Active Landscape Photography: Theoretical Groundwork for Landscape Architecture [1 ed.] 2019037330, 2019037329, 9781138479067, 9781138479074, 9781351066662

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface: how to approach this collection
PART ONE Groundwork: how photography works in landscape architecture
1 Always photographs: a place of beginning for landscape architecture
2 Landscape architecture and photography: a ubiquitous relationship
3 Making and using: diverse photographic practices in landscape architecture
4 Making photographs: making landscapes
5 Meaning is a relationship: gathering and investigating photographs to create landscape knowledge
6 Do we see what we see? More than icons for landscape photography
7 Active landscape photography: some critical concepts and methods
PART TWO Case studies
The Jacobs + Alta Team: LA River Path
Alta Planning + Design: Setting POB
Alta Planning + Design: CV Link
Coen + Partners: Heart of the City
Coen + Partners: Peavey Plaza
Claude Cormier + Associés: Berczy Park
Mayer/Reed: 30/40
Mayer/Reed: Waterfalls
Mayer/Reed: Willamette Falls Inventory
MIG: Yosemite Lodge Treatment Plan
MIG: Lithia Park
Nelson Byrd Woltz: Passports
Nelson Byrd Woltz: Orongo Station
Nelson Byrd Woltz: Duke Pond
SCAPE: Stapleton Waterfront Park
Public Sediment/SCAPE Team: Bay Area, California
SCAPE: Town Branch Commons
Snøhetta: Willamette Falls Riverwalk
Snøhetta: Times Square Reconstruction
West 8: Longwood Gardens Master Plan
West 8: Simco Wavedeck
West 8: Irma Logs
PART THREE Expanding possibilities
8 More than both ways with photography: beyond the objective and subjective for landscape architecture
9 Many uses, many contexts, many meanings: fluid photographic practices in landscape architecture
10 Combining photographs: complex processes, complex landscapes
11 Near, not-of: complex landscape narratives, complex photography
Bibliography
Interview bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

Active Landscape Photography

Photographs play a hugely influential but largely unexamined role in the practice of landscape architecture and design. Through a diverse set of essays and case studies, this seminal text unpacks the complex relationship between landscape architecture and photography. It explores the influence of photographic seeing on the design process by presenting theoretical concepts from photography and cultural theory through the lens of landscape architecture practice to create a rigorous, open discussion. Beautifully illustrated in full color throughout, with over 200 images, subjects covered include the diversity of everyday photographic practices for design decision making, the perception of landscape architecture through photography, transcending the objective and subjective with photography, and deploying multiplicity in photographic representation as a means to better represent the complexity of the discipline. Rather than solving problems and providing tidy solutions to the ubiquitous relationship between photography and landscape architecture, this book aims to invigorate a wider dialogue about photography’s influence on how landscapes are understood, valued and designed. Active photographic practices are presented throughout for professionals, academics, students and researchers. Anne C Godfrey’s research examines the relationship between photography and landscape architecture. As a photographer and writer, she engages in multidisciplinary critical inquiries into landscape, representation and experience. She is an award-winning professor of landscape architecture in both teaching and research, supporting students’ successes in international fellowships and design competitions. Godfrey is an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

‘In the first volume in the series  Active Landscape Photography  Anne Godfrey expands the discourse on landscape visualization and representation by championing photography as a critical tool of inquiry and analysis in the environmental design process. She narrows the gap between theory and practice through tangible methodologies and inspiring case studies of how designers engage with the photographic medium.’ – Chip Sullivan, ASLA, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley, USA

‘A concise introduction to critical ideas in photography relating to what we see and how we make sense of images that will be of particular value to those interested in landscape architecture.’  – Liz Wells, Professor in Photographic Culture, University of Plymouth, UK

Active Landscape Photography Theoretical Groundwork for Landscape Architecture

Anne C Godfrey

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Anne C Godfrey The right of Anne C Godfrey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Godfrey, Anne C, author. Title: Active landscape photography : theoretical groundwork for landscape architecture / Anne C Godfrey. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019037330 (print) | LCCN 2019037329 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138479067 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781138479074 (paperback) | ISBN 9781351066662 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351066662 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138479067 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781138479074 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Landscape architecture—Photographs. | Landscape architecture— Pictorial works. | Landscape photography. Classification: LCC SB472 .G63 2020 (ebook) | LCC SB472 (print) | DDC 712.022/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037330 ISBN: 978-1-138-47906-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-47907-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-06666-2 (ebk) Typeset in Futura by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To every single one of my students.

Contents

Preface: how to approach this collection

ix

PART ONE

Groundwork: how photography works in landscape architecture

1

1 Always photographs: a place of beginning for landscape architecture

3

2 Landscape architecture and photography: a ubiquitous relationship

7

3 Making and using: diverse photographic practices in landscape architecture

16

4 Making photographs: making landscapes

33

5 Meaning is a relationship: gathering and investigating photographs to create landscape knowledge

48

6 Do we see what we see? More than icons for landscape photography

61

7 Active landscape photography: some critical concepts and methods

70

PART TWO

Case studies

83

The Jacobs + Alta Team: LA River Path Alta Planning + Design: Setting POB Alta Planning + Design: CV Link

85 87 88

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j Contents

Coen + Partners: Heart of the City Coen + Partners: Peavey Plaza Claude Cormier + Associés: Berczy Park Mayer/Reed: 30/40 Mayer/Reed: Waterfalls Mayer/Reed: Willamette Falls Inventory MIG: Yosemite Lodge Treatment Plan MIG: Lithia Park Nelson Byrd Woltz: Passports Nelson Byrd Woltz: Orongo Station Nelson Byrd Woltz: Duke Pond SCAPE: Stapleton Waterfront Park Public Sediment/SCAPE Team: Bay Area, California SCAPE: Town Branch Commons Snøhetta: Willamette Falls Riverwalk Snøhetta: Times Square Reconstruction West 8: Longwood Gardens Master Plan West 8: Simco Wavedeck West 8: Irma Logs

90 93 95 97 98 100 102 105 106 108 111 112 115 116 118 120 123 125 127

PART THREE

Expanding possibilities

129

8 More than both ways with photography: beyond the objective and subjective for landscape architecture

131

9 Many uses, many contexts, many meanings: fluid photographic practices in landscape architecture

138

10 Combining photographs: complex processes, complex landscapes

150

11 Near, not-of: complex landscape narratives, complex photography

160

Bibliography Interview bibliography Acknowledgments Index

168 175 176 177

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Preface: how to approach this collection

Though as a whole this is a cumulative work, each of these essays can stand alone. Major themes repeat throughout, yet each essay has its own particular point and character. A reader may go from beginning to end or pick her way through in an order that is most interesting to her, or closely read only one or two chapters here and there over a longer span of time. There are three sections to this book. The first set of essays lays groundwork, discussing daily uses of photography in landscape architecture, presenting concepts from the body of literature in photography, art and cultural theory, and contextualizing larger issues of contemporary photographic making and meaning within the daily practice of landscape architecture. This introduces readers to a more critical understanding of how photography “works” and how its unique representational qualities influence our design decision-making process. Discussion is pointed towards how the process of photography and the reception of the created work create depth in understanding complex landscape systems. The second section is collected case studies of interesting, active and rigorous uses of photography within the discipline of landscape architecture. These case studies are all examples of uses within daily practice and demonstrate different tactics and methods through application in specific projects. Some case studies may be unique methods, while others are examples of practices widely utilized. The case studies are about far more than the visual photographs presented. They are interested in process and knowledge creation, which are discussed in each of the narrative captions. These processes may not be apparent by simply viewing the images. The case studies can be read by themselves, yet they are more deeply conceptually contextualized when read in relationship to the essays. Case studies may help kick-start your own unique way of working with photography. The last set of essays explore new techniques and theories, opening up possibilities for complexity and multiplicity in photo-based representations for landscape architecture. Photography is discussed as a constant construction, both as a visual representation produced by a photograph and as a collection of personal and cultural events, situations and contexts that ride with and are brought to the photographic image. The implication is that photography is a living document, not a static image, just as landscape is not a static place but a dynamic system. Throughout are photographs, and photo-based representations. These are far more than illustrations to the text, but instead are primary examples of concepts and points. There are many kinds of photographs shown here, often everyday photography, or photography that is made

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j Preface: how to approach this collection

for a very specific task. This is often the kind of photography we don’t see beyond the office or design development process. As a body these essays open the dialog about how we make, use and understand photography in landscape architecture. It is also an invitation to think more deeply and critically about the most influential representational practice in which we engage.

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PART ONE

Groundwork

How photography works in landscape architecture

1 Always photographs A place of beginning for landscape architecture

When I walk into a landscape architecture office I notice the presence or absence of certain things. A person designated to greet and perhaps direct me to a desk or offer me something to drink – or not. Walls or no walls dividing up the space. Offices, open work spaces, messy desks, empty desks. Conversation, music, noise outside the windows, tension-filled quiet. Printers, monitors, drafting desks, 3-D printers. Paper, drawings, models, flat files, construction documents. Library, conference room, kitchen, outdoor space. Maybe a dog. All of these may be present, or often an office depends on just a few things: some desks, some computers, a printer, coffee. But there are always photographs. Photographs of built work are displayed to show the firm’s accomplishments. Photographs of sites for design may mingle with drawings, topo maps, concepts and diagrams on walls devoted to in-process work. Photos are posted on people’s desks for inspiration, or reminders about an important aspect of a site. Photos reside on computers, accessed throughout the day, or hover as wallpaper or screen savers. Photographs amass in hard drives and office servers. Some photographs and their drawings are hidden away from visitors’ eyes because of a project’s high profile, unresolved land rights, private clients or political issues impacting the project. These photographs are made by various people for various reasons and thus yield various visual and narrative results. These various situations are all described by a “why?” Why was this photograph taken? Why do we need these photographs? Why am I taking this photograph? Why have other people asked for these photographs? Why am I using this photograph? This book and my research as a whole pursue an important question: How does photography influence our understanding, valuation and design of landscape places? Photography is an amazingly complex form of representation. Yet it is so easy to use. Just point and shoot. Right? The ease of use combined with its ubiquity results in taking photography for granted. We often don’t consider the complexity of its meaning and use. We passively trust photography to show us what a landscape “looks like.” Photographs do far more than “show us things” – they are a reflection of our values about landscape places. They play a hugely influential yet largely unexamined role in the everyday practice of landscape architecture. Photography is a visual construction, just like any other form of representation that we use. What a photograph looks like is influenced by the motivations, biases and desires of the person releasing the shutter. A photograph is a direct expression of the photographer. Later, how a

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photograph is read becomes a direct expression of the viewer and all the experiences, values, biases and understandings that viewer brings to the photograph. These essays look more closely at how we make and use photography as an everyday practice in landscape architecture. The goal is to unpack how photography works in order to gain a more critical and rigorous understanding of its influence within the discipline. It is important to cultivate a more rigorous understanding of how photography works because we are dependent on photography for the everyday practice of landscape architecture.

THIS WILL NOT BE TIDY Photography, ever changing, defies tidy definitions. Photography is constantly transformed by how we apply it to different uses, ideas and concepts. To try to tie photography up into an easy set of definitions or understood concepts is simply not possible. The way we use photography in landscape architecture constantly changes its definition and meaning. We use photography in very fluid ways, as discussed throughout these essays. Most interestingly, how we make and use photographs can sometime contradict itself. There can be no either/or with photography. It is always this and this and that, and that over there too. This is a messy, and I argue much more genuine, real, active and rigorous interaction with photography, when we allow for multiple situations, conditions and meanings. There will be no final definitive answers about the making and use of photography in landscape architecture. Instead multiple paths will be pursued that lead us towards better understanding of this ubiquitous representational medium. Multiple methodologies are presented that will help increase attention during the process of making and using photography. Similarly, the intent is not to solve problems related to the ubiquitous relationship between photography and landscape architecture. Instead these essays intend to open wide the wicked problems photographic representation poses by adding richness, complexity and rigor to this discussion. These essays apply texts from critical theories in photography, art history, philosophy and visual studies to the unique circumstances of landscape architecture practice. At times an essay is immersed in the specific questions of landscape architecture, and at other times the essay become more expansive and general about the use of photography and its relationship to landscape. Over the last 50 years several academics and practitioners within landscape architecture have discussed photography. Anne Whiston Spirn, most specifically in the Language of Landscape and The Eye Is a Door, has discussed the idea of photography as a process and a way of creating knowledge. Her work on Dorthea Lange, Daring to Look, is an excellent case study of narrative and photography creating depth of knowledge about the circumstance and experience of the Dust Bowl.1 James Corner and Alex McLean’s Taking Measures Across the American Landscape explores the meaning and use of aerial photography, combined with Corner’s explorations of collage, as a way to understand landscape places.2 Allen Berger’s Reclaiming the American West uses photographic practices to look at and critique extraction.3 A.E. Bye made photography as a means to better understand the subtlety and feeling of landscapes as inspiration for his own design work. Alan Ward has photographed significant works of landscape architecture, combining the landscape architect’s eye with the photographer’s eye to reveal the underlying conceptual intentions of these places in ways that few photographers have.4 Charles Waldheim

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Always photographs j

and Andrea Hansen present the uses of photocollage and montage throughout the history of landscape architecture in Composite Landscapes.5 Marc Tribe addresses use of photography as part of his larger body of work on representation.6 Kate Orff and Richard Misrach collaborate to examine the impacts of petroleum production in Petrochemical America.7 These works, situated in landscape architecture, reside within the much larger and longer inquiry into the meaning of photography and landscape. How photography influences our understanding of landscape places is a significant sub-genre within the discipline of photography. William Henry Fox’s Viewfinder,8 Mark Klett’s ongoing Rephotography Project,9 Estell Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock’s Landscape as Photograph,10 Sandy Hume, Ellen Manchester and Gary Metz’s The Great West,11 the work of Robert Adams, the work of Joe Deal, and the new topographic movement all look at the relationships between culture, landscape and change. Robert Smithson used photography to examine landscape as a process. Lucy Lippard continues to produce critical discourse on the intertwined relationship of photography, landscape, place, culture and perception.12 Rebecca Solnit has studied the use of photography in woman-centered practices in land art, sculpture and performance art, as well as photographer and inventor, Eadweard Muybridge.13 There has been a recent influx of exhibits recontextualizing, in contemporary terms, the survey photography of the American West and Ansel Adam’s work.14 Jeff Wall explores the subject of landscape as part of his photographic constructions.15 Conversations in multiple disciplines explore the relationship between photography and the representation of climate change. This is a very short excerpt of a vast, always-growing body of knowledge about photography and landscape. We are essentially dependent on photography for the everyday practice of landscape architecture. Yet, fundamentally, our understanding of how photography works is still underdeveloped. These essays take steps forward to clarify and elucidate how photography works in landscape architecture. This body of work is a place to start, discussing multiple paths for photography within the discipline. As you read this, my hope is that you will be inspired to further investigate, question and introduce more possibilities for how we make and use photography. NOTES 1 Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Anne Whiston Spirn, The Eye Is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery (Boston MA:Wolf Tree Press, 2014); Dorothea Lange, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports From the Fields (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2009). 2 James M. Corner and Alex S. MacLean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 3 Alan Berger, Reclaiming the American West (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). 4 Alan Ward, American Designed Landscapes: A Photographic Interpretation (Washington, DC: Spacemaker Press, 1998). 5 Charles Waldheim and Andrea Hansen, Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014). 6 Marc Treib, Representing Landscape Architecture (London: Taylor & Francis, 2008). 7 Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture, 2014). 8 William L. Fox, View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2001). 9 Mark Klett, Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West (Santa Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico, 2004).

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j Part One: Groundwork

10 Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, Landscape as Photograph (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 11 Sandy Hume and Nathan Lyons, The Great West: Real/Ideal (Boulder, CO: Department. of Fine Arts, University of Colorado, 1977). 12 Lucy R. Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride in Words and Images Through Land Use Politics in the Changing West (New York, NY: The New Press, 2014); Lucy R. Lippard, Ann M. Wolfe, Geoff Manaugh, and W. J. Thomas Mitchell, The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment (New York, NY: Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc., 2011); Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place (New York, NY: The New Press, 1999). 13 Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin Books, 2010). 14 “Ansel Adams in Our Times,” Boston Museum of Fine Art, 13 December 2018–24 February 2019; “Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs,” Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 8 September 2018–3 March 2019. 15 Jeff Wall and Thierry de Duve, Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon, 2009).

