The Narrative Landscape
Mark Greenland
2021
Most of us love movies. Many of us are fascinated by documentaries. But the two forms are very different: movies are an imaginative exercise (even if based on fact) while “docos” are essentially a scientific investigation. One form is “right brain” and fictional, while the other is left brain and technical.
The aim of the doco maker is to convey to the viewer an objectively faithful representation of an external set of circumstances to inform and motivate the viewer. The movie maker, on the other hand, draws on subjective responses to evoke a feeling. Both draw on technical skills but to quite different ends. (Perhaps both can aspire to be “Art”, but I don’t want that controversial word to distract us from the present theme)
Photography has always been fundamentally different from painting since painters start with a blank canvas and create everything, whereas we almost always start with the real world. From its birth, photography celebrated the visible world by recording it. Painting began by reproducing the world, but in the last 150 years or so, has sought instead to evoke the artist’s subjective impression of what he or she could see, or even to create a wholly imagined vision.
It’s always been the case that some photographers are influenced by painting, and are not satisfied to make objectively accurate representations of the world. These authors are less interested in informing viewers than in exciting them.
On the other hand, some photographers want to celebrate/reveal and share what they see as accurately as possible. These people want to tell a true story and may regard the other approach as fanciful and lacking in integrity. One need only listen to the judging of a nature competition to appreciate how disapproving some photographers are of any departure from reality. Thus landscape images submitted to a nature competition have to be literal representations of the real world, and will not be successful if they are edited to create drama which may appear unreal. (Yet, even in nature competitions, we are increasingly hearing judges asking for birds on sticks to be doing something; that is, they are asking for narrative).
Similarly, it seems, commercial landscape photographers (like Christian Fletcher) have to satisfy their market which prefers natural representations, rather than the more abstract interpretations which I suspect Christian himself prefers.
At the same time, I often hear photographers complaining that to succeed in an open competition, you have to edit the image until you’ve tortured it into “art”. Indeed, I decided long ago that “art” is actually the distortion of reality – and that’s just fine by me!
So, which type of photographer are you? In preparing this talk, I found that I am both, and maybe most of us are. The funny thing is, I compete with the “arty” images and I use the others just to please myself. (Actually, we should all own up to the idea that unless someone has commissioned us, we’re really shooting to please ourselves, and we don’t need any better reason than that!).
I call landscape images which try accurately to convey the scene, “representational”, and I call the images which seek to elaborate the scene to tell a story or evoke a feeling, “narrative”. (Obviously, these terms are no use outside landscape photography, for example photojournalism and sport images try to tell stories without fictional drama).
There is some overlap between these two approaches: a faithful record of a scene could include some unusual artistic feature. But, often, the narrative image will have been manipulated in post processing, to create the fictional aspect which tells the story, or evoke the aesthetic feeling.
I am not comparing the merits of the two approaches. I am not saying one is better than the other, but I am saying that you as the author need to consider what kind of image you want to create and how to do it, if you want to win the approval of other people, especially photo judges. When it comes time to make choices as to which of your images you will submit for judging, I suggest you prefer narrative images over representational.
Let’s look at a few examples of representational landscapes.
Although I like these images and I’m pleased to have taken the ones I did, I would not compete with them. So let’s look at what I mean by narrative images.
There’s a spectrum of narrative elements, from simply composing to draw attention to thought provoking features or transient phenomena such as light and weather, to altering contrast, brightness and saturation for drama, to adding small elements in PS, to imagining and creating the whole scene. Obviously, many of you will reject the radical end of this spectrum, but you may be comfortable at the other end, so I aim to show you examples right along the spectrum. The important thing is: – to do better in competitions, you will generally need to be somewhere on the spectrum, not presenting purely representational work, no matter how well it may portray the subject.