There is the heart and the mind, the Puritan idea is that the mind must be master. I think the heart should be master and the mind should be the tool and servant of the heart. The man who wants to produce art must have the emotional side first, and this must be reinforced by the practical. ~Robert Henri

Photography is a technology based medium produced by a technological society with a reason-focused worldview. It contains two temptations: decoration and propaganda. However, I propose an attitude that promotes expression. You may or may not agree with me in the end, but if you consider the relationship between your thoughts, values, and attitudes toward photography you may gain something.

What is your relationship with your photographic material?

The Scottish Philosopher John Macmurry struggled with a similar question: what is our relationship with life? As a consequence, he offered a Philosophy of the Personal that I believe offers insights for photographers.

His most fundamental claim is that we should reject “I think” and substitute “I do.” If the “Self” is the “Mind” then it must be a substance or organism. If instead the “Self” is an “Agent” then it is personal and only exists in dynamic relation with the “Other.”.

This is radical when compared to typical Western philosophical tradition and the modern emphasis on rational choice, process oriented business, and law based society; all which operate like machines.

Agency and relationship are the basis of the “Personal,” including our relationship with nature. “I think” is a special case of action where the “Action” is only mental. Most of the time, we are acting with the support of thinking.

The neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist researches the role that the left and right brain hemispheres play, and demonstrates a more complicated relationship between an intuitive function and an analytical function that are highly integrated.

The artist, the philosopher, and the scientist all reach similar conclusions: the modern dualism of the Cogito misrepresents the complexity of humans.

Of course, the poet also has an opinion:

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

We think by feeling and doing. The lowly worm climbs because nature has a thing to do. All these speak to action, feeling, and intuition. The certainty of the thinking mind is nowhere present in the paradox of living.

What the philosophy of Macmurry brings to the table is a framework with three types of the “Personal:” Science, Art, and Religion, clarifying the nature of Art and the relationship it implies.

Science considers relationships between “things:” abstraction, the world of cause and effect, prediction, and control. Science produces “knowledge about.”

Art is a relation between an “I” and an “Other:” a concrete other; imagine standing before a specific tree in friendship, with a giving and receiving. Art produces “knowledge of.”

Religion is a relation between people, which I will neglect. My interest is Art and how it is different from Science and what a personal relationship based art means for photography.

Personal Photography finds The Waking by rejecting the modern focus on thinking, analysing, knowing about, and instead focusing on doing, feeling, intuiting: a deep, intimate knowing of, a closeness.

(Pre)-Visualization

For me this is the elephant in the room because it is highly promoted in some photographic circles, but it does not work for me. I don’t mean it can’t produce a good image, I mean I hate doing it and it led me to a search for an art philosophy that could explain what I actually enjoy doing.

My relationship with the landscape and nature was well established long before I had a camera. I grew up outdoors: cycling, hiking, fishing, and backpacking. Sitting still and just looking was something one did when taking a break, eating lunch, or waiting for the sun to go down so you can sleep.

Once I took a camera into the woods, I had a dilemma: how am I going to spend so much time looking and imagining some phantom image that will appear on a computer screen indoors next week, when all I want to do is move and explore?

Relationship First

My way out of this closet was to decide: I must ignore all the current advice about how to make good landscape images and put my relationship with the landscape first. I needed to be myself. Macmurry provided the assurance that I was not crazy and granted permission to ignore the gurus. Even though it might seem silly for a grown man to need these crutches, rejecting advice of well known peers is not always easy.

But now what? How do I take this longing for relationship and turn it into a photograph?

The Impersonal and Antipersonal

Before diving deeper into what a relationship oriented (personal) photography (art) implies, I want to put the “Personal” into a larger context than Macmurray.

Macmurry made a distinction between society and community, which gave me a clue for describing this larger context. Society is the mass version of community, impersonal and based on rules rather than community based on love. Community is the purest form of Religion, but it cannot scale to the size of nations. Art and Science also have Impersonal forms. The Antipersonal form completes the map.

My conceptional model is as follows: Economy (Science), Decoration (Art), Society (Religion) are the impersonal forms; Knowledge (Science), Expression (Art), Community (Religion) are the personal forms; Exploitation (Science), Propaganda (Art), Tribalism (Religion) are the antipersonal, parasitic, or maladaptive forms.

Personal Art, or photography in the present case, sits between decoration/propaganda and knowledge/community. If photography avoids the impersonal and antipersonal it must avoid decoration and propaganda as well as avoid economy, society, exploitation, and tribalism. However, it may rely on knowledge and community for help.

This is an idealized model, so I don’t want to imply it is the only valid approach to photography nor that the box contents contain perfect words. My only claim is that I find this a useful model for understanding and guiding my approach, which aims for Expression.

The model puts Expression into a context for you to explore what it entails by exclusion. For Expression itself, I turn to phenomenology and surrealism for insight.

Phenomenology

We need to address another elephant in the room, that is our worldview, our culture, our knowledge, that baggage we carry around in our heads that affects how we see and pulls us away from Expression.