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2 Landscape architecture and photography A ubiquitous relationship

Photography is an essential tool in the visual assessment of landscapes for design. Combined with mapping and various demographic, historic, socioeconomic and ecological information, photography informs our decision-making process. As Liz Wells states in Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity, “From its inception photography has been involved in investigating and detailing environments, helping culture appropriate nature.”1 Though the discipline of landscape architecture may agree or disagree with the term “appropriate,” the visual assessment of a place through photography continues to dominate decision making for landscapes. We make photographs of sites we design for, we show photographs of landscapes to our design colleagues, we show photographs of landscapes to our clients, and we use photographs to make visualizations describing our design proposals (Figures 2.1––2.3). The relationship between photography and landscape architecture is ubiquitous. Because of its ubiquity this relationship is taken for granted. It goes unexamined because our relationship to photography is essential and commonplace. Not until very recently has there been a dialogue about photography’s everyday role in the practice of landscape architecture.2 Yet that conversation is episodic and not easily available to the wider discipline. In everyday practice, landscape architects usually do not take into consideration how photography influences our decision making. Photography is considered a tool as a means to an end. The process of photography as well as its history and theory is rarely consciously utilized during our daily use of it. This is as true for landscape architecture as it is for its wider daily use. As Marvin Heiferman points out in his introduction to Photography Changes Everything, We know that photographs work, but not quite how they do. We pay lip service to visual literacy, but don’t bother to teach it . . . we don’t give much time or thought to assessing what makes photography such an effective medium. We should.3

This collection of essays and case studies aims to bridge this gap and initiate a rigorous discussion about “how photography works” in the discipline of landscape architecture. Photography’s ability to visually describe makes photography the visual workhorse of landscape architecture. Our use of photography also creates knowledge through the act of photographing and later combining and viewing photography with other information. For example, cultural landscape preservationists use photography to create a type of catalogue of past landscape patterns in order to make decisions for preservation and design implementation. For community design, photography is used to create inventories about current conditions, such as vacant

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Figure 2.1 Colleagues, community members and friends gather to view a collection of photographs for Mayer/Reed’s 30/40 Anniversary celebration of their interdisciplinary studio based in Portland, Oregon. Photos displayed are just some of hundreds of images collected from Instagram of Mayer/Reed’s works of landscape architecture, graphic and product design. Source: Mayer/Reed.

and occupied storefronts. In making long-term policy for evaluation of scenic qualities in forest management the use of both photo simulations and photographs of current situations is a codified method.4 In all instances photographs serve as a kind of persuasive visual evidence. Photography not only gives us visual descriptions of landscapes but also supports or creates knowledge used for decision making. . . . If we (briefly) compare the volume of discourse on drawing to that on photography in landscape architecture, we would notice a huge proportional difference in favor of drawing. The unique hand of the maker is always evident in drawing; thus it is easier to engage in a critical dialogue about the relationship between process, product and the drawer’s motivations. But with photography, especially the fundamental workaday casual photography we make for in-house design use, the immediately discernable hand of the maker usually isn’t identifiable. And more significantly, it is not important that it be identifiable. In essence the camera is treated like a photocopy machine when we use it to record site conditions. We casually think it gives us what we want and “tells us” what is there, so we become lazy with the use of photography. We treat it like a machine independent from our thoughts and desires. Therein lies the trouble. Responsibility is relinquished when we passively think the camera does all the work. Photography is treated just as an end. Point and shoot. Thus, photography is rarely pointedly taught as a representational medium to be learned and carefully considered within the discipline of landscape architecture. Look at any landscape architecture program. Listed will be courses, often required, on drawing and digital

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Figure 2.2 This detail, from a Nelson Byrd Woltz site “passport,” utilizes photographs and text to explain potential restoration strategies. This information was presented as part of a larger community planning event for Karen Cragnolin Park, Asheville, North Carolina. Source: Nelson Byrd Woltz.

representation (Photoshop, GIS, AutoCAD, any number of BIM-based programs, etc.). Rarely is there a stand-alone course teaching photography as a fundamental tool in landscape architecture. Anne Whiston Spirn’s ongoing offering of “Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an exception. There are occasional one-off optional courses, and photography is sometimes imbedded in a course on representation and media, receiving one or two weeks of time, but to date there is no landscape architecture program that requires students to study how photography works as a representational medium in a stand-alone course.5 Unfortunately, with little attention being paid to teaching photography, a kind of passive attitude is applied. There is a combination of trust in the abilities of the representational tool to do the work, and a letting go of critical decision-making power on the part of the photographer and viewer. I attribute this tendency to unquestioned trust in the idea that the camera creates “optical reality,” which results in a falling away of critical discourse and responsibility for photo making.6 Photography determines how we understand landscape places. The primacy of visual experience cannot be denied. Photography takes viewers into places and shows them “what is there.” Photography acts as a surrogate for actual experience.7 Photography allows us to see places we will never visit. It is through the creation of a very select window, the frame, that the viewer forms ideas and creates knowledge about the places depicted. Photographing creates a narrative about a landscape. . . . Photography is used to “document” sites and their contexts for design. This happens in two ways. (1) A person or set of people is sent to the site and its context to take photographs and “document the site conditions” that seem relevant to the design process (Figures 2.4–2.7). (2) We access remote photography sources through the use of the Internet, archives and various holdings of aerial photography. This second group of photographic images, more often than not, was created by people who are not directly related to the design of the site and usually have no relationship at all to the process, project, goals and so forth.

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j Part One: Groundwork

In both cases, these types of photographs are casually treated as objective – as a straight kind of document, and truthful. We photograph sites to get “information.” That information is used to make decisions. Because of the optical reality the photographs produce, we passively trust them as we view them. The problems start here because we either don’t realize or forget, because of the context in which these photos are presented (as documents objectively describing), that the act of photographing is an act of selecting. Photography shows, but the very act of framing also takes away, removes and abstracts. Photographing means selecting what is shown and, equally important, what is not shown.8 These selections are made by a person who consciously and unconsciously imbues every framing and release of the shutter with a set of personal values. Relationships are created or denied based on what is combined in the frame, how the camera is tilted, how close or far the subject is from the photographer and so forth. Basically, all of the formal aspects of photography determine how we understand the place.9 So when we look at other people’s photographs of places, we are looking at their particular biases and their unique understanding of the place through their acts of selection/ framing. We can’t get around this situation. To approach this condition in a productive way, we must learn to always view photographs critically and actively. We must constantly ask questions about what is presented in the photograph and about the choices behind the presentation of that information. What is left out of the photograph? What am I not seeing? Does the relationship in this photograph actually exist? If this was taken from a different point of view, or with a different framing, would the strength of this relationship

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Figure 2.3 West 8’s masterplan for Longwood Gardens values the ephemeral experience of this historic landscape. Photocollage techniques represent moments of feeling and memory in the landscape. Source: West 8.

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Figures 2.4–2.7 Photographs were made to assess site conditions for a downtown revitalization project in Tucumcari, New Mexico. These photographs later aided in mapping out vacant lots and storefronts, as well as valuable assets, such as the Odeon Theater. Source: Author’s photos.

remain? Do I understand enough of the context? Do I understand any context from these photos (Figures 2.8–2.13)? The person making the photographs of a site for design is in a very powerful position. Through her choices she will determine some of the directions taken for the design. She not only shows information but also creates knowledge about a place through her act of framing and choosing. This is why it is important for landscape architects to both think critically while making photographs and develop an understanding of how photography works. One must actively use the tool of the camera, not relinquish critical decision making by simply pointing and shooting. Why is taking an active position so important? One example is this: It is easy to disregard a particular aspect of a place by simply not photographing it. Often this happens because of unexamined biases or circumstances that influence the photographic process. This can lead to a gap of understanding about a particular characteristic in a place. An example is my own dismissal of the West Side Highway in Manhattan, New York, while I was making photographs for the High Line Competition in 2003. 10 After I came back from a threeday photography trip (after much traipsing, climbing and trespassing), I looked through my

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Figures 2.8–2.13 As a set, these photographs depict senses of scale and space through multiple views. But if we were to see only one or two of these photographs, the understanding of space and scale could be quite different. Greylock WORKS, North Adams, Massachusetts. Source: Author’s photos.

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photographs and shared them with others. Someone asked me what the West Side Highway looked like. I didn’t have a single photograph, even though it is immediately adjacent to the High Line at several points. It dawned on me that I did not photograph it because I unconsciously did not like it. The most important interrelationship, especially at what is now Hudson Yards, was totally neglected. Instead, I only remember walking along a blue construction wall on a narrow sidewalk in the cold wind with wet socks. Talk about personal biases influencing the photography process. This is one example of the larger point at hand. Landscape architecture as a discipline would benefit from a richer, more active understanding of how photography works as a medium, how photography’s history influences current practices in our discipline, and how the theory of photography can better help us rigorously use it in our daily practice. To this end we can better understand the origins of particular photographic visual conventions and have clearer reasons for why we either continue to use them or question them. Allan Sekula, a formative postmodern theorist in photography, explains, “Photographic meaning is always a hybrid construction, the outcome of the interplay of iconic, graphic and narrative traditions.”11 This hybrid construction means that all photographs show, and all viewers of photographs see, different things. Each photo is a unique, constructed, subjective visual narrative by the photographer. Each viewer brings his or her own reading, laying another set of subjective experiences onto the photograph. Even photographs made to document and generate data have some subjective underpinnings. Deciding on a frame alone has both a subjective and objective side. Any tilting of the camera, choice in lens, time of day, focal point – all of these choices access the subjective, even when they are codified by an objective method. This hybrid construction is also built upon a whole history of photographic image making that in many ways is unique to this mode of representation. When we say we “see photographically,”12 what does that mean? What aesthetic ideals may we be subscribing to that we don’t even realize? One example is the idea that photography is a type of universal language that transcends contexts, cultures and time. The notion, strongly developed in the mid-twentieth century by some of the most influential figures in the history of photography, most significantly John Szarkowski and Edward Steichen13 (and earlier photographers like August Sander), holds up the idea/ideal that photography is a universal language legible to all lookers.14 Sekula explores the origins of these ideas, and questions their meaning and impact in his seminal article “The Traffic in Photographs.”15 Yet this universality, or rather the types of photographs identified as displaying this universality, favor a particular set of aesthetics: highly legible forms, strong geometries and simplicity. They depict the special and interesting, even if their context is the everyday and mundane. Some subjects are deemed “unphotographable” because they are too visually complex, and thus do not meet these particular visual criteria.16 The photographs made in this “universal” mode are transformed into aestheticized objects in and of themselves. They are living up to, often in an unrealized way, the expectations set up by mid-twentieth-century modernism’s interest in universal unity, harmony, clear form and legibility.17 This idea of photographic universality haunts the practice of landscape architecture. It strips out the relevancy of unique, idiosyncratic, temporal, contextual and phenomenological experience

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that can be portrayed with photography, albeit visually “messy.” The isolated “universal” image, regardless of whether we realize it, trumps actual experience and replaces its richness with flatness and formulae. Understanding the history and theory of the medium of photography and applying it to daily practice allows us to see these issues. Then we may more consciously understand why we are making a photograph in a particular way, leading us to ponder the implications of those choices. Heiferman states, “There is no single or simple story to tell about photography. So many photographs have been made for so many reasons that tidy narratives about the medium are impossible to construct or support.”18 Because the very nature of our profession is diverse and multifaceted, so is our use of photography. There is no need to propose a single or set of easily identifiable “solutions.” Instead we can embrace the vast complexity that exists when we make and use photography, bringing to light an active and critical dialog about our practices.

NOTES 1 Liz Wells, Land Matters Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011), 3. 2 The conference “New Territories: Landscape Representation in Contemporary Photographic Practices” (June 2017, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is one of the first of its kind to gather discourses about landscape architecture and photography. In 2015 a small conference on landscape and photography was held at the University of New Mexico. Speakers included Laurie Olin and Lucy Lippard. “University of New Mexico Events,” University of New Mexico, https://elibrary.unm.edu/about/events/2015/10/photopaysage-landscape-representation.php (accessed February 4, 2017). 3 Marvin Heiferman, Photography Changes Everything (New York: Aperture, 2012), 15. 4 Robert Ribe, E. T. Armstrong, and P. H. Gobster, “Scenic Vistas and the Changing Policy Landscape: Visualizing and Testing the Role of Visual Resources in Ecosystem Management,” Landscape Journal 21, no. 1 (2002): 42–66. 5 If you are, please contact me. Besides myself, Anne Whiston Spirn, at MIT, is the only other academic in landscape architecture who has consistently offered stand-alone courses on photography. Spirn has offered “Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry” for over two decades. There are many other academics who on occasion have been able to offer photography-focused courses, yet most departments’ curricula for landscape architecture consider this type of coursework optional. 6 Yet the camera does not replicate how or what we see. Human seeing is a process of viewing with two lenses side by side, not one, and constantly moving optics (our eyes are forever moving as we look). Humans cannot maintain a single point of view while looking. We see with our brain, as the visual information collected by our two constantly moving eyes is translated into vision by our brain. This is an incredibly fast and complex process that includes far more parts than a single lens (eye/glass camera optics) and a light-sensitive surface (retina/film or digital sensor). The camera does not include the sensation of peripheral vision (even 360-degree cameras, which have a huge amount of distortion, still rely on one or two single points of view). 7 Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography (1977, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 3–24. 8 Ibid. 9 The primary formal aspects of photography are frame, composition, point-of-view, scale, time and light. 10 Friends of the High Line, “High Line ,” Friends of the High Line, www.thehighline.org/about/ (accessed February 4, 2017). 11 Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 15–25, 16. 12 This phrase is best associated with Edward Weston’s essay “Seeing Photographically,” The Complete Photographer 9, no. 49 (1943): 3200–3206

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13 14 15 16

Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October 22 (1982): 27–63 Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs.” Ibid. Anne Godfrey, “Commercial Photography and the Understanding of Place,” Landscape Architecture 96, no. 4 (2006): 34–40. 17 Douglas Crimp, “The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by Richard Bolton (1981; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 3–12. 18 Heiferman, Photography Changes Everything, 11.

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3 Making and using Diverse photographic practices in landscape architecture

This essay outlines the major and common ways photography is made and used in landscape architecture. Dominant themes threading throughout these uses are investigated. This catalog reveals the diversity of types and uses of photography within the discipline. It also demonstrates how one photograph may serve many different uses. This essay creates a common ground from which to continue our conversation about photography for landscape architecture. A set of concepts informs and contextualizes this discussion: First: We make and use photography in several different ways. But for the most part we engage in these two practices: 1 A colleague goes out and makes site photographs. These include the site itself and contexts deemed significant to the project. Later these photographs are used by several people to make design decisions. 2 We find photographs someone else unknown to us has made and use them to inform our design decisions. Often these photographs were made for a different purpose other than design decision making. Second: In any and all instances of making photographs, regardless of the technology, a person is making a choice to make a photograph. This condition is at the core of understanding how photography works in landscape architecture. The tool, the camera, has particular attributes, but as the maker, you are still the one making the choices. The camera helps you make the photographic image. But we do not and should not relinquish our active decision-making process simply because we are using a piece of technology (camera) to create a representation we hope will help us with design. Third: This discussion is interested in the photographic practices that are easily utilized and firmly codified within the field of landscape architecture. Still photography made with common and accessible camera equipment (from phones to digital single-lens reflex cameras) continues to be the everyday photographic mode we use for design. There are several emerging methods of photographic image making, but still photography persists as the dominant form because of its accessibility.

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Figures 3.1–3.2 A photograph of a working model can be quickly made and then sketched over – for example, on a tablet – then quickly shared with others via email or text during a design process. In this case architect Marc Andre Plasse was developing ideas for Snøhetta’s expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Design development ideas are easily and quickly shared across Snøhetta’s offices in Europe and the United States. Source: Snøhetta.

Fourth: The great ease with which photographs are shared today creates an instant visual conversation within and across design offices around the world. Instead of sharing words to describe design form or inspiration, one can simply send a photograph of a place, a sketch or a model. Photographs taken in the moment or found in a photo archive are shared and sent easily and instantly to communicate ideas and values. These photographs are sent through our phones, in an email, though a file-sharing service or over some social media platform. They reside in data clouds accessed from any point across the globe (Figures 3.1–3.2). Fifth: The visually based process of making and using photographs also activates nonvisual thinking. Because we make meaning through how we look at and interpret photographs, visual information often triggers the understanding of nonvisual information, experiences and circumstances. Thus, the act of making and looking at photographs creates both visual and nonvisual knowledge.

A CONCISE CATALOG OF PHOTOGRAPHY MADE AND USED FOR LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE The following is a discussion of generally practiced ways photography is made and used in landscape architecture on a daily basis. There are no clear, bright boundaries between these processes. It is useful to acknowledge and embrace the interesting overlaps that occur. One photograph could serve a purpose in many of these categories (Figure 3.3). The context in which

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Figure 3.3 One photograph may be used in several ways and placed in several contexts. This photo was initially made by Mayer/Reed for a photographic material inventory of existing industrial structures on the Willamette Falls Riverwalk site in Oregon City, Oregon. But it can also assist as a spatial analysis of a specific building condition or a representation of color and form, or prompt a former employee to recount narratives about working in this part of the complex.

the photograph is presented defines its purpose, directs the reading and emphasizes focus on particular information. Site documentation These types of photographs are made expressly for the purpose of design decision making. These photographs are usually made by multiple people working on a project and are shared with anyone working on the project. These photographs are often taken casually as a means to collect site characteristics. The general intent of making these photographs is to learn about and document particular situations and conditions. Often there is no predetermined method to making the photographs besides “photograph as much as possible.” This process is often wandering and idiosyncratic. The common default mode of “if we just take as many photographs as we can while we are there we will get what we need” can be problematic. It can lead us down some unaware paths, and often expresses the major attributes of “passive photography” – such as believing the camera will do all the work and remaining unconscious to our decision-making process while photographing. For example, the passive mode of unconsciously photographing only what one “likes” can result in an unconscious bias leading to not photographing what may very well be important aspects of the site. Conversely, there is an upside to a casual approach to photographing. Just making a bunch of photographs allows us to get out of the demands of “picturesque seeing” and making “beautiful photographs.” This casualness allows for photographing something that doesn’t need to measure up to these aesthetic demands. Photographing can be a form of note taking. This casualness may allow us to photograph things that are ugly or “don’t look good” in a photograph, but are helpful for design.1

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Source: Mayer/Reed.

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At its best, this type of photography becomes a process of exploring and investigating – the act of photographing pulls the designer through the site as he or she looks, discovers, evaluates, chooses, observes, analyses, synthesizes and so forth (see the case study “SCAPE: Stapleton Waterfront Park”).” This process includes consciously photographing what is “interesting” and what is considered “significant” in regard to opportunities or constraints in the design process. Often multiple scales of landscape relationships are photographed, from details in geology or accumulated urban processes to human use and interactions, or large-scale viewsheds and hydrologic systems. Understanding of context: seen, unseen Closely tied to site photography is photography that documents contextual conditions. The scale of contexts varies from project to project, based on goals, values, stakeholders and type of project. Context can be simply one scale up, including adjacent neighbors, but no further. More frequently, and more importantly for a sustainable, inclusive practice, multiple scales of context are taken into consideration, from neighborhood to watershed (see the case study “SCAPE: Town Branch Commons”). Photographs are made and used to help investigate and understand the conditions and implications of these contexts for design decision making. Context photography is the best example of how we mix making our own photographs with finding and using other people’s photographs. For example, someone in the office will go and photograph existing right-of-ways adjacent to the multimodal path system design being worked on (Figure 3.4). Those photos are expressly made to show existing conditions, precedents and user expectations. They also may show character, building height, commercial occupancy rates, number of users at a given time and so forth.

Figure 3.4 At 60 percent design development, the existing right-of-way is compared to a proposed multimodal path alignment. By bringing drawings into the field and photographing them oriented to the existing conditions, proposals can be double-checked both in the field and back at the office. Alta Planning utilized this ground-truthing method for their work on CV Link in the Coachella Valley, California. Source: Alta Planning + Design.

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Simultaneously while making these context photographs, someone else in the office is looking on the Internet (most likely) for photographs that also show contextual conditions. These can come from several sources, from photo-based social media platforms to government archives. These photographs run the gamut from casual vacation photographs to photographs made to look at a particular situation that defines a place. Yet in these instances, the photographs were not originally made for the express purposes of design decision making. The original intention of making the photographs, usually by an unknown photographer, is not associated with the design project at hand. For example, a nonprofit organization’s photographs of poor water quality for the watershed I am designing in are not explicitly made to help me make design choices. Most often photographs like this are made to show and convince others that, in this case, poor water quality (1) exists and (2) is a problem (Figure 3.5). Looking at photographs originally made with other intentions is an act of translation. The landscape architect looks at these with her unique sets of knowledge and can see erosion, or a flashy storm cycle, or invasive species present. Photographing those specific characteristics may not have been the intention of the original photographer. Instagram mining is an interesting example – said mined photograph is often a portrait or selfie, but the designer is interested in what is in the background. I may not care anything about the people in the photograph, but I sure am interested in what is happening behind them, from a viewpoint I don’t have otherwise. History Usually we use photographs from the past to help us understand the history of a place. This understanding of the past may be as simple as seeing what the place looked like in 1952, 1909 and 1881. More often we act as investigators trying to piece together clues in order to make design decisions for the present and future (Figures 3.5 and 3.6). These photographs come from many types of sources. More conventionally, historic archives are searched and stakeholders contribute their own collection of photography. More recently Internet searching of broad photo-sharing sites is deployed, especially if we are trying to piece together information that is not readily available yet seems crucial to a decision we want to make.

