Exercise 2 – 3: Typologies

Notes from OCA Handbook (PH2lsc040413; 63 – 66)

• Widely agreed that the ‘New Topographics’ exhibition (1975) had a significant influence on contemporary landscape photography
• Included Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd & Hilda Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohike, Nicholas Nixon, Stephen Shore & Henry Wessel
• Subverted the traditional (e.g., Ansel Adams and Edward Weston) notions of Landscape.
• New kind of sublime — man made landscape not national parks.  Considered ordinary and banal.
• Baltz, — tract housing into desert — i.e., landscape dominated by man’s unrelenting colonisation and exploitation.
• Lack of dramatic skies etc and now monotonous shades of grey (except Shore’s colour)
• Belief that colour (Shore) did not belong in an art gallery!
• Bechers – typological methodology — multiple views of a coal processing plant.
• Typological methodology in which a consistent technical rigour is applied to similar or particular types of subjects.
• Individualities are seen through careful study and, more importantly, repetition.
• Typology was new in Landscape but had originally been coined by Augustus Pitt Rivers who collected different types of tools used across centuries.
• Paul Farley and Michael Simmons (2011; 194) describe  the visual effects of the Becher’s good as follows:

“The effect of this repeated pattern was very powerful.  A single cooling tower may look beautiful, but nine cooling towers on one sheet looks like a series of ancient monoliths, or temples, or plinths for statues of long forgotten gods’.

• The Bechers’ typologies stand for deeper concerns about the essence of photography, particularly about ideas relating to the medium and its practitioners as collectors — gathering, arranging and archiving visual information about the world.   (See David Company below)
• Donovan Wylie, The Maze (2004) – Repetitive views of the prison perpetuate the absence of individuality throughout the prison’s architecture.
• Power and control are recurring themes in Wylie’s work

David Campany Almost the Same Thing: Some Thoughts on the Photographer as Collector (2003)

• At their most similar collecting and photography entail accumulation, a faith in the object, but also an understanding that accumulation, collecting, is a fundamentally transformative process
• Nearly all the photographers involved with photographic modernism as it emerged around 1920 engaged with the idea of photography as assembly. They turn towards clear description and the rejection of painterly pictorialism.
• Photographic modernism departed from the single Picture and embraced the production of bodies of images — of sets, sequences and typologies.  Partly due to society becoming more technocratic but also due to weekly magazines and printed matter intensifying the visual experience.
• The popular book was an ideal format for a socially engaged and reflective photo practice.
• However, today we see the collapse of print media into entertainment
• Straight photography – Here the subject matter insists in such a way that the photograph seems as much a cutting out of the thing or person in the world as a picture.  A book of these then becomes a collection of things as much as a collection of images.
• Adhering to the factual and avoiding the arty in photography is not easy.  Self-effacement was understood as the price to be paid for description: the appearing of the subject matter demanded a disappearing of the author.  
• The image compels but it is difficult to look at.  Our gaze is restless and we don’t know quite what to do.  It is only when we see difference and repetition, comparison, contrast and dialogue between images that we can be relieved and stimulated. (Indeed, what might a solitary image by the Bechers mean?)  Such is the logic of the collection or sequence. The isolated picture/artefact is given a depth of meaning through the structure and orchestration of the group
• The photographs appear as single shots and as elements of a larger whole.  Two readings of the same image are montaged;
• Where the calculated straight image tends to describe things or people, the snapshot dramatises the instance of the picture making event.  The cool conventions of the premeditated straight image give way to the heated nervousness of the quick shot.
• Photography has again become a slow medium attuned more to describing things than instants.
• The snapshot model has had its own tendency towards accumulation that is very different from the archival straight image.  Essentially chancy and speculative it works by taking many images and then editing the large haul for revelations and epiphanies.

This article was written nearly 15 years ago and the developments in this period have been dramatic.  Most cameras can now take video and high speed bursts of images.  Both allow one to select an image from many.  The initial change from analogue film to digital allowed one to cheaply take many images.  This is another step up and allows one to select an image that may be a split second different in timing to others in the same sequence.

