Landscape Photography - Part Three

In this blog post I am going to continue examining the work of landscape photographers, and will begin with something that struck a very familiar cord.

Carrara Marble Quarries # 20, Carrara, Italy, 1993 by Edward Burtynsky

I have actually seen a similar if not precisely the same view Burtynsky recorded in this photograph, though I was lucky enough to visit the Carrara quarries many years after he did.  The view around the area is absolutely breathtaking, and this image does a good job of capturing that.  In other photographs in this series, Burtynsky even shows the place in the quarries where Michelangelo mined marble.  Nostalgia led me to this image, but the concept behind much of Burtynsky's work also interests me.  He seems to choose landscapes that have in some way been torn apart - mines, rail lines, etc... yet his images still reveal a certain beauty in these deconstructed landscapes, making his scenes more poignant.

    Blue Mountain Islands, 2006 by John Pfahl

Pfahl's technique in the picture above is quite fascinating, as it really plays with the hanging scroll tradition.  I have always meant to make a collagraph or something like that in a hanging scroll format, of course using landscape imagery throughout my composition.  What interests me about this photograph is that it stretches (quite literally) the original concept of a hanging scroll.  The image begins to distort towards the bottom of the piece, in contrast to some traditional hanging scrolls where such a landscape seems to exist in layers stacked on top of one another.  This is simply one of the most creative ways I have seen a landscape recorded in photography.  The entire notion of a horizontally-oriented composition is thrown completely out the window, and the viewer is faced with a curious, elongated scene.

-Kelly F.