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Figure 3.5 Photographs like this are made to document and demonstrate the extent of harmful algal blooms (HABs) in the western basin of Lake Erie. This type of photo, applied to data collecting research, is also shared with the general public as a means to educate about HABs and its spatial impact as a water quality issue. This photograph was made September 20, 2017, as part of a larger research effort led by Dr. Andrea VanderWoude. Source: Aerial Associates Photography, Inc., by Zachary Haslick.

Figure 3.6

Figure 3.7 For Washington Place, sets of repeat photographs such as these were utilized by Laurie Matthews and MIG to determine what vegetation, if any, was present when Queen Liliuokalani was living there. The queen had been involved in the planting, maintaining an ongoing plant list. Many of these plants are symbolic of Hawaiian heritage. A sense of the interrelationship between landscape elements (plants, circulation, lawn) and building was also established through the use of making and viewing repeat photography sets. While living at Washington Place, Liliuokalani was experiencing the processes of being removed from her position as queen by American businessmen and government officials. Source: Contemporary photograph by MIG. Historic photograph by Pan-Pacific Press Bureau, May 22, 1935. Washington Place, Honolulu, HI.

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Practitioners working in cultural landscape preservation are most familiar with these activities. They have developed the most codified methods for working with historic photographs within the discipline of landscape architecture.2 The filing of Cultural Landscape Reports and application for protected status in the United States require some form of photographic documentation. Most often these photos serve as visual evidence supporting the claim of historic significance. History is often considered a form of site context. One or several historic aspects of a site inspire core design concepts and determine specific design decisions. Key historic photographs are used to show the reasoning behind these choices and are often used to convince others of the relevance of a particular design concept or design move. Matthew McMahon, for Snøhetta, described this use of historic photography as a kind of “visual spelunking” while figuring out the layers and connections between multiple eras of industrial infrastructure for the Willamette Falls Riverwalk in Oregon City, Oregon3 (see the case study “Snøhetta: Willamette Falls Riverwalk”). Historic characteristics portrayed in photographs may be physical or visual, but they also denote important nonvisual sociocultural history. This is one example of the interrelationship between visual and nonvisual information represented in a photograph. In the case of Willamette Falls it is a literal nonvisual – something from the past is physically covered up and cannot be seen. The historic photographs aid in that discovery, by showing past time periods when those physical characteristics were not covered. In other instances, this photography denotes invisible sociocultural histories, including narratives, values and ephemeral cultural events. A particular physical phenomenon can act as a trigger or signifier for a very complex cultural history (Figures 3.8–3.11). As a part of the ongoing process of developing and interpreting the César Chávez National Monument, photographs of existing conditions were made to reattach current site characteristics to significant narratives about the people, values and uses of this place, which center around Chávez’s formation of the United Farm Workers with Dolores Huerta in 1962. Robert Z. Melnick, who has worked closely with this project, provided narrative information. This photo essay illustrates the interrelationship between photography of contemporary physical characteristics and historic narratives closely associated with these sites. It is important to acknowledge that historic photographs are often conceptually read as objective documents, evidence or records. Our unexamined associations with archives and blackand-white photography often lead us to unconsciously place these photographs into an objective and truth-telling category. Yet the original photographer’s motivations for making these photographs are just as full of biases as anyone who takes a photograph today. We don’t usually have access to what the photographer may have been thinking, but as active viewers we can keep in mind that multiple nonobjective factors led to the making of the photograph.4

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As a part of the ongoing process of developing and interpreting the César Chávez National Monument, photographs of existing conditions were made to reattach current site characteristics to signifi cant narratives about the people, values and uses of this place, which center around Chávez’s formation of the United Farm Workers with Dolores Huerta in 1962. Robert Z. Melnick, who has worked closely with this project, provided narrative information. This photo essay illustrates the interrelationship between photography of contemporary physical characteristics and historic narratives closely associated with these sites. Source: All photos by Robert Z. Melnick, FASLA. César Chávez National Monument, Caliente, California. Figure 3.8 The Keene Cafe, in Keene, California, is owned by the United Farm Workers (UFW) and is still a major gathering place. Artie Rodriguez visited frequently. He was César’s son-in-law and his successor as UFW president. Source: Photo by Robert Z. Melnick, FASLA.

Figure 3.9 Helen’s park. Helen Chávez was César’s widow (she died in 2016). The UFW regularly held parties and barbeques here. There is a film of César serving food and singing in the park during one of these events. The park sits next to the Chávezes’ own house on the site, now owned by the National Park Service. Source: Photo by Robert Z. Melnick, FASLA.

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Figure 3.10 This is a monument to multiple religions that Chávez built on the property. This monument is thought to speak to Chávez’s belief in and commitment to nonviolence. Source: Photo by Robert Z. Melnick, FASLA.

Figure 3.11 Along this road are sites for the trailers that used to house many UFW members. The posts in the background are electrical hookups for the trailers and motor homes. These remnants signal the active and vibrant history of the site. All of these activities are now gone. Source: Photo by Robert Z. Melnick, FASLA.

Aerial photography Aerial photography is made and used primarily for various mapping purposes. These aerial photos are obtained from sources such as Google Earth or other open-source, Internet-based aerial photography sites. Also, government and municipal resources are often freely available or may be requested. Aerial photography holdings reside in institutions of education or historic societies. At times, various private sources (often related to resource extraction or real-estate speculation) may be accessed for specific projects. These aerials are made primarily to map territory of interest, or to monitor and analyze particular conditions or changes over time (Figure 3.12).

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Figure 3.12 NASA utilizes a diverse set of specialized sensor monitoring techniques, many of which produce photographiclike images. This image of winter sea ice in the East Siberian Sea is made by a true-color Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). This image is a combination of two different readings from June 16 and 23, 2002. NASA’s “Visible Earth” website, where this image is found, uses the terms “images” and “animations” to describe visual monitoring products. “Photography” is listed within a much larger set of “Sensors.” Source: Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC.

Aerial photography is complicated, as it can be made in many different ways, with many different types of cameras or sensors, and is often altered to correct for lens distortion or the curvature of the earth, or to make a more map-like, measurable, to-scale representation. Thus, aerial photography, casually thought of as the most “accurate” or “objective” type of photography, is often post-produced in particular ways to meet end-use criteria. Orthographic photography is an example of this. An orthographic photograph has been geometrically corrected so that one may measure space to a specified scale. Thus, many types of aerial photography are actually much closer to mapping (with its series of agreed-upon rules for representation), acting more like a very detailed map than a photograph. The technical nature of these types of photographs is too extensive to be addressed in this short overview. Aerial photography sits within an in-between space. It acts like a photograph yet more often than not is altered to also act like a map. It is important to understand the condition of these representations, realizing that they are like any other manipulated image we make and use. Inspiration and precedents We collect precedents and inspiration by gathering photographs throughout the design process. These photos come from a diverse set of sources: personal photo libraries and purposeful travel; our own photographs of works of landscape architecture; the wealth of photographs available on the Internet about sites of landscape architecture and landscape places of interest. We also consult books, monographs, print media, archives and personal collections (see the case study “Mayer/Reed: Waterfalls”).

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These photographs stimulate creative design development, often helping kick-start the process of form making. Similarly, these photographs are collected as a type of personal catalog, situating the design work in front of us into the larger typologies and history of the discipline. Inspiration and precedent photographs fall under the same influences discussed earlier with historic, context and site photography. The biases and intentions of the photographer influence what is shown and not shown in these photographs. Often these photographs are pictorially interested, so we may see the same compositions and arrangements of forms and functions over and over. Construction documentation Photographs made for construction documentation are often interested in recording process. This can include monitoring contractors’ work on the site and documenting the stages of an installation, recording the installation of a particular new design technology – such as urban tree planting systems, subsurface stormwater conveyance or load-bearing infrastructure. Construction documentation is unique and often shows or captures part of a design that usually becomes covered up and invisible to the everyday user. Construction documentation is a way to show and tell about complex systems that can be hard to conceptually understand without some sort of visual description. Thus, these types of photographs are helpful for informing the public, acting as precedents for future design proposals, and simply documentation for reference within an office. These photographs may stand side by side with as-builts, or help in creating the final as-built document set. Increasingly firms use time laps or continuous video to document construction from one or several fixed points of view. These videos allow one to watch the design construction unfold. Similarly, they can be informative and revelatory to a lay audience in explaining the complexity of any landscape architecture project (e.g., SCAPE’s video of construction for NewYork – Presbyterian & Columbia University’s Chapel Garden for the medical campus in Washington Heights; Figure 3.13).

Figure 3.13 This still from SCAPE’s NewYork – Presbyterian Chapel Garden demonstrates the use of continuous video combined with vector overlays to describe the process of construction. As the construction proceeds in the video, new callouts pop up, pointing out features or changes, such as the one here for the existing cherry grove. A video like this helps connect the complexity of installation with the end design. Source: SCAPE.

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Built work photography Without question, photography is the primary way landscape architects show and share finished work. From websites and photo-sharing social media platforms to print media and lectures, still photography of built work is how we showcase, discuss and explain our work. This type of photography is so influential to our understanding of the discipline that I devote a whole essay later in the book to the discussion of this type of work. Here, I will touch upon a few major points. This type of photography is most often made to show the best parts of a design under the best circumstances. As a tool to both show the excellence of an office’s work and attract potential clients, this photography is primarily promotional and commercially driven. As discussed in previous work5 this type of photography often favors a set of narrow aesthetic values, such as strong angles, highly legible forms, clear viewpoints and aerial oblique views. Often these scenes are motivated by concepts of the pastoral, picturesque, beautiful and sublime. To describe promotional photography for what it is, by no means is a critique against this type of photography. It is simply a means to understand how this type of photography functions. By consciously identifying how this type of photography works, we cultivate an active mode of viewing and thinking about it when we encounter it. Post-occupancy evaluation Photography for post-occupancy evaluation is made to show how a built work of landscape architecture functions or is used. In some cases, this type of photography is used in before/after displays to discuss the benefits resulting from the installation of the new design. Two common sources for regular post-occupancy evaluations, Landscape Architecture Foundation’s “Landscape Performance Series”6 and the Project for Public Spaces,7 utilize photographs from several sources. Firms contribute their own photography of built works, persons performing the post-occupancy evaluations make their own photographs, and sometimes outside sources, such as third-party photography mined from the Internet, are presented along with narrative information, data and surveys about the “result” of the design project. There is not a single codified methodology for making or collecting these photographs. This is different than adopted methodologies for Cultural Landscape Reports (for instance) or visual resource assessment or impact studies. Photographs play various roles in these post-occupancy evaluations. They may form a cornerstone of the report, to simply include a couple of images that show the overall design. They are often user interested, showing people in place taking advantage of the various attributes of the designed space. Generally, these photographs are treated as windows upon the design, relying on an approach that assumes photographs show what it looks like and thus what it is like to be there. This concept, which applies to many of the foregoing examples, will be examined and scrutinized in many of the following essays. Visual resource assessment and visual impact assessment A set of codified photographic methods are utilized for visual resource assessment (VRA) and visual impact assessment (VIA). These repeatable photography methods are deployed to argue for or against a change in the landscape.8 Most often the aim is to show visual evidential information about either the impact of a proposed change in the landscape or the value of existing visual features in the landscape.

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A set of prescriptive methods is deployed that determines the way photographs are made when examining (often with legal implication) the placement and impact of certain dominant features in the landscape, such as wind turbines, transfer lines or other large and tall built forms.9 Similarly, this field has developed methodologies to document significant visual resources for protection, such as viewsheds in and out of specially designated lands, such as national monuments in the United States and heritage sites in the United Kingdom. What is tricky about this process is viewing. There continues to be an undercurrent of discussion about the subjective nature of viewing said photographs, even under the conditions of codified and controlled methods of making them in order to achieve a kind of objectivity. One discussion within this topic is concerned with who is qualified to view and evaluate such photographs.10 Another point I raise is that the information in any of these images is not fixed, because meaning is made through viewing, which is generally a subjective process.11

THEMES AND DISCUSSION Many We make and use many kinds of photographs throughout the design process. Each of these types of photography has its own unique ways of working. A major step towards engaging in active photography is understanding there are types of photographs. All photographs do not function in the same way. Similarly, the ways photographs are made are quite diverse and thus create photographs that do many different things and function in different ways. Photography is not a form of representation that creates a single result. It is a means of representation that produces many results and thus is viewed and interpreted in many different ways. Photography is a form of representation, but it is also much more than that. Photography is a process and a product. The action of photographing produces knowledge and understanding beyond the simple viewing photographs. We often talk about drawing as thinking – as a means to figure something out. Photography, done in an active way, can also be a way to think about a place. Collecting and choosing The photographs we use are collected from many sources – from photographs taken on site by a designer to photographs collected from remote sources, such as historical societies, social media feeds, newspaper archives and other online sources. These photographs are used to understand physical, historical, ecological, cultural and socioeconomic contexts, as well as more unique contextual issues particular to each the site. Because of the diversity of these sources, the photographs add complex and at times conflicting information and stories that are relevant to design decision making. They are a collection of photos taken by multiple people with various motivations and biases. These photographs may be initially taken for reasons that have nothing to do with design decision making. The first motivations for making these photographs are often lost. Yet it is important to remember these original motivations do determine what is shown within the frame of the photograph. These photographs both show what the photographer thought was important and leave out what the photographer did not consciously or unconsciously consider important.

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This is simply a condition of collecting photographs from multiple sources for design. This can’t and shouldn’t be avoided. Because of this condition it is important to treat these photographs with conscious care and a critical eye. Doing so can allow access to a much richer set of information. Choosing ends up being the ultimate act. What photographs do we choose to use from these various sources? Are we aware of our own biases as we choose? Am I choosing based simply on some kind of pleasing aesthetic? Am I choosing photos that have no people in them? Am I choosing details over scenes? Or vice versa – scenes over details? Do we deploy an active set of principles when we are collecting these photographs? Sometimes, are we even really looking at them as wholes? Or are we simply extracting information out of them – like punching holes – forgetting the information interpreted is influenced by everything in the photograph? Photographs are not just a collection of pieces of information. They are not unmotivated containers. Photographs are not a box in which information is placed. A photograph is not like my agate collection, in which I place a set of items into a nice box and call it a collection. Photographs are not like, let’s say, a collection of chairs, in which each item is independent of every other item, even though there is a theme to this collection. How many times do we simply extract a single piece of information from a whole photograph without thinking twice about it? That piece of information in isolation no longer tells the same story, or even means the same thing without reference to its original context and intention. If we easily pluck singular items from photographs, how does that translate into our ways of working and thinking? Might we reduce landscape complexity and interrelatedness to simply a number of things collected within the frame of a photograph, without realizing it? What can be helpful is to lay out an active, articulated agenda while viewing and choosing photographs. A similar articulated set of criteria can be applied while picking out particular specific information found in photographs as wholes. This could be attached to a set of principles or values implemented for a particular project. This agenda can help us see the whole, and consider relationships presented in the photograph, not just singular objects or characteristics (e.g., Mayer/Reed’s Willamette Falls material inventory and SCAPE’s work for Stapleton Waterfront Park, presented as case studies). Investigating and interpreting: past, present, future Landscape architects, and those in the larger environmental design fields, possess broad yet specialized knowledge when looking at photographs. Though the intention of the original photograph may have nothing to do with specifically showing landscape phenomena, we are able to see a vast amount of information. We read species, drainage, topography, development patterns and levels of ecological health. We see traces of climactic activity, agricultural patterns and signs of pollution. We are investigators. We apply various sets of knowledge to how we interpret any photograph. We possess the skills and knowledge necessary to ask a series of questions about the landscape viewed in any photograph. Most powerful is our ability to see and think about not only the present related in the photograph but also what the past may have been, and what the future holds (Figure 3.14). This is one of many ways in which photographs are thick12 and present many types of knowledge and information. Acknowledging this thickness releases us from the concept that a photograph is a single, isolated moment in time. Joe Deal’s13 photograph Backyard, Yorba Linda, California, 1984 is an example how the past, present and future of a landscape can be interpreted in a single photograph. The two figures

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Figure 3.14 Backyard, Yorba Linda, California, 1984, from the series Subdividing the Inland Basin, by Joe Deal. Source: Robert Mann Gallery, New York. © The Estate of Joe Deal.

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sit casually on lawn chairs, drinking Pepsi and having a smoke. Their two poofy white dogs laze in the dirt. The scene appears to be just-finished construction on a new suburban housing tract. We see the two people starting to play out their future use of the yard, lawn and patio, even though those elements are not yet present. The composition of the photograph cuts the landscape in half diagonally with the roofline and fence line. This compositional element reinforces a layering of past, present and future. The past lies beyond the roof and fence line. Several landscape pasts exist in the background: the immediate past of the construction bins; the past altered landscape of the power line corridor; and the past of the landscape beyond the fence, with its different vegetation pattern. We see the present: the people with their Pepsi and cigarettes are enjoying a day outside of their new home. We project thoughts onto them. Their hair is the same. Are they a couple, or siblings, or roommates? Some see humor in the poofy hair of the dogs matching that of their owners. Perhaps we have a similar experience of a place like this. And we see the future. The people are demonstrating their future desires for the yard. We expect, based on our knowledge of development for this part of California and the date of the photograph, that the background landscape will also soon be developed into housing. We view these characteristics within the frame, but we also project these characteristics outside of the frame and predict the larger future patterns and uses of this landscape. Professional experiences and education, as well as personal memories and associations, intertwine. If you are a viewer who grew up in a place like this, your understanding of this photograph has a different tone than mine. If you have never been to California, your projection of what this photograph means to you will be different from someone like me, who has spent a considerable amount of time in landscapes like this. Time How we relate to and understand photographs changes over time. In many instances, the landscape architects I interviewed discussed the benefit of looking at a set of photographs over a long period of time. It was essential to allow time to pass and continue to return to specific photographs as a means to cultivate a deeper understanding of the place.14 Working on a project over time involves constant acquisition and transformation of information, knowledge and understanding. Essentially, we are not the same person when we look at a photograph on the first day of a project as we are on the hundredth day. Our understanding and knowledge have changed, so what we see and how we think about what is depicted in the photograph change. Generally, we have increased our knowledge and understanding about the project. What was insignificant or not even noticed in a photograph on first viewing may now take on new meaning. Our external knowledge changes, and thus our reading of the photograph changes. We see things we did not see before, and their relevance increases or transforms. In rigorous practice, we allow for this time to look, and look again. We take time to ponder, let things simmer, step back and reassess, get “fresh eyes” and see things “a-new.” Looking at photographs, again and again, is an essential part of this process. This is an ever-changing relationship, with an ever-changing set of information, understanding and knowledge, similar to our own relationship with the design project itself. Photographs are not static. Once we actively participate in the inherent relationship between the viewer and what is depicted in the photograph, we understand that photographs change and grow, because we acknowledge that we change and grow. What I see in a photograph yesterday may be very different than what I see and how I interpret it in two years.