• The anonymity of the snapshot derives from the professional formulae of reportage on the one hand, and the amateur formulae of the family album on the other
• Manufacture, consumption, and the patterns of work and leisure under capitalism run throughout this exhibition as subject matter just as emphatically as any formal photographic convention. If photography is prone to accumulation it is because modern life is too. The trick is to make the one try and say something about the other.

THE MAZE  DONOVAN WYLIE – 12 MARCH TO 23 APRIL 2004

http://www.belfastexposed.org/exhibition/the_maze

The result is a body of work which aims to document the physical structure of the place and at the same time, through the quantity and style of the photographs, to give the viewer some experience of the psychological impact of being inside the Maze.

These images through the repetition create the same aesthetic as the Bechers’ images.  One stops and looks to see what is different.  However, there are others that pose different questions such as the image below of the wall being demolished.

He says in his interview with Andrew Pulver (2010):

• This was the key wall — the South wall, a mile long originally, and the last big bit to go.
• But the moment when the landscape behind the wall emerged was very liberating.  There was no way you could have been aware, as a prisoner inside the Maze, of the countryside around the prison.
• I love 19th-century photography because, flawed as the concept is, I feel that photography does have the capacity to record history.  In 20 years’ time, I’d like this photograph, and the others, to be seen as a historical record, as well as a metaphor for the peace process.

‘Superbly surreal’ … Maze Prison in 2008. Photograph: Donovan Wylie

Donovan Wylie (2011)

Donovan Wylie talks about his Outposts series of photographs which were on show in September 2011 at the National Media Museum

The series builds on his previous work, Maze and British Watchtowers and continues to interrogate the architecture of conflict, and derives from the idea of vision and power.  He was stationed with Canadian troops in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province.  From where he surveyed the military outposts which commanded multiple lines of sight, with dominance over vast swathes of land.

Having watched a few YouTube videos about Wylie and his work a few points emerge.  He is interested in architecture that is used for observation.  These have elements of brutality and fragility in them.  The former is self evident but the latter arises from the fact that they look a little like sandcastles. I see this particularly in the work from Kandahar, Afghanistan.  He also relates these to, particularly army structures, that can be put up quickly and taken down quickly.  This is a little different to his work, Maze, which was somewhat longer in construction and then demolition.  However, once demolished it revealed the landscape again.

The structures relate to control over the landscape, but also over people.  This reminds on of the ‘Panopticon’ of Foucault.

See my UVC Blog:  https://douguvc.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/project-4-3a-looking-observation-and-surveillance/

Finally a key thing for me was that he says that the development of his voice was gradual.

What is key though is the way in which this work relates to ‘Typologies’ .  The work os all of a similar topic and the viewer is asked to look at it carefully and compare images and ask what they are about.  This brings one back to two elements:

Typological methodology in which a consistent technical rigour is applied to similar or particular types of subjects.

and

The effect of this repeated pattern was very powerful.

Exercise 2.3 Typologies

In his article in the Guardian Sean O’Hagan has this to say about the images (168) of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses in this exhibition:

• Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal.
• The photographers were interested in the created landscapes of the 1970s urban America.
• Their images were both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental. I e. against the tradition of nature photography of Adams and Weston
• Stephan Shore was the only one to use colour.
• The exhibition was not just the moment when the apparently banal became accepted as a legitimate photographic subject, but when a certain strand of theoretically driven photography began to permeate the wider contemporary art world
• The images of the man-altered landscape carried a political message and reflected, unconsciously or otherwise, the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development and the spread of cities.