From the perspective of the Personal Art relationship, the relation between you and nature, baggage is a barrier to Expression. Who has not been in a love relationship with another person and found their family beliefs about roles, or their church’s teaching about authority, or their culture’s current beliefs about how to be together, have gotten in the way? Do we not carry a whole suitcase of cultural into the woods?

No ideas but in things. ~William Carlos Williams

Phenomenology suggests we can give all this stuff the boot and see what is really there. By extension, we can act on what is “actually there” and we can personally relate to what is ‘actually there.” This implies our personal relationship with the landscape and nature is not a threesome. (For “actual,” think Critical Realism)

Henri Bortoft’s “The Wholeness of Nature” is an entry point to a major promoter of phenomenology.

Goethe did not examine the phenomenon intellectually, but rather tried to visualize the phenomenon in his mind in a sensory way—by the process which he called “exact sensorial imagination” (exakte sinnliche Phantasie). Goethe’s way of thinking is concrete, not abstract, and can be described as one of dwelling in the phenomenon

Macmurry describes the art relation as “I” and “Other,” where the “Other” is concrete: that rock, not all rocks, this tree, not trees in general. This sounds similar to Bortoft and Goethe. Theory, language, the analytical, are all made secondary or deemphasized. Bortoft says:

Working with mental images activates a different mode of consciousness which is holistic and intuitive.

He states that our mode of consciousness is either analytical or intuitive. (This sounds a lot like left/right hemispheres described by McGilchrist.) He continues:

The purpose is to develop an organ of perception which can deepen our contact with the phenomenon in a way that is impossible by simply having thoughts about it and working over it with the intellectual mind.

This intuitive mode of consciousness is not scientific and is the essence of art and photography. However, we live in a society that on a good day glorifies science and economy, and on a bad day drifts into exploitation. We can also easily drift into decoration and other forms of commercial art or into propaganda and political art. These may be legitimate forms of photography, but I don’t consider them fully expressive because the artifact becomes an “end” in itself.

Surrealism

The intent of phenomenology goes beyond Macmurray in the sense that one is so engrossed in the other that not only does the analytical mode become inactive, the self might very well efface. What might surrealism contribute to understanding Expression?

André Breton wanted to neuter the “critical faculties:”

...a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought.

Breton was influenced by Freud and the trauma of WWI. He was promoting expression of the subconscious disconnected from external reality. However, Yvan Goll looked for grounding:

Reality is the basis of all great things. Without it no life, no substance. The reality is the ground under our feet and the sky on top of the head...Everything the artist creates has its starting point in nature...This transposition of reality into a higher (artistic) plane constitutes Surrealism.

Goll is grounded in experience but wants to transpose reality into something else. Breton focuses on the interior self and Goll focuses on the transcendent other. Breton releases hidden forces, Goll extends reality. Both suppress the critical facility, but neither focus on relationship as primary. These poles are found today in various ideas such as “abstract images representing emotion” or images with a “what else” it is.

What the “Personal” implies is an active relationship based on intuition, not the subconscious or unconscious, not dreams, not analytical thinking, not objective reality.

The photograph is a product of relationship, not the self alone, not the other alone, a relationship between a self and an other, rooted in the action of the photographer. constitutes Surrealism.

My Approach to Personal Photography

I don’t want propose a universal field approach; I will simply describe my practice and how I conceptualize my non-conceptual method. If you buy into the concepts and model I have presented, you will have to derive your own practice from them.

The key element of my process is walking, whether in a park or town, the woods, backpacking, etc. I do not drive somewhere and photograph from the road. I do not setup a tripod at a planned location and wait for sunrise or sunset. My planning goes no further than which canyon I chose to wander in and what kind of weather and season seems interesting.

Walking breaks down my analytical thinking mode, especially when hiking, when getting tired, especially in bad weather, and supremely out in nature. As I walk, because I have been a hiker for fifty years, I can allow my attention to drift off the trail and into the landscape in an intuitive mode without tripping and falling. I simply keep walking and keep looking until some feeling grabs my attention.

Then I stop and “actively” contemplate. Does the feeling persist? What if I move left/right, does the feeling increase? I call this feeling “resonance” because the feeling comes from the relationship I have with what is before me. Resonance occurs between me and other, it is not me alone, as if what I behold is remote.

If the resonance is strong, only then do I remove my pack and take out my camera. I might pack the camera up, walk 10 meters only to stop and take it out again. I do not walk with the camera in hand because it is a temptation to shoot too soon.

Once the camera is out, I start with a 70-200mm zoom most of the time. I zoom in/out, move the camera up/down/left/right, twiddle exposure and depth of field. Maybe make some test shots. I am sensing resonance as I move around seeking for the peak.

At peak I make the final capture.

If the resonance dissipates I pack up and continue walking. If I start analyzing, I put the camera away. When I don’t move on, I usually have frustration or poor results.

Note: I am not composing. I am not using rules. I only work by intuition and feeling.

My digital darkroom process follows the same principles of seeking resonance. I cannot walk and process, so I try to get into a flow state by removing all distractions. If I lose flow, I put the computer down and come back later. Working outside flow also produces frustration or poor results.

Pulling Personal Photography All Together

I will try to summarize with three points that are easy to remember:

• Intuition not Analysis
• Action not Visualization
• Resonance not Composition

Clearly, this is not a means to pleasing other people, it is not a means to win competitions, and certainly is not a means to profit. It is more like participation: an art life; a personal life in photography.