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These themes are about the ongoing relationship we have with all types of photographs. The relationship is interdependent between the photographer conveying subject matter and the viewer interpreting it, often through a process of investigation.

NOTES 1 This idea was brought up several times in interviews. Of note were discussions with John Donnelly, Technical Principle, SCAPE, November 17, 2017 (New York, NY), and Jeramie Shane, Principal, Mayer/ Reed, July 25, 2018 (Portland, OR). 2 See the following for standards in the United States: National Park Service, “Cultural Landscape Report Standards,” National Park Service, www.nps.gov/dscw/clr-standards.htm (accessed May 24, 2019); National Park Service, “Heritage Documentation Programs: HABS, HAER, HALS,” National Park Service, www.nps.gov/hdp/ (accessed May 24, 2019). See the following for a compellation of resources and standards for the UK: Heritage Portal, “United Kingdom,” Heritage Portal, www.heritageportal.eu/ Resources/EU-Countries/United%20Kingdom.html (accessed May 24, 2019). 3 Interview, Snøhetta, New York, NY, July 18, 2018, Matthew McMahon, Landscape Architect. 4 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the “Wisconsin Family” as an example. 5 Anne Godfrey, “Commercial Photography and the Understanding of Place,” Landscape Architecture Magazine 96, no. 4 (April 2006). 6 Landscape Architecture Foundation, “Guide to Evaluate Performance,” Landscape Performance Series, www.landscapeperformance.org/guide-to-evaluate-performance (accessed May 26, 2019). 7 The Project for Public Spaces, “The Project for Public Spaces,” The Project for Public Spaces, www.pps. org (accessed May 26, 2019). 8 There is a vast body of research and guidelines on this subject. Here are a few places to start: United States: Grant R. Jones, David F. Sorey, and Charles C. Scott, “Applying Visual Resource Assessment for Highway Planning,” in Landscape Architecture Graphic Standards (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 130–139; Bureau of Land Management, “Bureau of Land Management Visual Resource Management System,” Bureau of Land Management, http://blmwyomingvisual.anl. gov/vr-overview/blm/ (accessed May 26, 2019). United Kingdom: The Landscape Institute, Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013). 9 For example, Robert, Sullivan and M. Meyer, Guide to Evaluating Visual Impact Assessments for Renewable Energy Projects (Fort Collins, CO: National Park Service, 2014), http://blmwyomingvisual.anl. gov/docs/NRR_VIAGuide-RenewableEnergy_2014-08-08_large.pdf (accessed May 26, 2019). 10 James Palmer and Robert Sullivan, “On the Role of the Public in Visual Impact Assessment, With an Invitation for Reader Participation,” Visual Resource Stewardship Conference Proceedings: Landscape and Seascape Management in a Time of Change (Lemont, IL: November 7–9, 2017). 11 Anne C Godfrey, “How Photography Works: Understanding Photographic Subjectivity in Visual Resource Assessment,” Visual Resource Stewardship Conference Proceedings: Seeking 20/20 Vision for Landscape Futures (Lemont, IL: October 27–30, 2019). 12 See Chapter 8. 13 Joe Deal (1947–2010) is closely associated with the new topographic movement and its genre-shifting show at the George Eastman House in 1975, curated by William Jenkins. Deal’s subject matter usually centered on the altered California landscape of the 1970s and 1980s. Later, Deal returned to his childhood landscape in Kansas to produce his final body of work, West and West. 14 For example, this issue was discussed with Michelle Delk, Partner, Discipline Director – Landscape Architecture, Snøhetta, July 18, 2018, New York, NY; Carol Mayer Reed, Principle, Mayer/Reed, July 25, 2018; Nans Voron, Associate, SCAPE, November 17, 2017; as well as McMahon and Donnelly.

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4 Making photographs Making landscapes

“You use the word ‘make’ instead of ‘take’ when you talk about photography” is a frequent observation when I discuss the relationship between photography and landscape architecture. Let me explain why. Photography is an act of creation. A photographer actively engages in her environment and makes photographs based on a set of desires, pre-visualizations,1 objectives, ideas and hopes. When we think of photography as an act of making, we take the first critical step towards actively engaging in the process of photographing. First, let’s examine the word “taking.” Two concepts related to the idea of “taking” perpetuate problematic ideas about photography: 1 Photography is a mechanical activity working independently of the person releasing the shutter. The camera is responsible for the result of the photographic representation. The camera “takes” the photograph.2 2 Photography is a way to possess something external from the photographer, bring it back and keep as an object (often of desire).3 This is a consumptive position – I “take” a photograph of a place because I like it and want to possess it. These concepts of “taking” construct a passive, unconscious relationship with the act of photography because they deny, or at least muffle, the actual complex relationship between photographer and subject matter. Saying I take photographs removes consideration of how values, desires, biases, past experiences and so forth influence the process of photographing. The result is threefold: (1) a passive use of photography continues; (2) awareness of biases influencing photography is not cultivated; (3) the unique relationship between photographer and subject matter is not valued. Simply saying that I will, or you will or she wants to make photographs of a place starts to claim human interaction and decision making in this process of photographing. The use of make (instead of take) is a small yet powerful cognitive step towards actively engaging in the relationship between photographer and subject matter during the process of photographing.

THE CAMERA AS COPYIST The use of the word “take” expresses of the concept of photography as a mechanical tool functioning independent of the user. Photography, in part because of its explicit technological nature,

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is (still) casually trusted as acting as an autonomous mechanical copyist. The machine produces the representation, not the person operating the machine.4 William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography,5 constructed the idea of photography as an exacting copyist, possessing the ability to create an image replicating human vision. In many of his writings, including what is considered the first book on photography, The Pencil of Nature (1884),6 Talbot relinquishes his own role in the making of a photograph. Talbot states, “The [photographic] plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.”7 Earlier in 1839, when Talbot first describes his discovery in a lecture to the Royal Society in England, he repeatedly uses the word “copy” and “imitate” in relation to the several applications he foresees with this invention.8 These applications are all concerned with recording phenomena to be later used for some sort of analysis, appreciation or utility.9 “The first kind of objects which I attempted to copy by this process were flowers and leaves. . . . These it renders with utmost truth and fidelity.”10 Joseph Niépce and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre also expressed similar sentiments about their inventions.11 Other contemporary artists and writers believed photography presented the real, was a means to draw with light and had the capacity to imbue detail beyond the ability of the painter. Edgar Allen Poe stated in 1840, The Daguerreotyped plate is . . . infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands. . . . The variations of shade, and the gradations of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth itself in the supremeness of its perfection.12

Because of its perceived exactitude, photography was thought to be the death of painting as an art form. “From today, painting is Dead!” Paul Delaroche famously exclaimed after viewing a daguerreotype for the first time.13 Thus, the concept of photography as a mechanical means of copying was almost immediately associated with the invention. Another result of this association was derision for and dismissal of photography as a practice of lazy unskilled persons who need do nothing, only release the shutter. The poet Charles Baudelaire’s fiery condemnation of photography in 1859 contributed to and some would say started the now useless, yet unshakable debate of photography vs. drawing.14 Baudelaire shames those who practice photography as being ignorant tools of industry, not art. “If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it all together, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.” 15 Baudelaire finds the ease and accessibility of camera work threatening, as he has little respect for the mass audience, who he believes is overly influenced by the proliferation of machines.16 The novelty of photography, combined with the machine-nature of this form of representation, combined with the time period of the invention (when there were sweeping changes in labor and culture because of the ongoing development of machines and factory production), created the bright kernel of an idea that photography functioned of its own accord. Photography was a machine-based practice. The machine was seen as separate and independent from human activity (as both a positive and negative attribute).17 Photography “copied,” and the mechanical act of photography conceptually did not involve a human.

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Figure 4.1 Andrew J. Russell was one of several photographers documenting the resources and geologic features of the American West in the 1860s–1870s. This particular photograph comes from the publication Sun Pictures of Rocky Mountain Scenery, published by V.F. Hayden, who conducted surveys of the West for the US federal government. This collection depicts views along the Pacific Railroad line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California. This photograph is of Castle Rock in the Green River Valley of Wyoming, taken in 1868.

Photography is one of a set of technologies developed in the early and mid-1800s that transformed the world. American historian Walter Prescott Webb attributes six technologies to facilitating the settlement of the American West.18 Similarly, advances in factory technologies and mass production had already changed labor and society across Europe. Photography is not included in Webb’s list, overshadowed by larger charismatic technologies, such as the transcontinental railroad and the John Deere plow. Yet photography was used to provide persuasive visual descriptions of the possibilities that lay waiting in the West through the numerous US surveys conducted in the 1860s through the 1890s.19 Photography is credited with forging a conceptual opening of the western United States through these photographic images.20 These survey photographs were meant in part to portray viable places to settle and create new economies21 (Figure 4.1). Stating that a technology transformed the world, not human use of it, abandons, relinquishes or deserts any agency a human user of the technology might have. This simple construction maintains a cognitive mind-set that separates a technology from the implications of human decision making around that technology. It is a deterministic position, often passively taken as simply the way it is. Adding to this deterministic mind-set is that the invention of photography produced something (a photograph) that had almost no basis for comparison. Though the camera obscura and Claude glass had been used for centuries as a way to create drawings and paintings and view the landscape, there was nothing that “fixed” these projected images onto a static ground. The “art of fixing the shadow”22 made photography new and magical.23 There was nothing useful in

Source: Library of Congress.

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comparison (except painting, which in retrospect was not a productive comparison) in order to assess and understand how photography “worked.” So, the simple idea that one releases the shutter and the camera does the rest might actually have been the only conceptual place to start with this invention. As time passed and the use of photography proliferated, so did more sophisticated, complex conversation. In the twentieth century a photography-centered discussion emerged, directly exploring how photography worked on photography’s terms. László Moholy-Nagy and Edward Weston, practicing in very different modes, each created a body of written work examining the unique characteristics and potentiality of photography: such as Moholy-Nagy’s “A New Instrument of Vision” (1936) and Weston’s seminal “Seeing Photographically” (1943).24 The extent and sophistication of this discussion have unfolded, resulting in a rigorous and diverse set of histories and theories examining photography through itself. A series of important theory proliferated in the late twentieth century, including Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977),25 Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1981),26 Victor Burgin’s collection Thinking Photography (1982)27 and Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s Photography at the Dock (1991).28 During this time, and into the early twenty-first century, photography is presented through cultural lenses as well as aesthetic. Mary Warner Marien’s Photography, a Cultural History (2002)29 presents a holistic approach to teaching the history of photography through its cultural implications. Liz Wells’s Photography: A Critical Introduction30 compiles a series of essays looking at the many ways photography works and influences cultural discourse. This body of work examines how meaning is made through the process of photography – as a process of making values, knowledge and histories. It has moved beyond the simple fascination of how photography takes, records or copies, and instead is concerned with creating, making and influencing. With such books as Photography Changes Everything (2012),31 full acceptance of the validity of all of the different ways photography is made and used has taken hold – including the use of photography in the sciences and the vastness of the pedestrian, everyday proliferation of personal photography. Instead of pitting photographic “types” against one another in order to declare what is most virtuous or correct, photography is accepted as many things, with many uses, applications and implications. This new era in photography theory makes room for the premise of this book. It is now legitimate to talk about how landscape architecture makes and uses photography within the larger discourse of the history and theory of both photography and landscape architecture. It is also now possible to discuss how some of these ways of making and using are unique to the discipline. Examples will be discussed throughout the following essays.

TAKING: TO POSSESS AND CONTROL The set of verbs commonly used to describe the act of photographing –– take, shoot, capture — relates to concepts of removing something, taking it away and possessing it. These verbs also conjure ideas of the subject becoming an object that one can own, admire, idealize, desire and control. The subject matter becomes an aestheticized object hung on the wall or viewed on a screen. The action of aestheticizing and fetishizing these scenes, places, people and animals leads to thoughts of possessing and controlling the subject photographed.32

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This is complicated. First, let’s allow this concession: when I have a photograph of my dear border collie on the home screen on my phone, or you have a photograph of your child, loved one, companion animal and so forth this type of photograph is thought of as a loving memento. We often conjure a feeling of love while looking at this memento, enjoy it and thus participate in creating such mementos. It is similar to a daguerreotype of a sweetheart I would have kept in my pocket in 1845 (Figures 4.2 and 4.3). But let’s say I have a photograph of the Grand Tetons mountain range in Wyoming, United States, displayed in some way, shape or form. This photograph could be either part of a calendar – let’s say a Sierra Club calendar of Ansel Adams’s photographs – or a photograph I made myself that I post-produced and printed to frame and hang on the wall. Or it could simply be a photograph of the Tetons from some unknown source that is my screen saver (Figure 4.4). If this photograph is “taken” or “shot” or “captured” and I claim it as mine, then I am creating a construct of ownership, possession and objectification. Under this line of thinking the subject matter of the photograph is instantly decontextualized from its place, time and, in many cases, its meaning. This abstracts it into an aesthetic object, which allows it to be loaded with a whole set of desires, ideas and values that may have nothing to do with the original unique subject matter, or the relationship of the photographer to the subject matter.33 As soon as the subject matter becomes something to be possessed, desired, captured or taken, the act of decontextualization snips it loose from all manner of meanings, histories and contexts. This is an act of abstraction, transforming the subject from a living event and phenomena into a purely visual representation. In many cases the photographic representation becomes its own entity, becoming detached from the actual time and place in which it was taken.

Figure 4.2–4.3 Daguerreotypes were made for specific purposes, as the one here, which was most likely made to give to the subject’s sweetheart or betrothed. The leather and velvet case allows the photograph to be carried in a pocket or bag, such as a train case, and then taken out and easily viewed. Today, photographs of our animal companions, such as Bardwell the border collie (shown in Craters of the Moon National Monument, Arco, Idaho, 2018), are made and then put into a device where they can easily and frequently be viewed, such as a phone or tablet home screen. These devices are the contemporary version of the velvet-lined leather case, allowing the photograph to be easily carried and viewed at any time. Source: Public domain daguerreotype. Author’s photo of Bardwell.

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Figure 4.4 Grand Teton National Park, Moose, Wyoming. East shore of Leigh Lake (2018). Source: Author’s photo.

A different way of discussing the complexities and implications of this relationship is the idea of photographic ambiguity – the meaning of a photograph is always ambiguous. John Berger describes this circumstance in the brief introduction to Another Way of Telling. “A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.”34 Photographic ambiguity allows for a multidirectional relationship between viewer, subject matter, photographer and context, instead of a one-way relationship of taking and possessing, putting the photographer or viewer in the controlling, dominant position of ownership. By making we acknowledge the process of photographing. Making implies relationality in the activity of viewing and imbuing meaning. The idea of ownership and objectification may be more available to scrutiny if we think of photography as a making relationship between photographer, subject matter, viewer and context of viewing. This has different cognitive implications than taking and capturing, which imply ownership rather than relationship.

ANSEL ADAMS AND THE CRAFT OF MAKING PHOTOGRAPHS “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams, Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (1935)35

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) is arguably one of the best-known photographers in the world. If you don’t know his name, you have at least seen one of his photographs. Adams is best known for majestic black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially major US national parks,

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such as Yosemite and the Grand Tetons. He was given his first camera (a Kodak Box Brownie) at age 14 as part of a family trip to Yosemite in 1916. Adams cut his teeth on landscape photography while hiking in the Sierras as a teenager. His hiking and photography skills progressed through his teens and twenties, allowing him to eventually take large-format view cameras into the field.36 I show Adams’s work as a means through which to explain how photographers choose to augment what a photograph looks like through all stages of the photography process. Over and over I encounter the deep desire to believe that the eye and the camera do the same thing and thus a photographic image is fixed in meaning and shows “reality.” Ansel Adams, through both his photographs and his words, is helpful in demonstrating that this is not the case. In lectures I present how Adams used red filters (e.g. #29 F) on his deep depth-of-field lens (eventually an f/64) to create high contrast and clarity in the negative. I then discuss different techniques one would use in the darkroom, including the zone system, and use of filters. Often, I show Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, From Lone Pine, California, 1944 (Figure 4.5) and

Figure 4.5 Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, From Lone Pine, California, 1944, by Ansel Adams. Source: Collection Center for Creative Photography. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

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mimic on the projected screen the actions of dodging and burning37 used to increase the contrast and bring out the deep blacks and crisp whites for which Adams is best known. To this day I am surprised by how many of my students or members in the lecture audience are almost blown away when I explain these processes. The first time I gave this lecture about Adams’s working methods in the darkroom I had a student insist that I was wrong. She was appalled at the idea that Adams would engage in such “trickery” in the darkroom. My explanation that these processes were documented did not budge her. Even more surprising was the fact that she herself was a photography student. Adams to her was an untouchable icon, not simply a fellow photographer toiling away in the darkroom. To circumvent this repeated knee-jerk reaction of disbelief, I turned to Adams himself to help me out. In his autobiography, Adams writes an explicit play-by-play of how he first arrived at the use of a red filter while photographing Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927 (Figure 4.6), which he calls the major turning point in his photographic practice.38 To this day I enjoy reading this passage in class: As I replaced the [glass] slide [in the Korona view camera], I began to think about how the print was to appear, and if it would transmit any of the feeling of the monumental shape before me in terms of its expressive-emotional quality. I began to see in my mind’s eye the finished print I desired: the brooding cliff with a dark sky and the sharp rendition of distant, snowy Tenaya Peak. I realized that only a deep red filter would give me anything approaching the effect I felt emotionally. I had only one plate left. I attached my other [red] filter . . . and released the shutter. I felt I had finally accomplished something, and did not realize its significance until I developed the plate that evening. I had achieved my first true visualization! I had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print.39

My audience finally started to accept what I was saying when they heard Adams himself state that this was a creative process of making an idealized vision. It is as if I am lifting up a veil when I present Adams’s own discussion of his work. Sharing Adams’s conceptual process provides the audience with a set of concepts that help unlock the ability to see photographs for what they are – a creation by the photographer. Adams’s words so clearly rebuke the passive notion that the camera shows us what we see. We make photographs, not take them. Adams continues: The visualization of a photograph involves the intuitive search for meaning, shape, form, texture, and the projection of the image-format on the subject. The image forms in the mind – is visualized – and another part of the mind calculates the physical process involved in determining the exposure and development if the image of the negative and anticipates the qualities of the final print.40

More recently I have included another example of Adams’s work. I show a photograph of Adams, with his bolo tie and gleeful eyes, sitting in front of two prints of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941 (Figure 4.7) In his autobiography he describes the difference between the photograph on the left and the photograph on the right: During my first years of printing the Moonrise negative, I allowed some random clouds in the upper sky area to show, although I had visualized the sky in very deep values and almost cloudless. It was not until the 1970s that I achieved a print equal to the original visualization that I still vividly recall.41

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Figure 4.6 Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927, by Ansel Adams. Source: Collection Center for Creative Photography. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

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Figure 4.7 Ansel Adams with an earlier and later print of Moonrise (1981). Source: Jim Alinder.

