THE LANDSCAPE AND VIEWS BEYOND

PROJECT: RUIN LANDSCAPES

In 2015, I took a series of 3 images looking northwards from Fitful Head. I could see Dunrossness below, and the narrow width of South Mainland Shetland, but far into the distance the land stretched on and on. I recently merged these 3 photos to make a computer automated panorama. Standing at Fitful Head four years ago, the view of the land and sea seemed to wrap around you just as much as it stretched into distance - the eye could traverse details of distance cliffs and hills as well as be overwhelmed by vastness. In this photographic image however, although it is immersive and illusionistic, this multi-levelled experience of space has been flattened.

With photo-editing software, it can be said we now achieve in seconds an effect similar to what would have taken 18th century panorama painters months to complete - “the world…transformed into a spectacle”. [1] First invented in 1788, panoramas were incredibly popular well into the 19th century. These large-scale circular paintings were designed to (as ‘authentically’ as possible) gives viewers the experience of actually physically being in a given scene or landscape. Popular themes included historical events (especially battles), admired city views, and also landscapes. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, new panoramas in cities transported viewers from the smog of the town to grand mountains or sea-scapes where “we feel all but the breeze, and hear all but the dashing of the wave”. [2] They were both theatrical and a kind of mass-entertainment, and also seen as educational. At different times, panoramas have also been used as propaganda. War panoramas celebrated victorious battles with dashing horses, valiant fighting and the defeated lying strewn across the field.

Along with panoramas, many forms of ‘virtual reality’ were all the rage in the late 18th/early 19th century. As photography became more widely accessible, so too did kinetoscopes, stereographs, cycloramas, and of course eventually cinema. This was the rise of visual culture - and also the beginnings of our current image-saturated age. In his book ‘The Panorama’, Bernard Comment sites the panorama as marking when “the relationship between viewer and ‘reality’ underwent a profound mutation, opening up a new logic according to which the world was transformed into a spectacle and images substituted for direct experience”.

Over the last few months, I’ve been continuing with work that I first started back in 2015 when I spent a month in Shetland visiting war-ruins sites. As I spent time drawing and also photographing these eerie modern-age constructions in the landscape, my interest in perspective in image making grew, and particularly how perspective systems can be reflective of world-view and ideology. As relics of 20th century war, these sites are reminders (in Shetland’s otherwise natural-seeming landscape) of the dark side of human ideology, technological utopias and ‘illusionary beyonds’. Currently we live in very image-saturated times, where photographs and their linear perspective view of the world surround us with easily consumed snapshots of alternative realities. I'm interested in exploring alternative perspectives in my images, where the viewer is immersed in a different kind of viewpoint and more shifting sense of space, specifically ‘floating’ space as found in Chinese traditional landscape art. I’m also interested in experimenting with photographic material to disrupt, distort and ‘melt away’ fixed linear perspective , to melt away the illusion and turn photographs into surfaces of shifting uncertainty which are not easily and quickly consumable, but unfold and formulate over time like the spread of patina.

This project is supported by Visual Art and Craft Award. Shetland Arts in partnership with Creative Scotland and Shetland Islands Council

[1] Bernard Comment. ‘The Panorama’. 1999. Reaktion Books: London.

[2] Shannon Selin. ‘Panoramas: 19th Century Virtual Reality’. Available at: https://shannonselin.com/2016/11/panoramas-19th-century/