Expressions are a byproduct of personal relationships, not an end in themselves.

The idea that an artistic expression of harmony was an allegory for reinforcing the dominant social foundations is still a compelling argument. Landscape art has long been associated with power and order…. However, at this moment of environmental crisis, creating lyrically evocative narratives that connect us to our landscape is an act of resistance. This way of perceiving the natural world has also become a personal way of building a playful relationship with the landscape that addresses memory, nostalgia, history, landscape, place, storytelling and the passing of time ~Simon Dent, in Shan Shui in Silva Emete¹

With film photography we photograph what we saw; with digital photography we see what we have captured without really having looked, nor really been able or even wanted to composev~André Rouille, Le Photo-Numérique: Une Force Néo-Liberale, 2020, p.47

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot ~Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi, 1970

As I write this, I am rapidly approaching 75 years old and thinking that is probably a good point at which to stop producing articles for On Landscape before some elements of old fogeyism start to creep in (and, be warned, this may already be evident in what follows)². So, this article will be my 30th and last contribution and consequently provides an opportunity for reflection. When I wrote my very first article (some 8 years ago now) on The Science and Art of Hydrology³, it was an initial attempt to try to convey (and help to understand myself) what lay behind the types of landscape images that I was producing, particularly, as an academic hydrologist, those of water. This “trying to understand” has been a recurrent theme in articles since, including exploring some of the debates on photographic philosophies.

Here, I would like to pick up on one of those themes, expressed by Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) back in pre-digital days, about how, as photographers, we are all (to a greater or lesser extent) functionaries in the development of the photographic industry as part of the capitalist technological industrial complex⁴.

Because it has been suggested elsewhere that the technological advances in the last 200 years have far outstripped the capacity for human evolutionary adaptation and that this has resulted in a modernist separation of people from nature, both in the developed world and increasingly elsewhere. At its most basic, the technological developments that have provided shelter and comfort (for most), access to travel (for many), and fast communications and information/disinformation (for nearly all, in the West at least) have also served to create barriers between people and the landscape⁵. Those developments have meant that we are now living unsustainably on this earth and, in the majority, do not care enough about the exploitation of resources and resulting changing climate (present readers excepted, of course). Or rather that some of us might care, but are not willing enough to make sufficient major changes to our lifestyle to make it more sustainable – and that can often include our photographic practice.

This is, of course, despite the evidence that being out in “nature” is good for us both physically and mentally⁶. That benefit will depend on the nature and landscapes that are accessible to us, but even urban green spaces have been shown to have important positive impacts (while the negative impacts of exclusion from nature, such as during the Covid lockdowns, are also well recorded). In Switzerland, where I spend much of my time now, nature is readily accessible through good public transport systems and a network of well-marked trails for walking. But even in the Swiss landscape, the negative impacts of technological advances are all too evident when walking past the infrastructure associated with the ski industry, the surface damage resulting from ski runs and access roads, ways of storing water for use in snow canons, valleys drowned by dams for hydroelectric power generation (providing renewable energy of course) and fields disappearing under construction sites. Observing the increasingly rapid retreat of glaciers, accelerated by climate warming, is particularly sad⁷. That does provide opportunities for some images of waterfalls sustained by glacial melt throughout the summer, but many smaller glaciers will soon be lost completely so even that will not last in the longer term.

On the other hand, technological advances have meant that we have more scientific understanding of nature and landscape. Meteorological, hydrological, geological, pedological and ecological knowledge has been driven by, and also required by, advances in technology in an analogous way that we, as photographers, have driven and served (by buying new gear) the developments in camera technology, as Vilém Flusser pointed out more than 40 years ago. That scientific knowledge means that we could have a more harmonious and sustainable existence on this earth if there were not so many barriers to evolving to doing so.

Traditional pre-technological societies did not have such barriers. They were much more intimately embedded in the landscape, even if more vulnerable to natural disasters. Such societies had to know their landscapes intimately to survive.

Their experience would, for example, have generally avoided settlements in flood risk or avalanche areas as a result of that vulnerability - something that is still evident in traditional patterns of settlement, but not always taken into account in modern planning of new developments in areas at risk⁸.

But how does this relate to what we do as photographers?

It is evident that there has been dramatic progress in digital sensors over a short period of time, a good breeding ground for GAS and upgrading of kit, even if we do not really need the latest resolution and generation. The result, especially as a result of advances in mobile phones, has been a plethora of images, with resolutions that are way beyond what is necessary for anything that most of us will display electronically or print in hard copy form. It is currently estimated that some 61400 images are taken every second and that nearly two trillion will have been generated in 2024⁹. Storing these images, both locally or in the cloud, requires resources of both hardware and energy that is adding to climate change. Sharing those images across the internet, requires more hardware and energy, that is adding more to climate change. The numbers continue to grow, despite our awareness of climate change and its potential impacts (and there are, of course, many other ways in which we as photographers contribute to CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions¹⁰).