These two photographs are from the same negative. Adams describes how he chooses to print the photo in a new way, better matching his own visualization over time. Even recently my audience has a hard time believing the two photos shown are from the same negative. Adams is entirely straightforward and sincere when he explains how and why he changed his mind about the way he wanted this photograph to appear. Adams makes it clear how the photograph is not independent from the desires of the photographer who made it. This is a simple idea, yet is still a conceptual leap for those who are first confronted with how photography actually works: “Those aren’t really the same photograph, are they?” “Really?” “No way!” The truth of this matter continues to be hard to accept because of the casual perpetuation of the false idea that photographs capture exactly what we see. Adams’s work continues to be an excellent example of how all photographs are determined by the visualization of the photographer – be it through extensive technical and skillful work in the darkroom or someone like you or me making a photograph for site design. The photographer engages in making a photograph that translates the vision of what he thinks about the subject matter (Figure 4.8). Certainly, there is constructive critique of Adams’s photography of the American West. He created a set of iconic images reinforcing the majestic and the sublime. Adams’s photographs usually do not show people or the obvious activities of human intervention. Yet it is important to understand that Adams is not the first photographer to work this way. Adams follows in a lineage of photography that utilizes the visual conventions of the picturesque and sublime. Several photographers, including Charles Leander Weed (1824–1903), Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and Carleton Watkins (1828–1916), photographed Yosemite in very similar ways (Figures 4.9––4.10).

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Figure 4.8 Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, by Ansel Adams. Source: Collection Center for Creative Photography. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

The same viewpoints and scenes have been photographed over and over since cameras were first taken into Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. Adams was quite familiar with these photographers’ previous work.42 This very critique of Adams is also what makes his photography such a good example. Adams is very clear about his intentions. He is making photographs to create a feeling and to make his idealized vision of these landscapes. His writing on photography is very exacting about how to make the photograph one envisions, not take a photograph of what one sees. Adams published numerous books, including The Camera, The Print and The Negative, delineating techniques to achieve these goals.43 Yet often my audience, even those who know Adams’s work, still wants to believe these photographs are what one experiences when visiting these places. One wants to believe Adams has taken or captured a real moment, in a split second. Consider transferring this tendency to how we view our own photographs for landscape architecture. How often do we believe or trust photographs – from site photography to built-work photography – to show us what we see? One way to acknowledge that photography is a form of creation and translation is to consider how much time it actually takes to make a photograph. For Adams a long span of time is devoted

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Figure 4.9 The Half Dome, 4,953 feet, Yosemite, Cal., by Carleton Watkins (American, 1829–1916) (negative c. 1865– 1872; albumen silver print c. 1882). Source: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Figure 4.10 Best General View, Mariposa Trail, by Carleton Watkins (American, 1829– 1916) (albumen silver print 1865–1866). Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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to the creation of his unique “visualizations.” There is time preparing for the trip, there is time finding the points of view, there is time setting up the large-format camera, there is time metering light, adjusting the lens and choosing a filter. The shutter is released and then there is innumerable time working in the darkroom to make a print that satisfies Adams’s vision. This is an act of creation, a process and a commitment to making. Many of these time-intensive steps, even if we don’t work in the darkroom, apply to our own photography. We have taken aspects of a place into consideration through preliminary research and discussions with clients. We have translated this information into our own first steps for design, often before we actually walk onto a site and start making photographs. All of this contextual information colors our way of looking, seeing and photographing. These contexts, influences and preparations manifest themselves through how we first make photographs of the places we design for. This creates an unbreakable relationship between photographer, subject matter, viewer and context, which is further discussed in the next essay.

NOTES 1 See Edward Weston, “Seeing Photographically,” in The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells (1964; London: Routledge, 2002), 104–109; Ansel Adams and Mary S. Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1986). 2 Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Marien explores the implications of the idea that the camera does all of the work on its own accord (in relationship to its invention). She also she discusses the oft-mentioned concept of “magic” applied to the act of photography. Early writings about the newness of the invention refer to it as “magical” and a “miracle,” giving it yet another set of qualities that separate the user of the camera from the act of making the photograph. See especially “The Origins of Photographic Discourse: Spontaneous Reproduction,” 1–20. 3 For example, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 4 William H.F. Talbot’s and Joseph Niépce’s first writings about their photography inventions are often considered the origins of this idea: William H. F. Talbot, Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing: Or the Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil (London: Printed by R. and J.E. Taylor, 1839); Victor Fouque, The Truth Concerning the Invention of Photography: Nicéphore Niépce, His Life, Letters, and Works (New York: Tennant and Ward, 1978). 5 Joseph Niépce and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre are also credited as simultaneous inventors of photography. The year 1839 is most often cited as the birth of photography. Foundational writings, discussions and critiques proliferated during the following four decades. 6 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844; New York,: Da Capo Press, 1969) unpaginated. 7 Ibid. unpaginated. 8 Talbot, Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing: Or the Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil,1839. 9 Talbot discusses the following potential uses for photography: “Portraits”; “Painting on Glass”; “Application to the Microscope”; “Architecture, Landscape and External Nature”; “Delineations of Sculpture”; “Copying of Engravings”. 10 William Henry Fox Talbot “The Art of Photogenic Drawing,” in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, 3rd Edition, edited by Vicki Goldberg (1839; Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 39. 11 Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839–1900 12 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Daguerreotype,” in Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg and Amy W. Meyers (1840; New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 2005), 37–38.

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13 Stephen Bann, Paul Delaroche: History Painted (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 4. 14 The assertion that one is better than the other – that drawing is better than photography – is a fairly useless debate when it comes to contemporary practices in landscape architecture. Both of these forms of representation play crucial roles in daily practice. They also function in different ways. There is no need to pit these practices against one another. 15 Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859,” in Photography in Print: Writings From 1816 to the Present, edited by Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 125. 16 Ibid., 125. 17 One example of this discussion forms the thesis of Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; London: Oxford University Press, 2000). 18 Webb lists the following technologies in his book The Great Plains ((London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931): Colt six-shooter (1835), barbed wire (1874), windmill (medieval Europe), John Deere plow (1846), transcontinental railroad (1869) and harvester. Cited in Carolyn Merchant, American Environmental History: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 102. 19 Timothy O’Sullivan, one of several survey photographers, made photographs documenting water, timber and geologic resources. His work was aesthetically influenced by the Hudson River School painters and the concept of the picturesque. O’Sullivan’s photographs for the Clarence King Survey (1867–1872) are cited as inspirational by Ansel Adams, and the critic John Szarkowski. Photographers associated with the new topographics, such as Robert Adams and Joe Deal, refer to the great influence of these photographs. Two sources: Britt Salvesen, ed., New Topographics, (Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2009).; Karen Haas and Rebecca Senf, Ansel Adams, (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 2006). 20 Sandra Phillips, “To Subdue the Continent: Photographs of the Developing West,” in Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996), 13–49. 21 Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 22 A common phrase expressing the wonder of photography, influenced by Talbot’s own fascinated body of writing about his invention. 23 The word “magic” has always been a common descriptor of photography (Marien, Photography and Its Critics). Even to this day we see the use of the term “magic” to describe the capabilities of smart phone cameras, or the latest advances in DSLRs. 24 For example, László Moholy-Nagy, “A New Instrument of Vision,” in The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells (1936; London: Routledge, 2002); Edward Weston, “Seeing Photographically,” The Complete Photographer 9, no. 49 (1943): 3200–3206. 25 Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). 26 Roland Barthes and Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 27 Victor Burgin, Thinking Photography (1982; Houndmills, Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1993). 28 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (1991; Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 29 Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002). 30 Liz Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998). 31 Marvin Heiferman, Photography Changes Everything (New York: Aperture, 2012). 32 See Catherine Lutz and Jane Lou Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Deborah Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry in the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by Richard Bolton (1985; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 125–143. 33 Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic 34 John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (1982; New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 7. 35 Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography, (London, England: The Studio Limited, 1935). 

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36 Ansel Adams and Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (1985; Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1996). 37 Dodging and burning are simple physical techniques used in the darkroom while making photographic prints. Dodging is the act of covering parts of the light-sensitive photo paper while making an exposure with the negative. This act makes those portions of the photograph lighter. Similarly, burning is the act of covering most of the photographic paper and “burning” certain sections to make them darker. These techniques, to avoid harsh lines on the exposed photo paper, involve constant movement of the “masks” used, thus the terms “dodging” and “burning.” 38 Adams and Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, 69–79. 39 Ibid., 76. 40 Ibid., 78. 41 Ibid., 274. 42 Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, 183–184. 43 Ansel Adams and Robert C. Baker, The Print (1950; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011); Ansel Adams and Robert C. Baker, The Camera (1980; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011); Ansel Adams and Robert Baker, The Negative (1981; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011).

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5 Meaning is a relationship Gathering and investigating photographs to create landscape knowledge

The photograph never stands alone and speaks. A photograph is not independent and isolated from time or place or context. A photograph does not mechanically work away like some perpetual motion machine creating meaning. A photograph is not a closed system.1 Because a photograph continues to be considered a physical (optical) object we tend to think of it as a fully formed, discrete, fixed thing. Similar to the previous essay’s critique of the concept of taking photographs, thinking of photographs as objects alone flattens the photograph’s meaning and relieves us from our important responsibilities as viewers. A photograph’s meaning is constantly shifting and changing because of who looks at it and the context in which it is viewed. There is an unbreakable relationship between viewer and photograph. This relationship gives meaning to a photograph. The photograph does not mean by itself.2 Photographs don’t do things. Photographs are activated by looking. The meaning of a photograph changes as viewers and contexts change (Figures 5.1–5.4). Thus it is helpful to think about photography this way: Photography is relational. Photography is activated by looking. Photography is injected with meaning in relation to its context. Photography shows, but does not tell by itself. Photographic meaning is dependent on a critical relationship between four irremovable parts: Photographer Photograph (framed subject matter) Viewer Context A photograph would not exist without a photographer’s interests in a particular subject matter. A photograph does not mean without a viewer. A photograph is always presented in a specific context. Photography made and used for landscape architecture engages in all parts of this relationship. We make photographs of sites and contexts to help us understand and make design decisions. We choose and photograph subject matter we think is important, helpful, meaningful or just of interest. We then view our own and other people’s photographs. These photographs can be from various sources – our own photographs, historic photographs, photos acquired from online social media sources and various government agency sites, and photos provided by clients, just

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Figure 5.1–5.4 These photographs of the Very Large Array outside of Socorro, New Mexico (2006) can be understood from a diverse set of perspectives. If the viewer is totally unfamiliar with this place, these images may be fantastic, even strange. For those familiar with the geography of New Mexico, the Plains of San Agustin may be closely associated with these photographs. For those who understand what these radio antennas are used for, they may think of ongoing observations occurring at the various astronomical radio observatories around the world. For those with particularly specialized knowledge, they may even be able to understand what kind of study the position of the radio antennas indicates. Source: Author’s photos. Very Large Array, New Mexico.

name a few. These photos are viewed in various contexts – on our phones while in the field, in the office pinned up with other information, in historic archives joined with various other photographs within a collection, in presentations to stakeholders and so forth. We may even view photographs in galleries or exhibits that somehow relate to and inform design process.

VIEWING AND INTERPRETING All photographs are viewed by an individual. Viewing is an activity that defines photography. For landscape architecture, historic photos are viewed to gain understanding about a past condition: settlement patterns, historic vegetation, people in place, use of place, change over time and so forth. Historic photographs are casually thought of as “documents” that show “facts” about the past (Figure 5.5).

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Figure 5.5 Wisconsin Family (c. 1880), by Charles Van Schaick; Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Source: Wisconsin State Historical Society.

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This historic photograph comes with some information: the photographer’s name and date, and because of its source, we know that this is in the state of Wisconsin, in the United States. Now, let’s examine what we see and think when we look at this photograph: This is a house. It is wood frame construction. There is a woodpile. It looks like the house has been added on to over time. There is a chimney. This is a family. A husband, wife and two children. The other adult is a relative. There is a mysterious space between the three adults. They have a dog. There are no leaves on the trees. This is in a rural area. This is a portrait. The photograph is taken at a 45-degree angle to the house. Most of the house is seen in the photograph. This list could go on and on. It could be joined by some very complex narratives that you may be constructing at this very moment. Almost every piece of “information” gleaned from this or any photograph is based entirely upon experiences the viewer has had in the past. This can be acquisition of knowledge through study – such as plant identification or historic residential building styles. But more often everyday experiences are relied upon to make associations. The common reading that this is a “family” is based upon a set of codified cultural conventions. The identification of the season is based on simple life experiences (no leaves = not summer). Based on the characteristics around the house, one may think this is a farm. Compositional choices by the photographer may be interpreted in various ways based on the viewer’s previous experiences with photographic practices during the time period. This discourse between viewer and subject matter has been discussed and debated in various ways throughout the contemporary body of theory in photography and art – from Walter Benjamin’s questions about the implications of mechanical reproduction3 to Roland Barthes’s punctum and stadium,4 Susan Sontag’s ethics of seeing in On Photography5 and Jeff Wall’s exploration of meaning in “near-documentary” photography.6 All of these stances assume that meaning is dependent on an interactive relationship between the viewer and the photograph. For example, Barthes feels the “prick” (punctum) of meaning when looking at a photograph, but he also acknowledges that the prick/feeling is because of his own memories and associations. A semiological position creates the foundations for many of these arguments, and this argument here. For our purposes I augment Terry Barrett’s position of interpretation in Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images.7 As previously stated, landscape architects act as interpreters of photography. We bring what Barrett calls “original context” to how we read, understand and essentially interpret photographs – “history, social history, art history and the history of the

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individual photograph and the photographer who made it”8 are all applied. Any photograph we use in landscape architecture is assessed for information. We draw upon our previous experiences (original context) to describe what is assessed. We also heavily rely upon “external context” as we make meaning. “External context is the situation in which a photograph is presented or found.”9 External context for landscape architecture starts with using any photograph within the context of a specific design project. External context also occurs when we assess a photograph for signs of ecological health or lack thereof (when the original intent of the photograph was something else). External context may be our own aesthetic appreciation of a pattern or material we view in a historic photograph. These are just a few examples. We constantly apply external context to the process of viewing and meaning making with any photograph we use in landscape architecture. Interpreting photographs through applying external information is supported by the development of postmodern theories throughout many disciplines. Generally speaking, the bodies of theory from feminism, post-colonialism and positions examining popular culture all support a set of powerful ideas around the primary concept that readers/viewers bring unique, variable and valid understandings to texts or visual representations.10 These postmodern positions allow for multiple experiences, and a spectrum of understandings. These positions often question narratives of the hegemony. Postmodern thought helps us walk away from dualistic thinking of good/bad and right/wrong and accept ideas of multiplicity, positions on a spectrum and that five possibilities may exist, not just two, or one. Within landscape architecture, Elizabeth Meyer’s body of work questions acceptance of dualities and calls upon us to consider concepts of multiplicity. In her essay “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture”11 Meyer proposes an in-between space for landscape architecture that allows for many possibilities, instead of relying on strict binaries, most notably culture/nature. More recently Meyer’s “Sustaining Beauty” continues to advance the conversation by addressing how the use of aesthetics should support sustainable systems design.12 Meyer calls for a both/and position: beauty and sustainability can mutually inspire one another. She questions the assumption that there is no space for beauty in sustainability, or that beauty and sustainability are a dichotomous pair that do not benefit from reconciliation. Instead Meyer asks us to consider multiple possibilities and experiment with how beauty and sustainability intertwined instigate successful design solutions. When we apply these postmodern concepts to the use of photography for design decision making, we create the ability to see more and consider more as we look and interpret. Let us return to the Wisconsin family. Instead of thinking there is one answer to each of the visual relationships presented, let’s allow for multiple possibilities. This scene could be late fall or early spring. The presence of a stocked woodpile does not negate the spring narrative, because we have no idea what is immediately outside of the frame (e.g., depleted woodpiles, or several cords of wood standing by). We can also see more by taking into consideration what we do not see, what is not shown to us by the photographer. Multiplicity allows acknowledging that we don’t have a firm explanation for a particular situation. We can allow for the messy unknown if we dismiss the binary “I know/I don’t know.” We might know, but we’re not quite sure. The space in between – being not quite sure – can allow for far more texture, depth and possibility for our design decision making. For instance, we’re not quite sure what the space between the figures in the Wisconsin family photograph is about. We can spin multiple interesting narratives about it, but we just don’t know

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for sure. One of our narratives may be “correct,” but it is unlikely there will ever be confirmation.13 We can work with and accept assumptions and allow for multiple alternatives. We often must work this way in our design process – accept a set of assumptions and allow for multiple alternatives and outcomes for our designs.

PHOTOGRAPHER Asking “Why did the photographer make this photograph?” acknowledges the presence and motivations of the person on the other side of the frame and camera. Returning to the Wisconsin family, we can ask several questions: Why did the photographer ask the people to stand outside of the house for the portrait? Why did he show most of the house? Was there a particular occasion that prompted the making of the photograph? By asking these questions we can combine our own internal dialogue and personal experience with focused questions of inquiry about the motivations of the photographer. This acknowledges that there are always at least two people in a photograph: the photographer and the viewer.14 In the end, we won’t know for sure what the motivations of the photographer are, unless we have information directly from the photographer. Many photographers, such as Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Annie Leibovitz, Sally Mann and Jeff Wall, talk and write openly and extensively about their photographic process. Sharing our own motivations and interests in making photographs for design projects can be quite informative. But within landscape architecture we often work with photographs made by amateurs, often anonymous, and often not at all directed towards design decision making. This condition requires us to ask several questions, instead of passively accepting the information displayed in the photograph at face value. We simultaneously can become the viewer and a type of investigator placing ourselves into the shoes of the photographer. We can interrogate the photographs and the photographer (known or unknown) with our interdisciplinary set of knowledges. We have the capacity to act as both photographer and viewer.

