Edit: Even though the heading to the post says this was published by Andy Duncan, it was truly published by fellow contributor, Scott Wheeler.
Beate Gütschow (German b. 1970) digitally constructs landscape photographs after the manner of seventeenth and eighteenth century painters. Each image is composed of anywhere from thirty to one hundred different photographic elements, captured on film, scanned and then composited. The final montage is a photorealistic rendering of an arcadian landscape, which often contains subtle intentional artifacts showing the idealized place to be something less than whole.
At the time when Constable, Vernet, Lorrain, Poussin, and Gainsborough were painting landscapes, there were rigorous guidlines in place for the construction of their landscapes. Gütschow adhered closely to these patterns in her works, here she describes the old methods:
At the time, “landscape” in painting was a very artificial, highly organized construct: the picture was divided into foreground, middle ground, and background. The foreground is the entrance: the viewer “walks” into the picture from this entry point. The landscape is framed by clumps of trees and bushes, like a stage. The people, the staffage are generally placed in the middle ground. They look out into the landscape on the behalf of the viewer. The middle ground often contains a river or a path. The background is composed of a view into the distance: ranges of hills that vanish into the haze. The light mainly enters from the side, illuminating some areas and leaving others in shadow. The many layers create great spatial depth.
Through these methods landscape painters would imagine edenic splendor, and populate it with bits and pieces of their own world. They would perhaps sample local flora and fauna in their depictions of religious or mythological themes, synthesizing an idealized mythic past from the banal contents of their present age. This wresting of disparate elements into a whole is related well by Richard Payne Knight, in a poem written in 1794:
I know that nature scarcely affords a complete and faultless composition; but nevertheless she affords the parts of which taste and invention may make complete and faultless compositions; and it is by accurately and minutely copying these parts, and afterwards skillfully and judiciously combining and arranging them, that the most perfect works in the art have been produced.
The advent of photography in the mid nineteenth century brought upon a change in how one could render the world. The previous idea of landscapes constructed in a theatrical manner, like a stage or diorama, was outmoded by the cameras stationary singular viewpoint. In fact it was it’s stubborn ability to show every minute detail that brought it so much disdain from the art community. This is partly to blame for Baudelaire’s relegation of photography to the role of “handmaiden to the arts.”
Photography’s abruptness brings with it a weight of evidence, a sense that what we see in the picture is referent of reality and is true. Gütschow plays with this by using reference material which was not necessarily taken in pastoral nature. She shoots in urban and rural areas alike but excludes most evidence of our current landscape. Gütschow’s ability to recontextualize elements of our postindustrial landscape and return it to a vision of utopia, creates a compelling argument for the efficacy of photography in the digital age.
Further information: Gütschow had a book LS / S published in 2007 by Aperture. Find it here.
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