It can also be argued that part of the problem is that the camera itself puts another hardware barrier between us and the landscape. Looking through the viewfinder, we do not see a living landscape, we see a potential composition. We “take” images from the landscape in a way that is conceptually a form of exploiting the natural resource. Normally, that might have only a minimal impact (depending on how far we have had to travel to be there) but there are also some particularly vulnerable sites made popular though Instagram and YouTube where selfish or careless photographers - or just the sheer numbers of photographers - are damaging the site to get the shot or even just to take a selfie with the landscape as background¹¹. Our adaptation to the technology is greater than our adaptation to the threats to the landscape and to life within it. In part that is because we are rewarded by our use of the technology - in having a record of our lives, or images that we can share with others, exhibit or put in a book.

With digital this has become even easier, because we can immediately review the images we take. We are encouraged by the technology to make ever more use of the technology. The numbers of images continue to grow and grow, encouraged by the apparent low cost of digital images, but with the all-but-hidden cost of using more and more resources (and the impact of AI generated images is only just starting to be felt)¹². So now, on the one side we are overwhelmed by images of landscape beauty, and on the other we are overwhelmed by images of landscape loss and destruction (and the impacts of war and famine). We allow both to coexist, discordantly, in our minds and, sometimes, our practice spans both.

It is recognised that human evolution and adaptation is shaped by culture and technology much more rapidly than can occur by genetic changes.

Culture provides a second, and extraordinarily powerful, way of evolving. Genes encode information about phenotypic solutions to problems that organisms encountered in the past, and that information is transmitted only from parents to offspring. By contrast, cultural information—knowledge, technology, ideas and preferences—can be disseminated broadly, and the information can accumulate within a single generation ~Richard Lenski, 2016¹³

Indeed, it has been argued that humans have put limits on the process of natural selection by having the technology to ensure that nearly all children survive to adulthood.

There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Every thing we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain ~Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), 2000¹⁴

So what needs to evolve culturally to deal with this technological overload and failure of sustainability?

Is it possible to bring some harmony to this cacophonous cascade of discords? Harmony has long been taught as one of the fundamental principles of art (the others commonly cited being balance, emphasis, movement, proportion, rhythm, unity and variety). Harmony in this sense means having a good balance of elements of colour, value, shape and textures in an image to produce an effect of wholeness. There are many articles online about harmony in photography, for example on how to use the colour wheel and complementary colours in composing an image (or, less happily, in how to modify colours in post-processing for greater harmony and impact)¹⁵. But harmony (as well as its musical connotations) also has the wider definition of living peacefully with one another, or of living in harmony with nature.

It is naïve, of course, to suggest that pre-technological societies lived in harmony with nature. They also exploited nature for survival (and in some parts of the world still do) and were affected by natural disasters of floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.

Modern human society has only evolved to become enormously more effective in exploiting nature to create the Anthropocene and its impacts, including climate change and the ongoing major extinction event. But many traditional societies also created myths about living harmoniously with nature, and we know from ethnological studies of surviving societies that these included both origin myths and myths that would often emphasise sustainability and living with the spirit (or spirits) of natural elements of the landscape. Such myths, based on experience, were a way of creating sustainability for their society in the longer term. There are modern variants of myths, too, of course, such as in the philosophy of “Deep Ecology”, a name generally held to be coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (1912-2009)¹⁶, though he cited Rachel Carson (1907-1964) and her 1962 book Silent Spring as an important precursor.

In fact, we are not short of philosophical advice about achieving harmony, from Confucianism and Taoism in ancient China; the Vedic philosophy of ancient India; Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics in ancient Greece; Marcus Aurelius in ancient Rome; to Leibniz, Schiller, Santayana and Naess in more modern times¹⁷. There was even a 2010 report by the Director of the United Nations that linked the goals of sustainable development to living in harmony with nature¹⁸.

Dwell on thoughts that are in harmony with nature and her laws, and act accordingly. Don’t let yourself be pulled off course by the insults or injuries of others. Let them go their way and you go yours, continuing on the path of reason. This is not selfish or antisocial on your part—far from it. Your individual reason is not opposed to the common good, but in harmony with it.” ~Marcus Aurelius, 121-180 BCE

While human evolution has changed little with the advent of industrial technology, clearly societal evolution and the nature of thought have changed dramatically in the last two centuries since the Enlightenment and its myth of understanding and controlling nature that drove the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. While we still create myths of sustainability today, underpinned by idealism as well as science¹⁹, modern society is largely based on exploitation of both nature and people. The ideals and myths of living in harmony with nature have been largely lost. If we think about images in this way, then those that reveal the beauty of landscape might be considered as attempts at harmony; while those that represent loss and destruction are recording the ways we are failing to live in harmony with nature. Making and presenting either type of image can be considered as a political act (even if we rarely think about it in such terms), but the cases where the such images have had real political impact appear to be few.