VIEWING FOR OURSELVES, VIEWING FOR OTHERS As landscape architects we are uniquely able to put ourselves into several cognitive viewing positions at once as we engage in active inquiry through photographs. Our designs are about ourselves and others. We are simultaneously the designer and the eventual visitor. Our discipline is unique in that our work is always for others – other people, other places, other animals, other systems. We are constantly making choices for these others. And we take others’ experiences into consideration as we design. Our work addresses multiple scales, multiple problems and multiple species – there is no singularity about what we do. We are investigators constantly taking multiple factors into consideration, from multiple viewpoints. For example, we can ask about what is both present and absent. A question such as “What am I not seeing in this photograph?” can often yield important results. “What contexts are outside of the frame that may or may not influence the subject matter of the photograph?” More questions unfold: “Are the relationships presented in the photograph as strong or weak as they appear here?” “What if this photograph was taken at another time of day, or during another season? What would we see then?”

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As we engage in this process, all of a sudden a whole series of questions can unfurl, such as “What is behind the photographer?” “Is this a typical day?” “If this is a special event, what does that mean?” Viewing photos in this way means we are acknowledging the unbreakable relationship between viewer, photograph, photographer and context. This active engagement allows designers to embrace several layers of information and understanding about a place, helping us create designs that have physical and cultural longevity.

CONTEXT The fourth piece of this relationship is the context in which the photograph is viewed. Context is quite influential for the viewer’s experience and understanding of the photograph. Context can mean several things in this discussion. Most tangible is the physical context in which a photograph is viewed. But also important are the textual context, the temporal context, the sociocultural context and, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the context of personal experience the viewer brings to the image. External context, to return to Barrett’s term, sets up expectations and colors mind-set. These conditions influence a viewer’s thoughts, understanding and interactions with a photo. For example, if we look at X photo printed and mounted in a well-made large-format frame, hung in a clean white gallery, joined with other similarly well-presented photographs, one’s viewing is considered to be quite different than if one were to encounter that same photograph on a screen, at a smaller scale, held in one’s hands, perhaps on the couch at home. Or if viewed on the side of a building, driving at 60 miles an hour. Or, as landscape architects, if one were to view that photograph on a printed piece of paper lying on a desk with other photographs and perhaps some concept sketches (Figure 5.6). Each of these contexts would alter the way one encounters the photograph and thinks about the subject matter. In a gallery I think I should be quiet, not touch what is on the wall, and generally present myself as a responsible, professional adult. But if I were viewing the same photograph at home on the couch with a cup of coffee, in my pajamas, with my border collie curled up next me, then my mental state would be different. I may see and think about the image in front of me differently than I would while standing in the gallery. Similarly, if I was standing with my colleagues in the office, and we were viewing said photograph with some historical photographs, some site photography, a set of statistical information about the current socioeconomic condition and so forth what I think and share about the photograph may be different as well.

GATHER UP PHOTOS We gather up photos, in all of the various ways outlined previously, and view them to understand and thus make decisions for the sites in which we design. These photos are printed out and pinned up, filed in computers, viewed on screens and sometimes placed in visual slide shows for in-office discussions, stakeholder meetings or later for lectures. The photographs are gathered and combined into presentations that are projected or printed and handed out to community audiences (Figure 5.7).

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Figure 5.6 Display for Willamette Falls Riverwalk outreach meeting, Snøhetta Office, New York, New York, November 2018. Source: Author’s photo.

What is of most interest is these photographs are viewed in groups, sets and multiples, and often very much right next to one another or one after another. I am thinking of looking at a mass of photographs on a pinup board or laid out on a table, or clicking through photos on a screen with some kind of photo viewer. Often a smaller set of photographs is pinned up in personal work space as a kind of reminder or helpmate. This is a unique way of working with photographs. Landscape architects and environmental designers make and use photographs for both visual and nonvisual understanding of place. Photographs are not just visual information to us. Looking at them in groups and gathering them up increase this exchange of visual and nonvisual information. Why?

INVESTIGATING Landscape architects are trained to be investigators. Our work is dependent upon gathering up all kinds of information across a diverse set of sources. Though individually we specialize in certain areas of knowledge across the discipline, we must be able to comprehend and utilize information and expertise across a diversity of topics. Our discipline is about working in complex systems full of interdependent relationships. For example, we must work simultaneously with ecological and cultural systems. Any project may influence hydrology, economics, transportation, historic preservation, community gathering, urban wildlife, pollinators and so forth. We are trained to

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Figure 5.7 A park passport handed out by Nelson Byrd Woltz for Mill Ridge Park (formerly Southeast Davidson Regional Park) as part of the master planning kickoff meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. This particular passport presents a timeline of the site annotated with photographs. This passport also asks community members to share what they think and what they learned. NBW’s passports demonstrate how photographs, narratives and project proposals are combined to enliven community process. Source: NBW.

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and continue to hone our skills in observing, valuing and assessing a diverse set of factors that make landscape places. Individually and collectively we build knowledge in certain areas, share that knowledge with others, and use that knowledge to make design choices. This knowledge is a collection of visual and nonvisual interrelated information. That which is visually depicted, for a landscape architect, signals a whole set of nonvisual factors contributing to the visual and physical characteristics of a place. Nonvisual factors can be of several types. Some nonvisual factors have a physical manifestation that is not present, but is understood when viewing the photo. For example, photographs of trees with buried root flares in a plaza signals a problem for those who know what they are looking at. That problem, though not visually available in the photograph, has a physical manifestation discovered when the soil is excavated around the base of the tree – namely, some sort of girdling or root rot. In other cases, there is no physical characteristic of a nonvisual factor. For example, in assessing park distribution with aerial photographs the physical/visual reality of fewer parks in poor neighborhoods is the result of a series of economic and land-use policies. Those policies are not visual per se, as they are an expression of concepts and values, but they do impact the presence or absence of physical characteristics within the urban fabric. Landscape architects constantly assess the relationship between visual and nonvisual information when viewing photographs. This returns us to the concept that viewing photographs is about the unbreakable relationship between photographer, photograph, viewer and context. As viewers we bring meaning to the visual information depicted by the photograph. The photograph in no way tells us that a buried tree flare is something of concern. The photograph doesn’t even tell us that what is viewed is a buried tree flare. The viewer interprets that information. The context of viewing determines what is considered useful information and what information is to be disregarded. That same photograph of the buried tree flares in the plaza may also show who is in the place, or a particular community event, or materials indicative to that region. Yet the photograph is viewed within the context of “assessing urban tree health,” and thus the reading of the photograph is guided in that direction. This same photograph could be placed within the context of “understanding community needs and values.” Then the focus of the investigation would be about who is there, what is happening and how they are using the place. The buried tree flares may not even register. Multiple positions and sets of knowledge are created through the assessment of visual and nonvisual information during the act of looking at photographs. The visual information is obvious to us, but often the nonvisual information needs to be teased out. Something in the photograph – some visual phenomena – signals a system that is not wholly visually represented in the photograph. What is visually represented in the photograph stands as a sign or signifier for a whole set of nonvisual ecological and cultural systems and relationships important to the decision-making process.

PAST PRESENT FUTURE Similarly, because we understand how all of these systems work, when we look at photographs we can see/understand not only the present of the photograph but also the past and the future. The understanding of landscape systems and relationships allows for knowledge of what probably came before. Our understanding of potential outcomes also allows us to envision what the future of that place may hold. Because of our ability to investigate through the use of our accumulated external

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information we are able to see and understand multiple times simultaneously. Joe Deal’s photograph Backyard, Yorba Linda, California, 1984, discussed in a previous chapter, is one example. Another is my photograph here of Richard Haag’s Gasworks Park in Seattle, Washington (Figure 5.8). When we look at photos, and during the process of making them, we see and think complexly. Relationships are seen and understood. What came before and what may come after are predicted. We see at multiple scales, understanding much larger scales and much smaller scales simultaneously. A small detail is legible as part of a very large, complicated and intricate system. The ability to investigate photographs in this way is to truly see the viewable and know the invisible. The ways in which we in landscape architecture make and use photography bring this position into sharp focus. When we look, understand and design we are doing something quite different than some of our associated fields. We don’t focus on single species, single buildings or a single product or process. We can’t. Landscape architects work with multiscaled systems. How we make and use photographs helps us understand these systems and simultaneously displays our values for working this way. We think interdependently and interrelationally. When we look at photographs in sets, multiples, gathered together, contextualizing one another, these micro- and macrocosms expand, thickening, becoming multilayered, more complicated and more complex (Figure 5.9). Linear and nonlinear modes of understanding intertwine,

Figure 5.8 This 2015 photograph of Richard Haag’s Gasworks Park allows the viewer to experience past, present and future. To the right is the past, the original gasworks preserved by Haag’s design. Another layer of the past is the black cyclone fencing around the structures, added later as a safety measure. In the present of this photograph, the Great Earth Mound in the center left midground had been newly restored and reseeded. In the background we see a construction crane, an indicator of the construction boom in Seattle in the mid-2010s and early 2020s. Source: Author’s photo.

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Figure 5.9 SCAPE makes multiple photographic images to study current site conditions and gain inspiration from existing materiality. This collection for Red Hoek Point, in Brooklyn, New York, interweaves ephemeral details, repeated infrastructural forms, and traces of past uses. Source: SCAPE.

and intuitive and rational processes mix. Working this way, we acknowledge the relationship between photographer, photograph, viewer and context. We can open the cognitive position towards multiplicity and active engagement at all points of the process of making and using photographs. We can own and activate our unique ability to see and understand systems, interrelationships, and the past, present and future as we make and look at photography.

NOTES 1 Wells and Price offer a useful overview of contemporary theories of looking at photography in “Thinking About Photography.” Liz Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 9–64. 2 Though Roland Barthes continues to be a lightning rod in regards to the multiple interpretations of his work, he constructs the semiotics-based argument that the act of looking at photography is relational. Roland Barthes and Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981; New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 3 Walter Benjamin, “A Brief History of Photography,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings (1931; London: Penguin, 2009), 172–192. 4 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography 5 Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” and “The Image-World,” in On Photography (1977; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 1–26, 153–182. 6 Jeff Wall, Hans D. Wolf, and Joël Benzakin, Jeff Wall: The Crooked Path (Brussels, Belgium: Bozar Books, 2011). 7 Terry Barrett, Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images (Boston, MA: McGraw Hill Publishers, 2000). 8 Ibid., 99. 9 Ibid. 10 For example, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984; Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Dominick LaCapra, The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

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11 Elizabeth Meyer, “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture,” in Ecological Design and Planning, edited by George Thompson and Fredrick Steiner (New York: Wiley, 1997), 45–79. Her essay builds upon Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of new positions for the discipline of sculpture. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring, 1979): 30–44. 12 Elizabeth Meyer, “Sustaining Beauty. The Performance of Appearance a Manifesto in Three Parts,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 3 (2008): 6–23. 13 Even if we investigate the history of the photographer, Charles Van Schaick. No extensive original information is provided with the photograph as it sits in its collection in the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Only this narrative, produced at a much later date for archival purposes, is presented: “A family of five posing with their dog in the yard in front of their house. On the left is an older man sitting in a chair with a child in his lap, and in the center a younger man is standing with his hand on a chair where a woman is sitting with an infant on her lap. Behind them is a wood frame house surrounded by a fence, with an attached outbuilding, and another barn or shed in the far background.” Charles Van Schaick, Family Posing in Yard, circa 1800–1940, Negative, 10x8 inches, The Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI, From: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM41448. (accessed October 30, 2019) 14 Ansel Adams is often credited with making this comment. This statement occurs across discussions of photography and meaning.

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6 Do we see what we see? More than icons for landscape photography

Landscape architecture is in need of a more robust and complete discussion about the role of built-work photography within the discipline. This essay is a way to start a broader conversation, but by no means seeks to present a set of tidy solutions or positions. Instead, this conversation encourages more expansive thinking about the types of photography we make or could make to represent our work. In order to examine this situation, and broaden the scope of this discussion, let’s unpack some common ideas. Look at any number of firms’ websites and marketing material and it becomes clear how photography is used to create an experience that is ideal. Photographer and landscape architect Alan Ward addresses this situation in his essay “On the Making of Icons.”1 He discusses both the aesthetic practices and the potential ramifications of working this way with photography. He acknowledges how this type of photography may influence design. “This inevitably leads to design works conceived for their potential to appear evocative in print – the pursuit of an iconic image – rather than designed for the complexity of experience itself.” Many choices are made when creating these types of “iconic photographs.” The experience of light, space and use is augmented by aesthetic choices. These photos are often made at the end or beginning of the day to catch the most colorful and dramatic light (produced by the lower angle of the sun, and other atmospheric occurrences, such as clouds and fog). Choice of framing determines the sense of space and scale, potentially making the place appear larger or smaller than it actually is. In these types of photographs framing and composition enhance legibility of angles, paths and forms. Often aerial oblique photographs are used to show sweeping portions of the site. These are made from vantage points that a regular visitor would be unlikely to access. Or they are made with an aerial apparatus, like a drone or helicopter, that gives a view an average human could never experience. Types of human use are represented in many ways. Sometimes these photographs of beautiful, well-designed landscapes are empty of people. At other times the photographs may depict a space full of people at a critical celebratory, yet infrequent moment. The general rationale for making photographs in this manner is to show our designs at their best. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. More often than not what we see in marketing and commercial photographs of landscape spaces is a select instance of experience and vision – ideal and iconic. The use of lighting and framing conventions creates this idealized view and is an expression of the photographer’s own creative and aesthetic sensibilities. In all of these cases, landscape architects, as designers, are fully capable of understanding and identifying what type of photography this is and how it is working: a creative, often idealized, constructed visualization of a designed site. The photographer, through her creative endeavor, photography, makes very specific of choices about how she chooses to interact with and represent

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a place. The sets of people who choose these photographs for publications, websites and award submissions (partners, editors, owners, media specialists, etc.) are usually aware of their own desires to present photographs that create feelings of interest, success and attraction, while simultaneously displaying the best intentions of the design. The common critique of built-work photography – that it doesn’t show what the place looks like, plays to conventions of the picturesque, and emphasizes certain aspects of the design and while diminishing others – falls apart once we recognize that a photograph is not the place itself. Photographs do not wholesale copy what we see or experience. Ward asks, “[T]o what degree are the photographs faithful renditions of these landscapes?”2 The critique of being tricked or fooled by these photographs also does not hold in that (1) we are designers and understand how visual experience can be manipulated, enhanced, shifted, augmented and controlled by how it is presented; (2) in possessing this knowledge we have the ability to recognize how these types of photographs are working; (3) and we realize that a photograph does not and cannot be expected to reproduce or replace actual experience. We have the ability to understand that we are looking at an amazing photograph. Ward knows this, arguing that “the designer, critic and viewer should understand the roles of photographic images in the making of icons of landscape architecture.”3 These photographs sit next to the actual experience of these places. Built-work photography cannot and should not be expected to stand in for the unique on-site experience of these landscapes. As sophisticated designers and viewers, we can understand that built-work photography is an interpretation of the place – not the place itself.4 Ward, in his essay “On Photographic Interpretation,” states, “Photography is a process of editing out the unessential to make compelling images.”5 Ward outlines how the interrelationship of his own knowledge about the history of seminal works of landscape architecture (e.g., Kiley’s Miller Garden and Olmsted’s Biltmore) and his command of the photographic process inspires his own photographic interpretations. A photograph is a creation just like any other form of representation, from drawing to 3-D renderings. A photograph is the result of the photographer making choices and constructing a scene through the use of the camera. As discussed in Chapter 4, this tricky notion of “taking photographs” really gets us into trouble. On a daily basis we make drawings, diagrams, Photoshop renderings, construction documents and three-dimensional models. We say we “make” all of these things, and we treat them like a creation that we are responsible for. Yet we still say, “I take,” “you take,” “she takes” photographs. Thus, somehow, we continue to relinquish responsibility for the visual result of the photograph, forgetting it is a creation. Our best designs are complex, create places of social exchange, provide ecological function and allow for meaningful experiences. These contemporary designs function far beyond the creation of the scene. How can our photography express this complexity? Can we show more diverse types of photography when we share our finished work with others? Can we have more than icons? This essay will address one part of this larger question: how can we allow for photography to be all the things that it is and can be? Can we accept that photography is not sight (site), but instead an act of creation that can result in a diversity of aesthetic expressions? . . . Built-work photography, often made by skilled, practiced, professional photographers, is a form of art making, just like design. These artists strive to make photographs that are beautiful, interesting

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and evocative, eliciting some kind of emotional response. These photographers are interpreting these places, as Ward does. They make creative works through the process of photography. These photographs are not visual copies of these places. So, when words such as “amazing,” “beautiful” and “incredible” are used to describe builtwork photography, perhaps stepping back and accepting the context and conditions for these types of photographs actually free us up. Seeing these types of photographs for what they are allows us to move on. What is the use of continuing to desire or demand that they be something different than they are intended to be? It would be preposterous if I were to stand next to a painting by Jackson Pollock and be angry that it did not look more like Gaugin’s work. It would be rude to look at a colleague’s site photos and be upset that they didn’t look more like Stephen Shore’s. A better path is to discern what type of photograph is being viewed and how it functions or works. This gets back to understanding that photography works in many ways, is used for many purposes and is understood differently based on the context in which it is presented. If we identify and accept what built-work photography most often does – create careful, composed representations that produce an ideal image of a place – we can actually see it and conceive of it more clearly. This is a step towards accepting multiplicity in photographic representation in landscape architecture. There are multiple types of photography and ways to photograph within our discipline, and multiple ways and contexts in which these photographs are used. All types of photography influence us and help us. But each type (of the boundless types) works differently primarily because of compositional and formal techniques chosen by the photographer that affect the visual appearance of the subject matter. Accepting, identifying and understanding multiplicity in photography opens possibility. Allowing for and discussing the different types and uses of photography avoids consciously or unconsciously wanting photography to meet just one set of visual conventions, do one type of job or work in only one way. . . . Let me step back, perhaps digress, and tell a story that demonstrates this point. After I completed my undergraduate degree, I committed to honing my photographic vision and skills. I spent a great deal of time either photographing or working in the darkroom, experimenting with how I wanted my photographic prints to look. I committed to developing flexibility in the printing process. I tended towards higher-contrast filters and lots of darkness in my work (Figure 6.1). It was during this time that I decided to apply to landscape architecture graduate degree programs. Applications required physical portfolios. Fully committed to my photography, I created a portfolio of original photographs for each application. This meant printing five sets of ten unique photographs, mounting them on museum board and colleting them into 8×10 black display boxes (Figure 6.2). I had two mentors at the time, one of whom was dating a photographer. He asked to see the work. I dutifully mailed it off in one of the black boxes. His reply: “Oh my, don’t send those photographs for your application. They are too dark.” He continued to enumerate what they were not: “they are not this . . ., they don’t do that . . ., they don’t look like so and so.”

