Project 28 : intimate landscape

I am influenced here by David Ward and his books Landscape Within and Landscape Beyond. David does shoot vista but his best work takes a closer look at what is around our feet. This is not unlike Weston whose work on photographing natural form within nature is of the same genre.

As discussed elsewhere in this journal nature and landscape are not uniform and present themselves as chaotic with hidden form. It is difficult to quantify "intimate" along with close up and macro and I am not happy to include them in this. The difficulties with shallow depth of field in macro photography do not appeal to me within this context. I tend to think of this smaller world existing from 1m to 25m from the camera and in every case to exclude the horizon.

Shape and form with simple framing will succeed here and the cluttered and disjointed will always be unsatisfactory. I include below a selection of photographs taken with this in mind.

The forest floor

Small rocks forming a matrix

Light on dead wood

The larger the area under consideration for an image then the greater the distance the photographer has to move to instigate change or introduce new form. An intimate landscape implies a closeness, one where you can reach out and touch the shapes and textures but does not deny the existence of the wider world with its wide vistas. There is no reference to where the images are within the world and that is of no consequence as we are asking the viewer to look closer and allow themselves the time to see detail, texture and form. The intimacy helps to move the image from the illustrative into the abstract and to move away from objectivity and into another place, a microcosm where attention to detail is paramount for success.

"There is something about abstraction that is alluring. It forces the viewer to look afresh at the textures, colours and patterns of our world"  D Ward - Landscape Within