Those few celebrated cases do, however, include the role of the images of Carleton Watkins in the designation of the Yosemite Valley as the first National Park in the US in 1864; the images of Ansel Adams (1902-1984) in the formation of the Kings Canyon National Park by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940; the images of Horace Kephert (1862-1931) and George Masa (1885-1933) that influenced the designation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934¹⁹; the Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend image of Peter Dombrovskis (1945-1996) in saving the Franklin River in Tasmania from hydroelectric power development in the 1980s²¹; and the Colorado photographer John Fielder (1950-2023) whose work inspired the Colorado Wilderness act that created 36 wilderness areas in the state²². But the images of Eliot Porter in The Place No One Knew²³were too late to save the wonders of Glen Canyon from inundation under Lake Powell (though recent long term droughts, thought to be exacerbated by climate change, have allowed some of the side canyons to be visited again).

While Walter Niedermayr’s striking images of the Alps, including skiers and ski infrastructure, are also political in this sense of raising awareness, they have not resulted in any constraints on development. Martin Parr’s Small World images have not had led to any mitigation of the overtourism that is producing demonstrations and active resistance in places such as Barcelona, Venice, Mallorca, Bali, Santorini, and even rural Galicia²⁴. Some of the aerial images of the destruction caused by mining and tailings by Edward Burtynsky even give the impression of abstract beauty, and certainly have not had any impact on the sustainability of mining practices²⁵.

All the images of retreating glaciers, both by photographer artists, scientists and satellites have had little impact on national policies, even in Switzerland and other countries being significantly affected (some 10% of glacier volume in Switzerland has been lost in the last 2 years²⁶). All the artistic images of lakes and rivers in Britain have failed to stop the illegal releases of untreated sewage that is having such an impact on the water quality and ecology. Even images of the sewage releases or resulting eutrophic algal blooms and all the scientific data that has been collected, including by citizen scientists, and public demonstrations have not yet had any significant impact on the practices of the water industry or policy in government²⁷ (but we should hope that will not last). All the wonderful images of the amazingly skilled and dedicated wildlife photographers have done little to halt the decline in numbers of birds and animals as we live out the 6th mass extinction²⁸.

Indeed, it can seem that images reflecting the beauty of nature only serve to suggest that the degradation is not so serious. Perhaps the very fact that image numbers continue to grow and grow only serves to minimise such political impacts. The sheer numbers have only meant that images will be less effective than 80 or 100 years ago. Already as individual landscape photographers, we tend to have an overload problem with the images we take ourselves, since although we will not consider them all to be of the highest quality it is still difficult to delete all the others since our opinions might well change in a few months or years (…though again that storage really does have a real cost in resources and energy, even if our travel to get to the places we photograph might dominate any other photography related energy consumption or CO2 emissions). That is not to say, however, that the hope for political impact, has died out. Richard Sharum, talking about his recent book Spina Americana, stated:

It reflects my general philosophy towards photography as an anvil for activism, as well as my opening argument for a new direction in the hope for a more collective and persistent empathy.²⁹

I suspect that most readers of On Landscape will lean towards harmony with nature in ways that reflect our own emotional responses. Many will be prepared to argue that in attempting to show how beautiful nature can be, we strengthen the case that is worth preserving. That has certainly been the foundation for much of my own work. As such, although we do “take” our images from nature, we also want them to be a fairly faithful realisation of the real scene. We would like to hope that the image has some harmony with the viewed reality, our felt experience of being there, and what that reality might mean to us in a time of change.

This was precisely the goal, or mission, of film photographers: to fix a centre to the chaos of the world, to subject it to a geometric order and extract a truth by eliminating, cutting out, purifying until we end up with an intentionally constructed shot, captured at a “decisive moment” … At the opposite end of the spectrum are digital photos: too quickly taken, too fleeting, often too banal; they undermine the viewer's desire for the aesthetic experience of contemplation … The quest for truth has been transformed into a consumption of fictions ~André Rouille, Le Photo-Numérique: Une Force Néo-Liberale, 2020, p98/89/98

Many landscape photographers have written about the value (be that physical, psychological or spiritual) of being out and about in the landscape, over and above any images that we might bring back from any of our excursions. It does not even need any camera to be involved, which brings me back to my favourite photographic quotation, much cited in On Landscape³⁰ and elsewhere, of Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) in the Los Angeles Times of 13th August 1978, that “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” The advantage of going for a walk with a camera is that it really concentrates the mind on looking, in particular in seeing some of the detail of what is there (and perhaps then create a composition)³¹.

To my mind, that increases the potential for feeling some harmony with the landscape, but with the danger that it might be only at a superficial level (the image is more important than the reality), in part because of that technological barrier created by the viewfinder again.

And, returning to Vilém Flusser, there is always the challenge of avoiding redundant images. It is ever more the case that everything has been done before, that every new image is in some sense redundant, another version of the same. It might be our own version of what has been done before, with a degree of personal satisfaction of capturing the shot, but might there not be more interesting ways of trying to avoid redundancy? One way that might be more harmonious could be to explore the locally unique surroundings in preference to those highly photographed places that require long distance travel and that have been seen so often before. There might then be more satisfaction in the hunt to find something more original, more personal, than going somewhere far away to only produce redundant images you will already have seen. As David Ward put it:

It's important to me that I am making an enquiry about my surroundings in my images, rather than imposing a conclusion. I am not seeking to make definitive statements because I don't know the answers. The questions vary enormously from image to image; I might be asking about the colour of light or what is it that is beautiful about moving water or why I find that arrangement of elements interesting or musing on the ecology of a particular place.” ~David Ward in Nobody Expects the Inquisition³²