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Figure 6.1 Petaluma, California (n.d.), by Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author.

Figure 6.2 Photography portfolio artifacts of Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author.

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This mentor wanted my photos to look like his expectation of what black-and-white photographs of landscapes “should look like.” He had a very narrow formulaic view of what this meant based upon visual expectations codified by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and his girlfriend, who photographed in similar ways. He could not accept or actually see what I was doing. His expectations closed off discourse. His expectations were so narrow that he could not accept something different as being valid. He wanted something that he was not getting from my photographs.6 Do we individually and as a discipline engage in this same discourse without even realizing it? We can see photography of built work for what it is, instead of what we want it to be. Often this type of photography is a creative interpretation of a place that seeks pleasure and interest. Sometimes it shows the sublime. Sometimes it is dramatic, narrative, fantasy inducing. This type of photography visually interprets the project. Photographs of built work are not the built work. This is similar to Magritte’s The Treachery of Images This Is Not a Pipe (La Trahison des images Ceci n’est pas une pipe).7 . . . I first wrote about this topic in an article for Landscape Architecture Magazine titled “Commercial Photography and the Understanding of Place.”8 My discussion was based on my stance that the visual experience of visiting sites of landscape architecture can be quite different than the builtwork photos appearing on websites or in publications. I pointed out that many of these types of photographs are made from points of view not necessarily experienced while walking through these landscapes. I described how the photos are taken at times of day favoring more dramatic colorful lighting, such as early in the morning or before sunset. I discussed how the photographs are often made during special events when people are activating the site in unique ways that don’t demonstrate everyday happenings. To explore this hypothesis further, I developed a method of photography that more closely “replicates” (a very tricky word) a visitor’s actual experience. In this method, which I called “user’s viewer photography,” photos were: (1) made at normal times of visitation, such as lunchtime, weekends or after work; (2) made from average human standing eye height utilizing a 50mm focal length; (3) from normal positions that an everyday user would access. And, of course, people would be present in the photographs, as well as other species, such as cranes, small birds, dogs, squirrels and insects (Figures 6.3–6.4). When my photographs using this method were compared to built-work photography – available on firms’ websites’, in Landscape Architecture Magazine, or submitted for award consideration – it was clear there was a visual difference between the two. Several audiences, such as the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, local American Society of Landscape Architects chapters and invited academic lecture groups, responded strongly and favorably to my “user’s view photography.” They do to this day. It is clear to the viewers that they see two different depictions of the places. Though sometimes not as consciously understood, the viewers are looking at two different types of photography that work in different ways. One set, the builtwork photography, is more dynamic and interested in the picturesque, favors legibility, strong form and strong colors, and often shows special events where everyone is highly activated. My “user’s view” method leads to making photographs of the everyday existence of a place, such as puddles, desire lines worn into grass and gray overcast days (Figures 6.5 and 6.6). This method shows ornamental grasses cut down to their rhizome masses in the winter months, wear and tear from skateboard reappropriation and people trudging off to work.9

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Figure 6.3–6.4 User’s View, Crissy Field (Hargreaves Associates) (San Francisco, California, 2002), by Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author.

Figure 6.5–6.6 User’s View, Kreielsheimer Promenade (Gustafson Guthrie Nichol) (Seattle, Washington, 2005), by Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author.

As time has passed, the way I conceive of this work has changed. In the past I held my method as the better way to move forward as we made photographs representing our built work. I stated that my method was more “honest,” “truthful” and “responsible.” Those are some loaded terms. Now I realize they are very closed terms that shut down possibility. Today I think of my user’s-view method as a way – one way – to represent built work that can serve a set of specific purposes with pre-identified methodological criteria. But this method is not the only way, nor it is the “right” way. My user’s view method dwells more in the area of visual resource assessment (which strives to create a set of criteria and repeatable methods for defensible documentation of land-use decision making). The user’s-view method is simply one

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Figure 6.7–6.8 User’s View, Stanford Medical Center (Peter Walker Partners) (Palo Alto, California, 2007), by Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author.

type of photographic representation that utilizes a particular method for making photographs (Figures 6.7 and 6.8). . . . We can allow for multiple types of photography in the discipline. Learning to critically identify the multiple types, and what they accomplish, is the path towards more rigorous, active use of photography within landscape architecture. It is important to understand how certain types of photography are working, or more correctly, what we are doing and making when we choose how to photograph. This is another example of flipping the cognitive tables: “Yes, I am in charge of how this works, I am making photographs, I can easily understand how this photograph is working.” This is quite different than thinking the photograph is doing something to me the viewer, and I passively receive it. Though Roland Barthes says photography pricks us,10 it is our engagement and association with the subject matter of the photograph that prick. Our looking and interpreting cause the prick, not the photograph all by itself. Let’s role-play what is possible under this active cognitive position (please fill in the blanks as you please): Active viewing: “Hey, look at this beautiful photograph _____ (professional photographer) made of ___ (project)! See how she highlighted the texture of the plantings in relationship to this innovative seating by photographing from ___ (angle) at ___ (time of day). That reminds me of when I first visited __ (garden) in England and really understood the craft, intention and effect of putting these two types of textures together.”

Instead of a more passive viewing: “Wow, look at this beautiful place. Let’s go there next time we are in ________ (place).”

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Or this active viewing conversation: DESIGNER 1: See, these photographs show how the users would really like another path cutting

through this section of the lawn. I can now see how ____ (destination) on the north side of this space is much more of a destination point than we had originally thought. DESIGNER 2: Hmm, yes, it is helpful to see this. You can see how much of a visual focal point the steep pitch of that roof creates. Were these taken from the path? DESIGNER 3: Yes, this one is too – see how much visual space the wetland takes up. I think we made the right choice in expanding our reach for this part of the project. You can see from this photograph, also taken from the path, how it creates a strong transition and visual buffer for the high-volume parking lot in the distance. DESIGNER 2: This third photo helps show the experience of being on the bay at this location in the park, where the visitor turns northeast. Keeping the plantings waist height was a really good idea. Instead of: DESIGNER 1: Ugh, people keep walking through the lawn there! I think we can only show this

one photograph of the wetland with the cranes in it. DESIGNER 2: Okay. When working with photographs we can develop a set of stated criteria or values about how we want our photographs to work in relationship to how we want them to look. Larger offices often have designated staff whose specific job description includes developing stated and clear criteria about what they want photography of built work to accomplish, while smaller offices may have design staff and partners who work together to make such decisions. Articulating these values and choices allows us to understand the underlying motivations for choosing certain types of photographs when we share our work with others. . . . There are many possibilities for photographic representations of landscapes. To think that there is only a narrow set of acceptable types of photography stops us short and makes us dependent on icons. Let’s use our excellent investigative abilities to look, discuss, understand and critique. While researching this book I visited several firms and I saw such a diverse and interesting range of photography. These photographs worked in all kinds of ways – documentation of textures and geomorphology, nonhuman species interacting with one another, humans in very everyday ways populating places, scores of historical photos that unearth the complex pasts of sites, construction documentation and so forth. The accumulation of these photographs amasses a visual document that is unique and original to each project. It surprised several landscape architects when I asked to use some of these types of photographs as examples. “This is interesting? But it’s not a very good photograph” was a typical response. I would explain that the process and reasons behind why they made these photographs are very interesting.

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In this same vein, we can make and use more types of photography in explaining and showcasing our work -- portraiture, collage, grids, abstract work, daily use and interactions -- as a means to reveal more of the invisible and visible narratives that make our work meaningful. Creative works that provoke strong feelings are a way to understand the subtleties and importance of emotion and sensorial experience in our design work. Photography that shows everyday experience – the mundane, those cloudy, wintry days – is a way to understand our work through its entire life cycle. Creating photographs of carefully composed scenes may do a wonderful job of describing the underlying intent of the spatial organization of a design. Presenting a matrix of photographs showing details of process may help a viewer understand a complex system. We can accept there are several useful and interesting ways to photograph. There is much to be learned by looking at and spending thoughtful time critically examining the various ways landscapes can be represented with photography. While photographic icons have an important use and place, we can have more than icons.

NOTES 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

8 9

10

Alan Ward, “On the Making of Icons,” LandForum 12 (2002): 24. Ibid. Ibid. My argument is a rejection of Baudrillard’s “hyperreal.” My stance is that we as humans in our contemporary existence do have the capacity to understand how visual media functions and “read it”; certainly those of us who work in design should cultivate this capacity. We can understand when something is made to simulate and when something is real. Hyperrealism is only another construction of a way of seeing and understanding the world. See Jean Baudrillard and Sheila Faria Glaser. Simulacra and simulation. (1994; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). “On Photographic Interpretation,” American Designed Landscapes: A Photographic Interpretation (Washington, DC: Spacemaker Press, 1998), 126. I was accepted to every program I applied to. Magritte, René. The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe) (La Trahison des images [Ceci n’est pas une pipe]), 1928–1929, Brussels, Belgium. Appearing in René Magritte and Didier Ottinger. Magritte: The Treachery of Images. 2017. Anne Godfrey, “Commercial Photography and the Understanding of Place,” Landscape Architecture Magazine 96, no. 4 (April 2006): 34–40. When I discuss this issue audience members often share this piece of information: the American Institute of Architects sends someone to visit sites/buildings before they confirm final national awards. They do not rely upon photographs, narrative content and reference letters alone. The American Society of Landscape Architects at the time of this publication does not require a site visit for national awards. Information about AIA site visits can be found at: AIA, “AIA Honors and Awards,” www.aia.org/pages/6153986-aia-honors–awards (accessed June 1, 2019). Information about site visits is discussed in the application materials accessed behind the AIA member sign-in wall. The application asks for a site visit contact: “The Site Visit Contact must be someone other than the architect or someone within the firm. Please make sure this person is aware they may be contacted by the AIA to schedule a site visit and no communication with the firm can occur should a visit be arranged. Failure to follow these requirements is grounds for disqualification.” Roland Barthes and Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981; New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). Page 47 is one example of the word “prick” used throughout the text.

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7 Active landscape photography Some critical concepts and methods

Working actively with photography reinvigorates conscious and critical practices as we make and use photography in landscape architecture. Active photography acknowledges that the photographer and the viewer bring meaning to the subject of the photograph. Active photography understands how context influences these readings, completing the full four-piece relationship of photographer + photograph + viewer + context = meaning. Meaning in photographs changes. Meaning includes both visual and nonvisual phenomena and is thick with time. The photographer, through the act of photographing, designates the subject matter as something that means. This subject matter, conveyed to the viewer through the photograph, is reevaluated, assessed and given meaning by the viewer through her own previous experiences and through the context in which the photograph is viewed. These are interrelated active actions. The previous essays have introduced a subset of active and conscious approaches to photography, through narrative examples. This essay systematically articulates a series of approaches to cultivate active, rigorous and conscious photographic engagement. These methods are accessible, repeatable and potentially prescriptive. They are presented as an easy jumping-off point. They do not depend on an idea of “talent,” or the right equipment, or some other predetermined barrier to entry. Instead, they are simple and mostly involve changing one’s mind-set, paying attention and being present for the act of making and looking at photography.

ACTIVE MAKING The first step to thoughtful, active practice is to reconceptualize one’s relationship with the process of photography. Photography is an act of creation. The photographer makes all of the choices resulting in a photograph. The camera is not a self-motivated instrument external from the photographer. The camera does not make decisions. The photographer does. Those decisions are made throughout the entire photographic process, from preparation, site visitation and technical decisions made while photographing to any form of postproduction. Indeed, there are DSLR cameras or advanced camera phones that make predetermined choices about exposure, metering, white balance and so forth. Yet those are still aesthetic preferences chosen by someone –– in this case the group of people who decide how these cameras are programed. But I have the choice to use these options, or at least acknowledge that these predetermined, pre-programed aesthetics influence how my photographs look. Even with my smartphone I have the ability to spot-meter to make the exposure I want. I can choose the format of the frame, and I can apply some kind of filter. There is always a choice.

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Denying there is a choice is the problem and leads down the path of passive photography and the idea that “the camera made me do it.” This is not a responsible or accurate position for us to take. We are designers, and thus we understand how many choices are made, can be made and must be made for our designs to be successful. If we took the same passive position for our design work as we sometimes take for photography, it would be as if there was some kind of “landscape machine” and we would press a button while pointing it in a particular direction of our desire and a landscape would pop out. That’s ludicrous, right? Well, often in passive photographic practice, that’s exactly what the camera is expected to do. Press the button and out pops a truthful, fully formed, independent, discrete photographic object that exists in-and-of-itself as some kind of closed system. Instead, let’s look at a set of easy methods that help us become more active in our photographic practices. Slowing down and creating constraints and limits It is easy, in this digital era of photography, to make 500 photographs of a site in a very short amount of time. But how many of these photographs are actually useful for design? When one is photographing so quickly, how conscious and aware can one be? All of us have hard drives and servers full of these photographs. They are often deleted, or more likely forgotten and exiled to an archive folder deep in a set of project files. Prior to the ubiquity of digital photographic representation, stacks of physical photographs accumulated throughout the design process. Yet even with the constraint of rolls of film and development costs, many of those photos ended up in boxes, useless, eventually stored in dead files, or simply thrown out. They were also made quickly and in overabundance. Slowing down and creating constraints while photographing address the pitfalls of passively making too many photographs. Slow down: five second rule There is often a kind of urgency that takes over when we arrive on a site. The goal is to collect as much as possible, usually within a container of time that never feels like enough. This urgency can be quite distracting and diffusing. Slowing down, though it sounds antithetical, is exactly how one can gain focus and learn more. Looking is more important than photographing. Spending time looking, instead of sticking the phone or the camera in front of your face and rapid-fire photographing (shooting!), leads to more active engagement in the site. Looking leads to photographs that are more useful and are more thoughtful. Spending five seconds seeing and thinking before releasing the shutter leads to more active engagement in the subject matter, and more thoughtful and conscious making of photographs. Five seconds does not sound like a lot of time, but take a moment to test this. Set a timer for five seconds, and then look at something while the timer counts down. Did it feel longer than you thought? Did you notice how your attention shifted? I have assigned this method to countless students. I see their work change and become more focused and meaningful when they slow down. They remark upon how surprised they are at the effectiveness of something so simple.1 Try it! Only photograph 5 seconds, 10 seconds or 30 seconds after looking at the subject. Or even after a minute. See what happens.

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Constraints and limits: do we really need all these photographs? We are quite familiar with the use of constraints and limits within the design process. These limits help us be attentive to specific situations. The use of constraints helps focus the process of creating. Yet we seldom constrain ourselves when we make photographs of a site and its context. The default mode is “take as many photographs as possible” and then maybe what we need will “end up in there somewhere.”2 This is a fairly passive way of photographing and takes us back to relying on the camera as some kind of external, self-motivated device, or copy machine, doing the work for us. In interviews, most people did pause after making some form of the previous comments, and took a moment to acknowledge that this might not be working as well as they hoped. Instead, creating a limit for how many photographs we make can greatly increase the number of useful photographs. This method shifts the focus of attention into active engagement. If I can make only a limited number of photographs, I have to pay attention to the choices I make. I utilize four number limits when I photograph, dependent on the scale of the site, the amount of time I have and the likelihood of whether I will visit it again: 24, 36, 50, 100. The limits 24 and 36 are derived from the number of exposures in a roll of 35mm film. Though these numbers may seem arbitrary to anyone who has never used film, these numbers do signal and shift thinking. “Imagine,” I say to my students, “that you have limited funds, and can afford to buy only one roll of color film at about $6–$10 a roll, and processing for $12–$14. You’ll have 24 or 36 exposures. If you are lucky you can eke out one extra exposure, which makes 25 or 37 exposures.”3 With this constraint you are more likely to take more time considering each of the photographs, taking an active position while photographing. The limited resources motivate the photographer to make every photo count (which is a long-standing prompt in photography courses). The limits of 50 and 100 photographs are useful for larger sites. If one has more time, or this is the only visit that can be made, then 100 photographs are helpful. This is still a vastly lower number than 200 or 500 photographs. “But why would I limit myself?” you may ask. “What if I miss something?” Using a limit like this changes one’s thinking. It helps bring forward thought processes, such as “What am I learning? What is important? And what am I trying to show?” It increases engagement with the site during the time of visitation because it heightens attention. I have to make every photograph useful and meaningful (see note 5). Here is an example: I have photographed Willamette Falls4 three times – once on a group tour, once with a colleague and once by myself. The tour, though very interesting, was not an opportunity to make photography useful to my research. I made about 50 photos, of which I found only very few useful. I knew this was happening at the time, and at a certain point on the tour I stopped photographing. I just could not focus in the environment of a tour with several other people with several different interests. Instead, I collected a lot of interesting information through verbal communication about the site – such as how it was used and the many layers of infrastructure that have accumulated on the site. But I could not focus to make meaningful photographs.5 On my second visit I made 111 images and on the third 110. First, let’s be clear that as a trained photographer I do bracket (manually).6 The lighting conditions of the second trip caused me to make only two exposures, the balanced one and one longer exposure. On the third trip the lighting motivated me to bracket on either side of the balanced exposure, making three exposures. I do not count bracketing of the same image as three different photographs.7

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Figure 7.1 Armature, Willamette Falls (2017), by Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author

Willamette Falls is a very complicated place, and it would be easy to make hundreds if not thousands of photos on this site. That would be exhausting. I knew I needed a constraint, so I chose to focus on photographing volumes of space. This was also exhausting, but in a much more productive and satisfying way than in a tedious “I need to document everything!” way. Thinking one can document everything makes one frantic at a site like this. So, I made 221 photographs over two trips. About half I find interesting and useful to understanding the unique scales of volumes on this site. These photographs satisfy my stated goals as the photographer. The photographs were made over about ten hours of time – five hours for each visit. I saw and thought about far more than what I photographed. My memory of this place exists with the photographs, but also extends beyond the photographs, in part because I took more time to make fewer photographs (Figure 7.1). Walking away from a site visit with 500 photos (instead of 100 photos, or 200+ over two visits) may result in those 500 photos having less meaning, being shot in a passive, copying mode. A lack of some kind of constraint (number, theme, directed question) to focus on results in diffuse, erratic photographs. So many photos have less reason for being made. Similarly, combing through 500 photographs back in the office can lead to reduced attention and focus. It may be less possible to pick out those essential, helpful, useful photographs out of a set of 500 than out of a set of 100 or 50. It becomes too much to take in and becomes visually numbing.

