Thoughts on beauty and art
And finding both in landscape photography
Hello, I’m Gill and I write a photography blog inspired by the landscapes of Suffolk and beyond. Please subscribe to read more of my writing and visit my website to view my images.
Picture a scene.
It is the height of summer, a few hours after sunrise and I am walking by the coast. To my right stands a red and white stripped lighthouse, towering above fields of leafy sugar beet and facing the pale blue sea beyond. In between the two, crumbling cliffs snake along the shoreline, their mop of flowering grasses shimmer in the sunlight. Overhead sand martins chatter as they ride the gentle morning breeze in search of insects.
This is summer in Norfolk and it is beautiful.
I lift my camera and take a few images. But while my eyes see the soft summer colours glowing in the sunshine, my camera sees harsh, contrasty light full of dark shadows and glaring highlights.
When I look at the world around me I see the landscape not only with my eyes but with my heart and I see beauty everywhere. Although this may seem natural it is a difficult thing to convey in a photograph and it got me thinking - does the beauty we see with our eyes always translate into a beautiful image? And is it possible to create something beautiful on a bright, contrasty, summers day.
I usually avoid shooting landscapes when the light is harsh and there are no clouds in the sky, but if I am tempted to press the shutter button I will often convert the resulting images into black and white. Whilst I love colour I rarely like how the camera renders it when the light is harsh.
The landscape is beautiful to me for many reasons and colour is one of them. I wonder whether I am removing something vital from my image if I discard the colour? Will the resulting monotone image still convey the beauty of the day?
Whilst the view that I saw with my eyes at Happisburgh looked amazing, as a photograph it lost all its appeal. I felt that the primary colours (blue, green and red) all competed with each other and the resulting image had a tension about it that I didn’t feel in the landscape. However once I had simplified the image by removing the colour I felt it worked much better, but I wasn’t sure if I had lost some of the essence of summer that had so attracted me to the scene in the first place.
I came across a quote the other day from Ralph Waldo Emerson which started my thought process on this subject. He said
Love of beauty is taste
The creation of beauty is art.
Thinking about this in terms of photography I wondered how it applied to my own work. I have always thought of photography as art and I see the natural world as fundamentally beautiful, so am I creating art with my photos or just representing the beauty that nature has already created for me? Is nature intrinsically beautiful or is it the creation of a photograph that makes it so?
I left Norfolk with lots of questions and went home to look at a few images I took some days earlier. Again these were taken in the middle of the day in similar lighting conditions to my Norfolk shots. However this time I felt I could represent the beauty that I saw in the landscape in a colour image.
When we make images we create them based on our own biases. We are all drawn to things that are aesthetically pleasing but what that constitutes will be different for each of us. Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.
Thinking about this a little deeper I concluded that, for me, beauty in landscape photography comes down to two things - composition and colour. I represent the scene I am photographing using compositional techniques such as rule of thirds, the use of lines, shape, form and symmetry. Composition allows me to create order from the chaos. I can choose the elements I find beautiful to include within my frame and exclude those I don’t care for. In a way I am defining what beauty is to me by my choices.
Colour on the other hand creates an emotional response. Warm colours are more likely to evoke heightened emotions of love or joy while cool colours are more calming. Pastel tones are soft and tranquil compared to contrasting and saturated colours which are more likely to cause visual confusion. Again by including only colours I perceive as beautiful I am defining what beauty is to me.
Going back to my lighthouse image it didn’t work for me as a straight shot because it had too many competing primary colours which created a confusing image. Once the colour was removed the composition became more prominent giving the image a more cohesive structure.
As for the image at Walberswick, it works for me because it has a simple composition and a calming colour palette.
I believe that when we make a photograph we:
simplify the chaos by our choice of framing and composition
work with the available colours to create an emotional response.
Our biases connected to these two elements will lead us to create an image that we find beautiful. It most likely will not be a straight representation of the scene but rather our interpretation of it and as such should be considered art.
This morning I went out to the beach at sunrise to shoot in the soft morning light. For me this is the time when composition, colour, framing and light all come together to create the images I most like making.
Creating beauty in harsh light may be possible but for me the start of the day will always yield the greatest rewards and the most beautiful images.
What are your thoughts on beauty in landscape photography? Do you think a beautiful landscape always translates into a beautiful image. I would love to hear your thoughts on beauty in nature and art so please feel free to comment below.
Thank you very much for reading and until next week enjoy your photography.
Gill
Thank you Gill for another thought provoking post. While the creation of beauty may be art, art is more than the creation of beauty. I want my photography to show something that the viewer might not see. This may be beauty in a landscape that they don't or can't see, but it can be other things. For me that is the art of photography
I love the way you ask yourself questions, Gill. There is an art to that, and it is through such questions that we grow as photographers. Very much enjoyed this post.