerset House. My perspective on its central themes was perhaps skewed by the media's reporting of the aftermath of Thatcher's death, as old footage and new interviews brought back into public consciousness the still-devastating impact of Britain's deindustrialization on the country's social landscape. It was with this in mind that I encountered the exhibition's focus on the negative impact of industrialization on the environment. Organized around a set of conceptual keywords--from the sublime and the pastoral; to scar datum control hallucination, and reverie--the wide-ranging subjects and approaches seemed only loosely connected by a recognition of humanity's impact on the environment, for better or for worse. It was usually for worse. In his curatorial statement, William A. Ewing pointed out that the genre's lasting appeal is due to our experience of living on a fragile planet whose ecosystem is in trouble. Thus it was the environmental legacies of profit-driven industrial and agricultural practices, climate change, desertification, rising water levels, and the depletion of natural resources that were foregrounded in the idea of landscape defined here. As a genre, Ewing suggests, landscape photography is hard to pin down, potentially encompassing almost any- and everything. And that problem was evident in this show's scope and scale, with even the press release describing it as a sweeping overview. Including 130 photographs produced by an international body of more than seventy photographers, the take-home message was unclear. Perhaps it was the show's attempt to expose both the harsh realities of mankind's impact on an ever-changing environment, as well the enduring and stunning beauty of a landscape that won't be beaten into submission, that made it problematic. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Beginning with a room dedicated to the awe-inspiring majesty of the sublime, the show opened on a high note. Faced at once with the crystalline translucency of Olaf Otto Becker's frozen seascape Ilulissat Icefjord 5, 07/2003 69[degrees]11'59 N, 51[degrees]08'08 W, from the series Broken Line (2003), the work's impossible scale was offset by the calming horizon of Hiroshi Sugimoto's Baltic Sea, Rugen (1996), and the abstracted detail of Susan Derges's moonlit photogram Shoreline 4.9 (1997). Together, while recalling landscape photography's origins in the painting it replaced, each example presented a fresh take on the genre's historical associations. Next door, the pastoral section was altogether more comforting. Harry Cory Wright's The English Channel and Land's End, from the 2010 series Place in Mind, presented a more picturesque view of the land, while the domestic scale of the hedgerows of the English countryside was revealed in Simon Roberts's South Downs Way, West Sussex from the 2007 series We English. Responding to a national photographic heritage, the bucolic experience was situated within the British visual tradition. …