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Even now, after the diarrhetic flow of images that all of us see all of the time, there are still pictures that shock us, that make us look without recognition. But it isn’t a really a matter of ‘even now’, but of ‘especially now’. The tropes for the mainstream stopped flowing and solidified a long time ago. And like solids, there is still some flow, some change, but it is slow, imperceptible. It is this sameness of images that makes it, for the few who are still interested, possible to rebel. Even necessary to rebel.
One image trope is the format that landscapes are taken in. It’s called ‘landscape’ format. Wow. We aren’t usually this obvious. There is a natural tendency to reflect landscapes in a way that is wider than taller. But this doesn’t have to be. There is much merit in the anti-landscape.
A classic landscape photo stretches horizontally. It dissociates the picture viewer and demands, ‘look at all this beauty.’ It flattens the image and orders everything at a static distance so that we can gaze clearly, with shifts in perspective.
The anti-landscape is taken in a portrait format, it is taller than it is wider. It highlights the distance from us to the scene that we are supposed to be looking at. It shows us how far we are physically from nature but it also hints at how far we are mentally. How much our abstractness and ambiguity differentiate us. It tells us that to get from here to there is hard, and suggests that life, looking after this body, moving it, feeding it, caring for it is a constant effort. It stretches out the sky, and the ground and shows us the world’s immensity, and mocks how small we are. It makes us focus, it eliminates the vista in preference of a hard slice of mental attention.
It does something new, and different, and so it makes us anxious.
Posted 2 years ago
