The Contemporary Landscape
This is a studio class focusing on the use of film in an age primarily grounded in digital technology. Through the combination of learning large format camera systems, which are often used in the fields of architecture and advertisement, and film development, students will examine the historical and practical significance of working with film. Through the slowed-down workings of large format photography, students will be able to focus on composition and the integrity of the images they make instead of applying the shotgun approach often practiced in digital photography.
Student Work:
(more landscape images coming soon…)
Final Project:
Collaborative Installation to Commemorate the Centennial of Zion National Park:
“Through the Looking Glass”
The view camera, as used by early photographers at Zion National Park, works much in the same way as the human eye; light is gathered through a lens and is then focused as an upside-down image on the back of the retina. In a view camera the upside-down image is focused in the back of the camera on a piece of glass known as the ground glass. We chose to exploit this principle in our installation by assembling a composite view of Zion National Park hung as an upside-down tableau that is to be viewed through a primitive view camera. By viewing just the tableau without the view camera, the viewer will experience what photographers of the 19th century observed on their ground glasses when they created their photographs. When the viewer views the tableau on the ground glass of our view camera in the installation, the image appears much like a finished, right side up, black and white photograph as it would have looked in the 19th century.
The first light-sensitive image-making processes were slow and required up to an 8-hour exposure to produce an image that quickly faded. In 1826, the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, with much experimentation, refined the process of “fixing” an image to the point of immortalizing the subject matter indefinitely. Early photographers in Zion National Park used slow, cumbersome equipment to make epic documents to both publicize and preserve their experiences of the Park. The field of photography has come a long way in the last 100 years of the existence of the Park, which has changed the way that we see and remember our visits to the Park. The once bulky setups of trained professionals hired out to idealize the Park have been replaced by individuals, with their own digital cameras, creating their own interpretations of the Park.
This installation was produced in partial fulfillment for Professor Jeremias Paul’s ART 3820: The Contemporary Landscape photography class at Southern Utah University during the fall 2008 semester by:
Katie Anderson
Megan Anderson
Scott Chandler
Teisha Fooks
William Gray
Duane Simon
Jacki Stoddard
Special Thanks To:
Eric Brown, Art & Design Department Chair
Bill Byrnes, College of Performing & Visual Arts Dean
Rossina Felstead, Art & Design Department Manager
David B. Gray
Star Sign & Banner
Reece Summers, Braithwaite Fine Arts Gallery Director
Mike Williams, SUU Events Electrician
Installation Shots from Final Project:
