Pleinair

Visningsrommet USF 

A photographic exhibition by Erik Friis Reitan & Klara Sofie Ludvigsen

Essay by Anthea Buys, 2015

Since the emergence of a critical photographic discourse in the twentieth century, the photography of nature has been polarised into two genres, that correspond respectively to fine art and journalism. Landscape photography, far from an innocent record of naturally occurring phenomena and spatial arrangements, always, inevitably, speaks to “human values and actions imposed on the land over time” (Bright, 1989: 126). As Deborah Bright writes, “Even formal and personal choices do not emerge sui generis, but instead reflect collective interests and influences, whether philosophical, political, economic or otherwise” (Ibid.: 126).  To an extent the same can be claimed of journalistic nature photography, the benchmark of which has been the output of National Geographic magazine. The revelatory nature of this kind of photography depends on sophisticated optics, on the ability of some photographers to be in places most of us will never be, and on the tightly controlled invocation of spectacle. Manipulating colour saturation, careful cropping and grand undertakings of omission give this genre the power to state over and over again that the experience of nature should be sublime, not intellectual. 

But alongside the development of the content-rich language of landscape and nature photography, the technical specificity of camera-use and photographic development techniques in the twentieth century became the scene of important explorations of opticality, abstraction, and formalism. In Erik Friis Reitan’s and Klara Sofie Ludvigsen’s practices  medium-specific reflection interfaces with world of content outside of the camera and the processing environments of photography, whether analogue or digital. Moving away from the notion of the photograph as a disembodied artefact of a mechanical process of seeing, both explore the relationship between photography and embodiment. The latter is expressed when a viewer experiences their works as three-dimensional manifestations, or on the brink of three-dimensionality.

What has arisen from their collaboration on the exhibition Pleinair is two complementary strands that pursue the tension between optical and physical experience in the presence of a photographic artwork, and between the essential formal qualities of a medium in transition and the subjective intervention that leads an artist to favour one image or form over another.  

In a large work titled Taakefjell, Ludvigsen, who processes her photographs in the dark room, has worked with a scale that challenges the physical possibilities of darkroom processing. At (117cm x 154 cm), the print is developed through a highly controlled process of rolling and shifting the paper through the developing tray. This repetitive activity is visible in the final print in the form of faint streaks, the fingerprints of the analogue process. In addition to the visible challenge of making the image, the work also presents an optical challenge for the viewer. The image is of a cloud engulfing a mountain, a subject that is itself much larger than the paper, but would have been more consumable if it had been printed in a smaller, more conventional format. Moreover, the scene is inverted, so that the weight of the mountain sits at the top of the picture, with the clouds below seeming to swallow it. When first looking at the image the viewer has a moment of wondering “what am I looking at?”, before the brain does once again the job it already does for the eyes, and turns the image the “right” way around again.  

This moment of asking “what am I looking at?” is, according to Scott Walden, fundamental to the act of looking at a photograph, when when the content of the photograph is abstracted or otherwise resists being understood. He writes: 

The drive to identify the subject of a photograph does not disappear when confronted with hard-to-identify or abstract works; in fact, the more difficult and challenging the identification, the more we may find ourselves concentrating our efforts on it. This marks an important distinction between how we respond to abstraction in painting and in photography. Whereas with the abstract painting it is often misguided to ask “what is this?” (in the sense of identifying a real-world subject), with photography the question always has its place. For, with rare exception, all photographs taken with a camera (and even some without) are of something, except perhaps the more arcane experiments with lenses, mirrors and light, such as Alvin Langdon’s Vortographs. Part of the initial interest in an abstract photograph (or photogram) might be this puzzle of identification. 

Walden goes on to discuss a 1962 photograph by Minor White titled Moencopi Strata, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah (above), an image made by photographing dried leaves on the ground. The title of the image attaches it to its source in the ‘real world’, a protected natural area that is publicly accessible. However, what we see in the image is not an index of this reality. In other words, the work is not ‘about’ this site; it is ‘about’ the transference of textures and forms from one world to another via an eye that is insensitive to contextual information. The titling of the work points to precisely this contradiction: the connection of photographs to the ‘real world’ and at the same time their disinterested distance from it. 

In Erik Reitan’s installation 60.214004°N, 4.997958°E, a close up image of the surface of a rock is enlarged and broken up by striations, and given a geometric containing form. This form suggests a flattened perspectival rendering of a block, and is installed on a wall in the gallery that is itself at an irregular angle. The surface of the rock brings to mind White’s dried leaves in that its texture and shapes are striking primarily for their formal qualities. The fact that they occur on a rock is secondary. This loss of connection to the photographic source is heightened with the interruption of the image by regular bars in which slices of the source image are removed. The effect is that the work can no longer reasonably be called a photograph, even though it has photographic origins. The “what” that I am looking at is simply a work, a thing in its own right, that occupies the same three-dimensional world that I do when I am with it.  

As a collaborative presentation, Ludvigsen’s and Friis Reitan’s works share the gallery in a way that leads the works, and indeed these two distinct practices, to be read in tandem. The broken and inverted images, and the shifts in visibility that occur in the exhibition - due to variations in light and physical placement - involve these photographic works in a scenography that encourages us to think of them temporally and as material beings. What emerges from this is a natively photographic environment that is also corporeal and participatory.