Landscape - a rereading

Challenging our traditional reading of an objective, idealised, pastoral landscape, a series of photographs taken from one vantage point. By deflecting the viewers’ eye, subverting a more contemporary, traditional understanding of a mountain landscape, challenging us to see beyond the obvious, to the far distance, the land, sky, the landscape therein. Introducing the dynamics of nature, birds, confuses the more Arcadian view of a landscape image, a shift in the framing, the reading, the relationship between the viewer, the land, the landscape. John Constable's comment on his paintings, “..it will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment..” helps partly articulate what might be experienced in such mountain imagery. In the same way that traditional Japanese landscape imagery would oft’ have a tree branch, or similar intruding into, even partly obscuring the landscape, I am challenging the viewer to apply a more intellectual rigour by asking them to see beyond the mere object, glimpse traditional allegorical motifs of beauty, sublime totems in the land & the sky. Underpinning this series are Paul Cezanne’s hallowed observations, "Seeing is not believing, it is to question”, and that “One must see nature as no one has seen before you”. Thus we should read the land and the landscape with new aesthetic sensibilities, as a mountain sheep farmer will view the land differently to say an infantry soldier, a miner, a lumberjack all of whom will see prospects, and markedly different to a tourist who may see landscape as a prospect of beauty, not from the point of view of survival & of thriving.