This implies that we need to evolve a deeper, more thoughtful, approach to the landscape. Many landscape photographers are there already, of course, including the readership of On Landscape and those photographers following the 7 Nature First principles³³ to minimise impact and to leave no trace of our passing in making our images (and ideally in the manner of our getting there too). As with the Swiss glaciers, seeking harmony has to represent more than recording their current beauty in the process of disappearing³⁴. It should involve a consideration of what might be required to preserve that beauty in the long term, to ensure that that our relationship with the landscape might be sustainable in this technologically dominated world. But is then the viewfinder a barrier to thinking in that way and acting according? I think it can be. I think it has been in my photographic life in the past which has not always been so thoughtful about the impacts we have, even though as far back as I can remember I have cared about the landscape³⁵. We have to think, therefore, outside the box, whether it is in hand or sitting on the tripod! To achieve some degree of harmony, both as one of the fundamental principles of art, and in the sense of our reflecting our own authentic feelings about a place or element of the landscape.

The images that give us the most satisfaction are surely harmonious in this way and might then also induce an emotional response in the viewer that the reality itself has value (and not only the image taken from it as an artifact to be collected and curated).

So in this, my last, article for On Landscape can I encourage all who might read this piece to evolve your thinking and practice towards a more ancient idea of harmony with nature, and consequently to be more thoughtful about your approach to the landscape and the sustainability of its beauty. That does require a philosophical stance, perhaps the personal philosophy of harmony as advocated by Arne Næss. What might that look like? It means thinking about harmony in the sense of sustainability in the long term, with the classic dilemma that sustainability implies policies at national and global scale and what we can do as individuals seems so miniscule. But if we do care, we should do what we can to live more sustainably; to think about our impacts on the landscape; to reflect nature (and not some artificial or augmented reality); and to reveal the wondrous details of nature that might otherwise be missed so as to encourage the recognition of their value.

You will, of course, appreciate that it really does not seem to be the way the world is going. There are more and more images that are simulacra or constructed reality rather than simulationsin the sense of Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)³⁶. But in terms of social evolution, education is important. Teach your children well, as the Graham Nash song says³⁷. Do we need to do more to educate our children about nature and landscape before it becomes something that most will only experience as virtual realities in games, as nature documentaries on screens (however wonderful), or as distant backgrounds in selfies³⁸? It is not as if we have not been aware of such change for a long time. If Vilém Flusser has not been widely read, even by photographers, in more popular culture Joni Mitchell was singing, as long ago as 1970:

“They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
…
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?” ³⁹

Current technologies create barriers to real experience in favour of experience filtered by the technology. The response to the technology in this case is currently evolving to put the self before the landscape. The rise of the selfie represents a form of disengagement with nature, encouraged by the technology in a way that is not sustainable, but it is also not a necessary consequence. We can evolve our practice to stay aware of what is needed for sustainability and of harmony with the landscape. To cite Brad Carr:

The camera is a vehicle that can carry us towards a place of deep healing, resulting in self-acceptance, and, therefore, acceptance of others. Nature, I believe, is the portal through which we now need to travel if we wish to reverse the damage of the past and co-create a more peaceful, harmonious and loving world to exist in tomorrow.⁴⁰”

That then is my two-penn’orth. I will stop now and leave you just with a few final images of some new visual haiku, taken from a second volume The River as Haiku⁴¹. These have been taken with harmony in mind, mostly on walking trips from our front door or reached by public transport. I hope you will be able to find projects of your own that allow you to do the same.

