Susan Wides : Picturing Landscape

Things have gotten quite busy at CPW! With lots of workshops, a change over of Arts Administration interns, and a new AIR, there is lots going on…and lots distracting me from keeping up with the blog. For any regular readers, I apologize for being distant…its not you, it’s me.

Megan and I got the chance to be part of Susan Wides’ workshop, Picturing Landscape, on a weekend when we had double workshops – the other being Joan Barker teaching Intro to Digital Photography. During my time in undergraduate, I never had an assignment that addressed the historical or contemporary approaches and ideas behind landscape photography, so this workshop was a welcome learning experience for me. Going into it, I knew that I would have a lot to learn and take in…kind of a blank slate as far as the subject matter went.

Susan has been in 18 one-person shows, over 60 group exhibitions, and is in a number of collections. She has had her work written about in a variety of publications such as the New York Times, Artforum, and the Village Voice. She shoots with a 4x5 view camera with intentional areas of sharp and soft focus. The images she creates can often be mistaken as miniatures. I found it interesting that in her work, the majority of the piece that is out-of-focus is just as significant, if not more, than the selected part that is in-focus.


We spent the first part of Saturday looking at student’s work, discussing landscape photography historically, and going over places we could go shoot in the Catskills. Being in upstate New York, the workshop was specifically focused on the paintings done by those in the Hudson River School. For those of you uncertain about that history, you can read a quick and easy overview HERE and look at examples of the paintings HERE.

Many of the Hudson River School painters came up to the Hudson Valley as a retreat away from New York City. At that time, NYC was the center of commerce in the US, and the Catskills were close enough for them to travel and far enough that they were able to escape from the filth of the city. The Catskill Mountain House drew in lots of wealthy people searching for the culture of the United States outside of the city.

A lot of these artists took a significant amount of artistic liberties in order to communicate their feeling about the place rather than a documentary view. During the time they were working, there was also an incredible boom of industrialization. The painters just chose to leave out these signs because they were more interested in talking about the raw nature that they had discovered in America. Often, the paintings referenced the ‘fear of God’ in their dark skies and embellished clouds.

Thomas Cole, the founder, was known for separating the optimal reality from visual reality. Sometimes he felt a subject was more interesting – even more real – if a veil of interpretation was put over it. The memory one has of a place tends to hold dominant features that are then illustrated as embellishments in the artwork.

Both Saturday and Sunday we chanced beating the rain in order to go out on location to shoot…






Susan encouraged us to think about landscape photography as moving beyond documentary and into addressing the relationship we have to a specific place. We talked about topophilia (a word I’d never even heard before), meaning ‘a love of landscape’ according to Merriam-Webster. She gave us a number of categories to consider when photographing:
- toponymic = the names we have given to places
- narrative = the stories or legends behind a place
- experimental = the dependence we have on the place for survival
- numinous = the spiritual or mysterious feeling we have in a place

There are also formal considerations to landscape photography. These may come off as obvious to some of you, but as someone new to landscape work, they were interesting to consider, even if it was just as acknowledgement. In most photographic work, you’re taking a 3-dimensional object and turning it 2-dimensional. In addition, you have constraints to work in as far as your film choice (the dimensions will change depending if it is 35mm, 120, 4x4, etc.). And, perhaps the most obvious, compositionally the things you are trying to capture are stagnant, not movable. We physically need to change our viewpoint in order to animate them in a way appealing to viewers. This challenge is what can separate art from documentation.

All this being said, I learned a lot from this workshop as far as conceptual approaches to a subject I previously didn’t really understand. Below are some of the shots I took of the day…I know, I know, I didn’t really shoot an overall landscape – I have a hard time straying away from details!