See also review of New Topographics done for DPP

TateShots: Lewis Baltz

• Since the late 1960s, US photographer Lewis Baltz has been making images relating to the modern industrial and suburban landscape.
• Baltz epitomised the New Topographic movement through his sparse landscapes, finding a minimalist beauty in the factories, low-slung offices and parking lots of post-industrialised America.  These everyday American landscapes are strikingly close to the abstract and stark forms of the minimalist art of the same period.
• ‘Prototypes’, was a body of work that concentrated on the dialectic between simple, regular geometric forms found in the postwar industrial landscape with the (far from simple) culture that generated such forms, or was conditioned by them.  Stucco walls, parking lots, the sides of warehouse sheds or disused billboards baked in the steady Californian sunlight—these and other “hyper-banal” subjects were printed in blacks and whites of a breathtaking tonal evenness.  He meant the replicable social conventions as well as model structures of replicable manufacture. The fraught relation of neutral form to highly charged content plays itself out on the emphatically planar surface of these prints, objects that exude magnificence and severity simultaneously.
  Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit  http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/baltz  Accessed 27.11.17

Baltz’ images show the typical style of the New Topographics – repetition and the banal.  What I found more interesting was were his comments about his photographic career.  Having started and known what he wanted to do from an early age (12) he developed using photography as an Art Medium.  For him this was the simplest way in which to record something.  Southern California, the area in which he lived was developing rapidly and was watched by all so this became his focus although people pretended not to notice this development and the mundane.  However, he comments that there are no people in his images as he wants to leave space for the viewer.  He wanted his work to be unpretentious and unremarkable.  He goes on to say that, anyone can take a photograph but the hard work begins when one has to arrange them to obtain some meaning.  Later work focused on trying to convey the concept of a ‘city’, through images and also on the uses of technology and machines which, epitomise this development.  An exhibition of this showed close ups and more distant images with differing focus so that one had to move close to some of the images and further to view others.

Redbubble Blog

The short blog by Beth (2012) in Redbubble provides a succinct overview of what ‘typologies’ comprise of.   From the beginnings where August Sander produced a series of portraits in 1929 entitled ‘Face of Our Time’, a collection of works documenting German society between the two World Wars.   Through the photography of the Becher’s who began documenting dilapidated German industrial architecture in 1959.  Each photograph was taken from the same angle, at approximately the same distance from the buildings.  This can also be seen in Jeff Brouws images of freshly painted houses  http://www.jeffbrouws.com/series/typologies_T04.html , or Rachel Been’s images of chocolate bar cross sections http://etc.rachelbeen.com/food.

Jon Nicholls Blog

This blog provides an easy to read summary of typologies and some good links to other web sites.  Something I had not included earlier and should have, is the definition of Typology:

typology |tīˈpäləjē|

noun (plural typologies)

1. • A classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences: a typology of Saxon cremation vessels.
     • Study or analysis using typology.
   • The study and interpretation of types and symbols, originally especially in the Bible.

DERIVATIVES

typological |ˌtīpəˈläjək(ə)l| adjective.

typologist |-jist| noun

ORIGIN

mid 19th century ( sense 2): from Greek tupos ‘type’ + -logy.

A further, and wider definition is found on Diana Zlatanovski’s web site:

The TYPOLOGY is a photographic collection of collections.

Working with cultural artefacts as a researcher and museum curator, I’ve developed a tremendous appreciation for the significance of objects.  Studying the amazing spectrum of variation within collections provides the inspiration behind my current photographic body of work, Typology.  By definition, a typology is an assemblage based on a shared attribute. Patterns, both visual and intellectual, resonate and reveal themselves within collections.  Information not apparent in isolation becomes visible in context-only through studying groupings are we able to discern similarities and contrasts.  In observing collections of similar things, the beautiful variations become evident.  And the closer you look, the more you see.

See also her Tumbler site:  http://thetypologist.tumblr.com

In his paper ‘Typologies in Photography’ Dr. Güven Încilîoglu (1995) discusses August Sander and the Bechers and quotes  Freidus from the 1991 and 1992, exhibition , ‘Typologies: Nine Contemporary Photographers’  that toured the USA.   In his introductory essay he defines ‘typology’ as:

It could be a grouping of physiognomic types, vernacular buildings, or species of monkeys.  A typology is assembled by observation, collection, naming and grouping.  These actions allow the members of the class to be compared, usually in search of broader patterns.  These patterns may reveal biological constants if the subjects are living things, or social truths if the subjects are human creations (Freidus, 1991,10).

He makes many of the same points as discussed above but does highlight too that the format of the display of a typology set is important.

Also, that in the case of a typological approach in photography, ‘it has often been observed as a resistance against disappearance or loss.  It is the will to classify, record and preserve the expendable’.  Güven Încilîoglu (1995: 20)

Finally in his closing paragraph he makes the following point about what a typology reveals to the viewer.

The photographic typologies, inversely show us the differences among the members of a type (and not a stereotype) much more than their similarities.  ….  After all, if a truth is to be revealed through a real artwork, in this case, it is to be found among the nuances (not the contrasts) of the physical appearances, if it is not all black and white.  Güven Încilîoglu (1995: 20)

Bibliography

1. Campany David, Almost the Same Thing: Some Thoughts on the Photographer as Collector , First published in the Tate Modern exhibition catalogue Cruel and Tender: the Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph, 2003     http://davidcampany.com/almost-the-same-thing-some-thoughts-on-the-photographer-as-collector/  Accessed 24.11.17
2. Pulver, Andrew,  Photographer Donovan Wylie’s best shot, The Guardian (10 March 2010) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/mar/10/photography-donovan-wylie-best-shot  Accessed 26.11.17
3. Outposts: Donovan Wylie,  National Science and Media Museum   (5 September 2011)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQekhfX73zE   Accessed (26.11.17)
4. Donovan Wylie in conversation with Curator of Photographs Greg Hobson at the National Media Museum (3 October 2011)   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QwOSWBiYR4 Accessed 26.11.17
5. Discussing Outposts as Military Structures & Outposts by Donovan Wylie  National Media Museum Curator Philippa Wright talks to Hilary Roberts from the Imperial War Museum about Bradford Fellowship 2010/11 recipient Donovan Wylie.  (21 September 2011)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-C0ErmC0KU  Accessed 26.11.17
6. Things Left Unsaid – Paul Seawright and Donovan Wylie in conversation  (30 June 2015)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9F7ISkEvM8  Accessed 26.11.17
7. Tate, ‘TateShots: Lewis Baltz’ (23 August 2012) http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-lewis-baltz   Accessed 27.11.17
8. O’Hagan, Sean New Topographics: photographs that find beauty in the banal  The Guardian, (8 February 2010) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/feb/08/new-topographics-photographs-american-landscapes Accessed 26.11.17
9. ASX, INTERVIEW: “Interview with Lewis Baltz – Photography is a Political Technology of the Gaze” (1993) (11 March 2011)  http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/03/interview-interview-with-lewis-baltz.html  Accessed 27.11.17
10. Ted Tezeu, ‘Contacts vol 2: Lewis Baltz’ (2 October 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXLPMf6Ypbs  Accessed 27.11.17
11. Beth, ‘Photographic Typologies: The Study of Types’ (26 April 2012)  https://blog.redbubble.com/2012/04/photographic-typologies-the-study-of-types/   Accessed 30.11.17
12. Jon Nicholls, Typologies: A Level lesson Plan, http://www.photopedagogy.com/typologies.html  Accessed 30.11.17
13. Phillips, Cara, ‘Typology’ Ground Glass (12 May 2008)  https://caraphillips.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/typology/  Accessed 30.11.17
14. Photographic Typologies, Design: A Beginners Handbook (21 October 2015) http://infinitedictionary.com/blog/2015/10/21/photographic-typologies/  Accessed 30.11.17
15. Diana Zlatanovski ‘Typology’ (2016)  http://thetypology.com  Accessed 30.11.17
16. Artsy, Typologies,  https://www.artsy.net/gene/typologies  Accessed 30.11.17
17. C. Güven İNCİRLİOĞLU ,’Typologies in Photography’  (17 May 1995) Available at  http://jfa.arch.metu.edu.tr/archive/0258-5316/1994/cilt14/sayi_1_2/11-22.pdf  accessed 30.11.17