References

1. https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2023/10/shan-shui-in-silva-elmete
2. An old fogey may derive from the Scots foggie, fogie (noun) from foggie (“covered with moss or lichen; mossy”, adj) to suggest a dull person (especially an older man) who is behind the times, holding antiquated, over-conservative views. The OED's earliest evidence for old fogey is from 1785, in a dictionary by Francis Grose, antiquary.
3. In Issue 135, https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2017/04/the-science-and-art-of-hydrology/
4. See https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2020/06/landscape-and-the-philosophers-of-photography/
5. The writings of the iconoclast philosopher Ivan Illich (1926-2002), active in the 1960s and 70s, are worth exploring in this respect. It was he who, in his book Tools for Conviviality, suggested that the ideal form of transport was the bicycle as a compromise between going further and spending more time travelling. Anything faster and it would necessarily result in more time spent travelling. The proof of this is all the wasted hours spent in airports by many people since. His books on Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis are also worth reading.
6. See, for example, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/04/better-than-medication-prescribing-nature-works-project-shows
7. See https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2021/05/loss-in-the-landscape/ in Issue 231
8. See, for example, Cost–benefit analysis of flood-zoning policies: A review of current practice at
   https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wat2.1387 (open access). In Switzerland, the risks are also getting greater as seen recently in the failure of the Birch glacier and consequent rock avalanche that buried most of the village of Blatten. This type of risk is increasing as a result of the loss of permafrost in the mountain soils.
9. See https://photutorial.com/photos-statistics/. Note that Vilém Flusser already talked about the redundancy of most images well before the age of digital photography. A more recent discussion along similar lines is the book by André Rouille, La Photo Numerique – Une Force Néo-Libérale, L’Echappé: Paris, 2020 (in French). The arguments on the service of the digital image to capitalism are not always convincing but the discussion is interesting. André Rouille has published a number of books on photography and maintains the site www.paris-art.com. The only book of his I could find that has been translated into English was A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives with Jean-Claude Lemagny from 1987.
10. See the article by Joe Cornish in Issue no. 180 https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2019/03/a-question-of-responsibility/ and the discussions that followed.
11. See the article by Matt Payne on concealing locations, especially sensitive locations, https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2024/12/geotagging-gatekeeping-location-sharing/.
12. An academic paper on Life Cycle Analysis of film and digital imaging from 2006 suggested that:
    When all impacts were considered, no single imaging scenario was clearly "better" or "worse" than the others. Imaging scenarios that were advantaged in one impact category were often disadvantaged in others. This leads one to believe that a more complete picture (with more impact categories) would also not show an “absolute winner.” See https://www.mech.kuleuven.be/lce2006/070.pdf. However, their figures suggested that the lifetime number of images for a film camera at that time was only 4800, and actually more than a digital camera at 4500. The number of digital images produced per year since 2006 has expanded exponentially.
13. http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10711.pdf in Jonathan B. Losos and Richard E. Lenski (Eds), 2016, How Evolution Shapes our Lives, Princeton University Press, Chapter 1
14. Gould, S.J. 2000, The spice of life. Leader to Leader. 15:14–19., see also Templeton, AR., 2010, Has human evolution stopped? Rambam Maimonides Med J. 1(1):e0006.
15. E.g. https://iso.500px.com/color-theory-photographers-introduction-color-wheel/
16. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arne_Næss. Næss actually called his own ecological philosophy Ecosophy T where the T referred to Tvergastein, the mountain hut where he wrote most of his books. He encouraged people to develop their own personal philosophy.
    “By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. A philosophy as a kind of sofia (or) wisdom, is openly normative, it contains both norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs in our universe. Wisdom is policy wisdom, prescription, not only scientific description and prediction. The details of an ecosophy will show many variations due to significant differences concerning not only the 'facts' of pollution, resources, population, etc. but also value priorities.”
    Arne Næss, in Drengson, A. and Y. Inoue, eds. (1995) The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology. Berkeley: North Atlantic Publishers.p.8
17. Even our current King has been involved in a book titled Harmony: A new way of looking at the world, co-written with Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly in 2010 - https://kings-foundation.org/about-us/philosophy-of-harmony/
18. https://www.garn.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Harmony-with-Nature-United-Nations-Report.pdf. This followed General Assembly resolution 64/196 with the title Harmony with Nature
19. See for example the 2024 book Agrophilosophie: réconcilier nature et liberté of the French author and philosopher Gaspard Koenig, who proposes a system based on principles of recycling and individual responsibility for a sustainable soil, scaled up to local self-governing communities and to federal nation states with limited powers. He is not so convincing on how to persuade societies to move towards such a sustainable option unless some “miraculous political circumstances” appear somehow. See https://editions-observatoire.com/livre/Agrophilosophie/544
20. See, for example, https://smokieslife.org/product/george-masa/
21. See https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2017/06/morning-mist-rock-island-peter-dombrovskis/
22. See https://petapixel.com/2023/08/14/revered-landscape-photographer-john-fielder-dies-after-cancer-battle/
23. Eliot Porter, 1963, The Place No One Knew, 25th Anniversary Edition published by Peregrine Books in 1988 (ISBN 978-0-87905-249-2) and reprinted in 2000. Michael Engelhard, in his 2024 book No Walk in the Park, points out that Eliot Porter’s book should really have been called The Place Not Many White Men Knew, since there were many places in Glen Canyon that were sacred to the indigenous peoples. The history of the Glen Canyon Dam controversy is summarised in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Canyon_Dam.
24. As reported in https://www.euronews.com/travel/2024/09/02/paradise-ruined-why-spanish-locals-fed-up-with-overtourism-are-blocking-zebra-crossing
25. https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs
26. See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/swiss-glaciers-lose-tenth-volume-in-two-years-climate-crisis#:~:text=Swiss%20glaciers%20have%20lost%2010,have%20caused%20the%20accelerating%20melts. Interestingly, just about the only landscape photographs shown at the recent biennial Images Vevey exhibitions in Switzerland were two of the Aletsch Glacier by Andreas Gursky, the first made in 1993, the second in 2023 (see https://www.images.ch/archives/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2024/09/CP_GURSKY_IMAGES-VEVEY_04092024.pdf in French).
27. E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/03/thousands-protesters-march-for-clean-water-london-sewage-pollution in November 2024. It has been suggested that the private Water Companies have paid out more in dividends to shareholders than has been invested in environmental improvements, and in the case of Thames Water, to bring it to the point of bankruptcy while still releasing more raw sewage and with limited action to reduce the enormous losses of treated water from its pipe network. At the time of writing, there is news that water bills will rise to fund improvements, but without any indication that returns to shareholders will be reduced.
28. https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-is-the-sixth-mass-extinction-and-what-can-we-do-about-it. It seems that this is occurring even in the remotest parts of the Amazon forests, see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/30/birds-dying-pristine-amazon-climate-crisis-aoe
29. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2025/jan/23/this-is-not-flyover-country-a-journey-down-americas-spine-in-pictures
30. E.g. in https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2021/09/the-pleasure-of-the-search-for-the-unexpected/ and https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2011/07/featured-photographer-michela-griffith/
31. See my previous article on walking in https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2024/06/the-road-not-taken/
32. https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2021/08/nobody-expects-the-inquisition/
33. See the article by Sarah Marino at https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2019/12/7-principles-reduce-impact-nature-photography-wild-places/
34. Such as in the images of Thomas Wrede and Ohan Breiding of the degradation of the reflective blanket that covers part of the lower Rhone Glacier in the Valais, Switzerland.
35. And was a member of the Thetford Environmental Action Group in 1973. The Group did not last long, but does have an entry in the National Archives I was astonished to find.
36. Simulacra et Simulations was first published by Baudrillard in 1981 in French. A good summary can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation.
37. Actually written in 1968 when he was still with the Hollies, but not recorded until 1970 with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The lyrics start:You, who are on the road
    Must have a code you try to live by
    And so become yourself
    Because the past is just a goodbyeTeach your children well
    Their father's hell did slowly go by
    Feed them on your dreams
    The one they pick's the one you'll know by
38. André Rouille (op.cit.) notes the important difference between the tradition of the auto-portrait (including in photography) with the intention of only limited circulation, and the selfie intended to be posted on networks with the intention of being dispersed as far as possible.
40. https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2024/11/learning-to-see-again/
41. The previous volume, The Landscape as Haiku, was introduced in the On Landscape article at https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2024/04/landscape-as-visual-haiku/ . It is also available as a Blurb book or PDF at https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11891565-landscape-as-haiku. The new book is called The River as Haiku and is available as a Burb book or PDF at https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/12348913-the-river-as-haiku. There is also now a third volume, Mallerstang Haiku, with images from my favourite valley in Cumbria. It is also available as a Blurb book or PDF at https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/12426797-mallerstang-haiku.

I’ve just plonked my comfortable bottom down on my comfortable sofa. And selected some Nat King Cole from my playlist. All in preparation for writing a few words for your perusal. But on opening Microsoft word its informed me that if I press “+L” Copilot will write my blurb with me. Or maybe it will write it for me. I’ve no idea. I don’t know who, or what, Copilot is. I’m guessing that Copilot is a more organised individual than I. With a much bigger brain. But if I start using Copilot (or Otto as I think I’ll start calling him/her/it), how long will he be happy being a copilot.

How long before I’m a passenger, stuck back in economy, complaining about the lack of legroom, while Otto flies me on a route entirely of his choosing? I don’t want any help to rite these few words. Other perhaps than a few spelling suggestions. I’m not really sure I want any other grammatical suggestions. I’ll start and finish a sentence however I want. .

However, the mood takes me. And my photography is the same. I’m not really fussed about any fancy grids on the screen, pointing out the rule of thirds. However, I’m not against the histogram. I’ll call that my spellchecker.

My cameras are mostly of a decent age. They’re still quite simple. But how long before they come with their own version of Copilot? iPhones are well on the way with artificial intelligence. Not that I mind too much. I turn off most things and just point and shoot. A bit of straightforward snapseedery and I’m happy. It's me choosing what I’m taking a photograph of, and me that’s deciding how I want to present it. It’s the same as when I’m using the big camera. A simple, straightforward image, processed in Lightroom. Looking at the picture as I process it. Deciding how dark I want the darks to be and then deciding how I’m going to tone it. Hopefully, in such a way that it matches the image in my head. I don’t really want to rely on any other form of intelligence other than my own. I don’t even want to see suggestions as to how the finished article would look like. Tim and I spoke to Damian Shields the other day.

We were talking about how long it took to make an image. And I was in completely in agreement with the wee man. I talk about some of my pictures being snapshots. But they aren’t. The image I made last night of the Isle of Lewis from my bedroom window took me over 62 years to make. Because everything in my life that led me up to that moment influenced me. Otto wasn’t looking over my shoulder, making little suggestions..

Now, I’m not saying that artificial intelligence is a bad thing in itself. It’s a bit like a no age statement whisky in a way, blended with all sorts of ingredients. Whereas, I’d describe myself as more of a very well aged single malt. Peaty, smoky, maybe a bit of sweetness from being encased in an Oloroso cask for 25 years. Bottled at cask strength. Richly individual. My cupboard is full of such whiskies. Maybe not the same age as me. But they are all individual. All to be savoured at different moments. Matching a whisky to a mood. A bit like the photography and the photographs that I enjoy. From David Ward to Sandra Bartocha to Rachael Talibart to Joe Cornish to Valda Bailey. Individuals all. Amongst an ocean of individuals. All bobbing up and down with no artificial buoyancy aids. Plotting their own course.

And yes. I know. I spelt write wrongly about 350 words ago. But it made me giggle, so I left it in. And I’ve no idea what I had been planning to write about. But in a way, Copilot made the decision for me.