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Asking and answering two simple questions 1

Why am I photographing this? To simply take five seconds to ponder this question snaps attention into place. It allows the photographer to look at the subject matter longer. It changes the condition of looking into one of creating knowledge. This moment of questioning also creates space to open a dialog about motivations and biases for photographing the subject matter. Asking this question also creates a stronger bond between the moment of photographing and looking at the photograph again in the future. This moment of alertness, attachment and consciousness helps the making of that photograph be more useful in the future, as more information will adhere, at least to the photographer, and be available when looking at the photograph later.

2

What am I not photographing? Photography is always an act of making a choice. One chooses what is important and designates something in the world as meaningful through the choice of photographing it. In choosing to photograph, one is simultaneously choosing not to photograph something else. Taking a moment and asking, “What am I not photographing?” can reveal three things: (1) Simply identifying what is not being photographed. (2) Biases (which we will talk about more ahead) I am holding that are causing me to exclude a particular phenomenon as I photograph this place. (3) Characteristics or themes around what I am not photographing that would be helpful to pay attention to. Not photographing something isn’t an automatic “bad thing.” Not photographing can mean something truly is not particularly important. That’s fine, but it is important to consciously identify this choice.8

When we aren’t actively engaged in the decision-making process of photographing, biases may cause us to leave something out that might be important. Earlier I referred to my experience of photographing the High Line in New York City while preparing for the 2003 ideas competition.9 I had totally ignored the West Side Highway because I didn’t like it, and because the inclement weather was distracting me. I came back to Oregon and had no photos of this significant adjacent context. Most of us have experienced a similar type of situation. Taking a moment to think about what we are not photographing can be helpful in catching unconscious biases and assist in making sure to photograph what is significant to the design process, not just what we passively “like” or “don’t like.” Casual composition is okay It is okay to treat photography as a means of casual note taking. Photographs for our purposes in landscape architecture do not always need to be highly calculated compositions in order to be helpful and meaningful. They are a means to understand a place, through the act of making and looking. Thus, what I term “casual composition” is okay. For example, if a particular texture, geologic phenomenon or pervasive pattern is interesting, it is okay to have some photos of that particular thing that are just simple subject-matter center-framed photos of those characteristics (Figures 7.2–7.5). Maybe one of these details could be joined by a similarly casual composition showing the larger context, or a photograph that helps us to understand scale. These photographs don’t need to be dynamically visually interesting photographs. There are a couple of benefits to casual compositions.

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Figure 7.2–7.5 In photographing the Fort Mason Community Garden, in San Francisco, California, in 2009, I was interested in understanding the uses and values expressed throughout. Compost and water use practices are different in every community garden, so my photographs are interested in showing the practices here. I was also interested in the vernacular use of repurposed materials throughout the garden, photographing plastic containers acting as cloches and mesh containers as protection against animal grazing. Though there is larger contextual information in each of these photographs, the primary subject of interest is center weighted in each. Source: Author.

First, they release us from the expectations of making good-looking photographs directed by a set of aesthetic ideals. A beautiful, well-composed photograph of a place may not be the best way to photograph that place for the purposes of design. Compositional techniques that favor legibility, strong lines, symmetry and visual conventions of the picturesque or sublime may tell only one part of the story of a place – and leave out other important aspects. This desire for aesthetically pleasing photographs is a strong and tricky bias that most of us passively utilize while making and evaluating photographs. Casual compositions may allow us to actively engage more closely with our cognitive and phenomenological interactions with a place. Why? Instead of utilizing a set of principles that may be external to the self – a set of aesthetic ideals external to you, the place or the moment – the act of photographing can truly be an extension of the self, individual vision and unique moment. Like note taking, it can be parts and pieces of a whole, or a translation or interpretation on the

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part of the maker. Also, it opens up more possibilities for what might be photographed. Instead of shutting down while looking through the frame – “oh, that does not look good” – one can open up. This combined with taking more time, limits and asking “Why am I making this photograph?” can lead to more useful, interesting and diverse photography. Thus far this conversation about casual composition has focused on making photographs, but it equally applies to looking at them. Looking at photographs can allow for casual compositions and the concept of note taking as well. While looking at photographs we or others have made, or while collecting photographs from other sources, we often default (in a passive way) to gravitating towards those images that meet aesthetic conventions we are familiar with. Passively these types of compositions are accepted as “better.” But what are we missing? How much do we not see, because we passively expect and choose familiar aesthetics instead of actively investigating what the photographer is showing in the photograph on the photographer’s terms? Thus, limits can be helpful. When there are just SO MANY photographs to sift through it becomes a visually exhausting process, thus defaulting occurs. If there were fewer photographs to look at, there would be more time to look at each one individually. Then there would be time and space to actively engage in what is visually presented. There would be more space to consider the motivations of the photographer and engage in a personal, internal dialog about biases, experiences, expertise and memory that we draw upon while looking at the images.

ACTIVE LOOKING The previous methods focus on making photographs. We both make and use photographs. Thus, active looking is equally important. Our use of photography is wide-ranging, as discussed in previous chapters We look at photographs that we have made and also at photographs we have gathered from various sources. Active looking is cultivated through conscious shifts in attention, often achieved by asking questions. Active looking embraces multiplicity. Through active looking our ability to learn from and accept interesting, complex and, at times, contradictory information increases. Paying attention to beliefs and biases Each of us brings a set of beliefs and biases to looking at any photographic representation. These are formed by our experiences in the world, and any number of psychological and physiological factors.10 The terms “belief” and “bias” help to put a container around several contextual issues that influence individual perception and understanding: culture, race, religion, gender, personal values, histories and experiences, socioeconomic background, education and so forth. Asking some simple questions while looking at photographs helps highlight the influence these beliefs and biases have on how we read photographs: Why am I feeling/thinking this way? How does the information in this photograph relate to my previous experiences? What knowledge am I drawing upon as I look at this photograph? Where does that knowledge come from? What else would be helpful to know now that I’ve spent time looking at these photographs? What don’t I understand in this photograph? Why?

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Active landscape photography j

Asking these questions is a means through which to stand outside one’s self and have a good look – at yourself. These questions can cultivate a process through which to observe one’s own beliefs from a detached viewpoint.11 Why is this helpful? Often our beliefs and biases may lead us to miss something or over- or undervalue something. As landscape architects our work is for many: countless humans, animals, plant species and whole landscape systems. Because of this it is important to see beyond one’s self. Design is a personal act of creation, yet it can be infused with a broader multivalent set of information, understanding and values beyond what sits within an individual designer. Acknowledge the effects certain aesthetics have on understanding The aesthetic legacies of beauty, the pastoral, the picturesque, the sublime, one- and two-point perspective and familiar compositional tropes all influence how photographs are made. Each of these visual conventions influences choices the photographer makes about how subject matter is presented in the photograph. As designers, we have the ability to identify when these visual conventions are at play. When we look actively and consciously, we can acknowledge the effect they have on the understanding of the subject matter. By identifying how these conventions affect appearance one can have a more observational dialog with one’s self and the photograph. How might conventions of the sublime be influencing the appearance of X in the photograph? How is the focal point affecting the conceptual weight of a particular subject in the scene? How does that relate to my knowledge of this place, or other places, or systems like this? Acknowledgment, questioning and then deeper looking are a rich way to dialogue with visual conventions. To understand they are at play is to understand how they work, and how they influence the perception of the subject matter. This is another example of how to go beyond reading a photograph at face value. This dialogue removes a passive tendency to be lulled, lured and even fooled by some of the visual tactics of common aesthetic conventions for the landscape scene. Our reaction to these aesthetics or styles can mask, distract, cover up or leave out important characteristics.12 If we understand places only through these types of representations, then we miss factors and phenomena that are important to attend to.13 Yet beauty, the sublime and the picturesque have played very important roles in forming the way we value landscape places. Rigor in looking at how these aesthetic styles work allows us to investigate the effects and meanings of these aesthetic ideals, instead of accepting them in passive, unconscious ways, or casting them aside in a wholesale manner. Again, this gets back to asking questions: How is this working on my psyche? What is the emotional effect I am experiencing while I look at this? What are the implications? What are the subtleties? What motivates the photographer? What don’t I see in this kind of representation of place? Spend time with photographs The importance of spending time with photographs is a reoccurring theme in my conversations with practitioners. One example is Snøhetta’s site investigation for the revitalization of Times Square in New York City. Michele Delk spoke about investigating site photographs to gain cues for how people desired to use the site. These photographs depict groups of people sitting on the

Active landscape photography: Anne C Godfrey

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j Part One: Groundwork

curbs eating sandwiches, gathering around newspaper boxes and trying to use them as tables, or standing on temporary concrete barriers in order to make photographs of the iconic intersection (see the case study “Snøhetta: Times Square Reconstruction”). By spending time really looking at these photographs in order to understand the subtleties of how people wanted to position their bodies to facilitate these uses, Snøhetta created a set of flexible seating benches accommodating these desires.14 Spending time with photographs allows for several possibilities. Looking longer allows one to see more, take more in, go deeper into the details of the photograph. This happens on a visual level, but it also happens on a psychological level. One may think more, process more, call upon more experiences through taking more time to look. Returning to photographs over and over is the second aspect of spending time with photographs that came up in my conversations. As a project develops, as time passes, as the designer changes, what one sees in a photograph can change over time. What is seen the first day of the project will most likely be different than what one sees in the middle of a project and what is seen after completion, or at any other step within or after the process. This is another example of how time is thick in photographs as the meaning of photographs changes over time. Often, photographs are pinned up on project walls and at our desks. These are consulted to various degrees. Yet we rely on our mind’s eye quite a bit. The mind’s eye tends to bend and shift while photographs visually stay the same – even though our relationship with the information shown in the photograph changes over time. Taking more time to return to photographs, look again and reassess helps ground the decision-making process, and acknowledges the role of the visible. What was not noticed before might now become quite important when looking again, later. Significance of the unphotographed It is helpful to ask questions about what is not photographed: What is missing? What is not in the frame? What is behind the photographer? Why aren’t we seeing something? Is there something I expect to see, but am not seeing it? Why? Because we use all types of photography, often from outside sources, questioning what is not shown and acknowledging absence help in our investigations. What is not photographed can be just as significant or revealing as what is photographed. Absence points to a set of conditions that can be just as influential. This is part of the process of piecing together information to make informed decisions for design. Asking such questions, even when an answer may not be readily available, is still an active way of interacting with photographs. Instead of passively accepting what is shown as all there is, asking what is not there activates a whole new set of thoughts and ideas, and potential gathering of new sets of information. Through this process we can draw upon best available information, keen observation, past experiences and a bit of intuition and gut feelings (like any good mystery investigator, such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Maisie Dobbs).

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Investigating All of the active methods outlined here are forms of investigation. As introduced in Chapter 5 landscape architects are trained to be good investigators. The discipline requires the development of knowledge in a diverse set of areas, spreading across issues of culture, ecology, planning, economics, hydrology and infrastructure, to name but a few. This diverse knowledge is brought to the reading of photographs. The relationship between photographer, photograph, viewer and context is obvious when thinking about how we apply this diverse knowledge to looking. Acknowledging this relationship, and our ability to see and understand so many things at once while looking at photographs of landscape places, activates this concept of investigation. Investigation is about taking time to look, asking questions and not just accepting the photograph at its surface value. Active investigation creates a set of expectations about “unpacking” what is visually available in a photograph and then attaching all of the parts and pieces of knowledge we possess about landscape systems to that visual information. This can be as simple as asking, “What am I really looking at?” Going back to our detectives, one can also ask, “What clues are in this photograph?” Or, working more from our discipline, “What traces are here that indicate previous activity not represented currently in the photograph?” This leads to the following. Acknowledging nonvisible information Much of the visual information presented in a photograph of a landscape not only shows physical, tangible visible phenomena but also signifies or indicates invisible phenomena. For example, a trace of leaf debris caught in willows on a riverbank indicates the past high-water mark of the river system. Or bullet holes in the facade of a building signify a past significant historic event that may play a huge cultural identification role for a community. The diversity, or lack of diversity, in a set of understory plants in a forest opens up understanding of past events that led to the current condition. This kind of inquiry allows for the invisible to be just as present and meaningful as the visible. The dialogue becomes richer and more diverse as we open up to what is signified by the subject of the photograph as well as what is visually depicted in the photograph. Thinking like this opens us up to considering multiple scales. This reinforces the acknowledgment that all landscape systems are interdependent, and thus inter-affected. A photograph of a remnant pier piling can help us think of things at multiple scales (Figure 7.6) – from wondering what that structure was for to realizing the fluctuation of the rise and fall of this river system, to thinking about the quality of the water, or pondering what that system was like in the past in relation to what exists now and, as we step into the next part of the narrative for this place, how our future design interventions will interrelate to these current and past systems. This returns to the idea that our relationship with photographs – the relationship between photographer, photograph, viewer and context – is also a relationship between past, present and future. While actively making and looking at photographs, time expands as the exchange of information expands. While both making and looking at photographs, we see a current condition while simultaneously understanding a past condition, and current or past invisible systems, and what is possible for the future, at both a tactile and visible level, but also at a landscape systems level. This is an act of unfurling. Quickly and automatically we are able to unfurl all of these interconnections, simultaneously understanding past, present and future.

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Figure 7.6 The east side of the Hudson River looking northwest, New York, 2015. Remnant pier pilings still exist along many sites on either side of the Hudson River. These pilings are characteristic of a common infrastructural remnant found in many of the waterways within the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States. Source: Author.

Our relationship with photography is multidirectional, not just causal in one direction. When we engage from this active position, we create a far more rigorous and meaningful process for design decision making. Accepting different readings Through accepting multiplicity, we can also accept and learn from different readings of photographs. There are certain methodologies from the social sciences that seek this, such as photo voice.15 Often these different readings take place at a much more casual level. It happens between colleagues, in stakeholder meetings, and simply by looking at photographs with others and sharing what is seen. For example, Snøhetta has created a deck of photo cards they use while meeting with clients and stakeholders (Figure 7.7). These photos are of a wide range of subjects and places that have nothing to do with the immediate design in question. Instead they are a seemingly random set of photographs, from cars parked at a festival, to rock textures, to a very pregnant dog showing her belly. People’s reactions to these photographs are variable based on their own personal experiences and associations. This process is used to get a feel for where people are coming from, what they like, what they don’t like and how they communicate. Sets of associations, thoughts and memories unfold as one looks at these images. Looking at and sharing about the photographs are a way to cultivate dialogue and collaboration.16 Snøhetta uses this photo deck exercise as a means to get people comfortable with the process of design. The use of non-designed places in the photo cards is a more open-ended and collaborative way to start community dialog. This helps a diverse set of people find a place of validity because their personal readings of the photographs are listened to and valued. This process acknowledges different people will have varying associations with the subjects in the photographs.

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Figure 7.7 A selection of photos from a large deck of “photo cards” that Snøhetta uses to stimulate client and community design dialogues at the beginning of a project. These photocards are purposely of subjects not directly representing designed landscape places. Source: Snøhetta, New York office.

Creating a sense of openness, like this photo card process, helps better investigate the content of photographs. Taking time to look, talk about and share different readings of photographs increases understanding of the complexity of landscape places. Though we can never understand everything about a site, accepting and soliciting different readings can expand our understanding of place. As landscape architects we are perfectly comfortable with bringing all of these different sources of information together, applying them to expand understanding of place – we are particularly good at this. This active way of looking at photography increases rigor in working in a multidisciplinary way. Active photography embraces possibility and complexity, instead of seeking simple answers. It takes effort to work this way, balancing and taking into account all of these variable factors. But isn’t that what the nature of our discipline entails? Is not landscape architecture about embracing and working with all of the various fascinating landscape and human systems at play in any given place?

NOTES 1 I have applied this method in several of my courses since 2003 –– for example, “Photography, Environment and You,”, “Photo/Info/Graphy,” “Landscape and Architectural Photography” and “10 Lessons in Landscape Photography.” 2 This idea was brought up at some point in all my interviews with landscape architects. 3 When working with film there is some kind of satisfaction in getting that extra frame, or gambling on that one extra frame actually turning out when you get the film back. 4 The site for the Willamette Falls Riverwalk project in Oregon City, Oregon. Design and engineering team: Otac, Snøhetta, Mayer/Reed, KPFF, Pacific Habitat Services in partnership with Portland Metro.

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5 Meaningful photographs do not necessarily mean beautiful or well composed. Instead I think of it as photographs that are thoughtful and help show the unique relationships and aspects of the site. But of course some of these photographs are beautiful and have compelling compositions. These two ideas need not be mutually exclusive, nor do they need to be mutually dependent. 6 Bracketing means to make an exposure on “either side” of the usually balanced metered exposure. Bracketing allows for capturing a wider range of light qualities yet still (usually) maintains a range that is flexible and workable in postproduction. In certain cases, depending on the range of shadows and highlights, an exposure that is longer or shorter than the balanced exposure creates a more dynamic range of lights and darks. I like to think of it as creating an exposure that feels more like what I am feeling when I am in the moment, or later what I remember feeling as I view the exposures on the computer. Exposure for me is a way to create experience – not to replicate experience (“that’s what it looked like”). 7 The tricky part here, as the photographer, is you must take the responsibility and the time to make the first edit for those exposures before sharing them with colleagues, or quite frankly you run the risk of wasting their time and falling back into the too many photographs problem. No one wants to look at 300+ images with three different exposures (not even the photographer, as this first edit can become a tedious process). 8 Already discussed is the idea that we cannot and should not photograph everything. When we think we can, because it is easy to make 500 photographs, once again we find ourselves in a passive mode of treating the camera like a photocopy machine for the world. 9 See Chapter 2. 10 See Terry Barrett, Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images (Boston, MA: McGraw Hill Publishers, 2000); Liz Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000). 11 Often called self-observation. 12 See Anandi Ramamurthy, “Constructions of Illusion: Photography and Commodity Culture,” in Photography: A Critical Introduction, edited by Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2000), 165–216. 13 See as one example Diana Balmori, “Contemporary Issues Deriving From Change,” in Drawing and Reinventing Landscape (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2014), 181–188. 14 Interview. Delk, Michelle, Partner, Discipline Director – Landscape Architecture. Snøhetta, New York, NY, December 11, 2017. 15 For example, Naydene de Lange, Claudia Mitchell, and Jean Stuart. Putting People in the Picture (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2008). 16 Roundtable discussion. Snøhetta New York, NY. March 15, 2018. Including: Matt McMahon, Michelle Delk, Michelle Shofet, Adam Longebach, Anny Li and Elaine Molinar.

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PART TWO

Case studies  

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The Jacobs + Alta Team: LA River Path Los Angeles, California The last 8-mile segment of the LA River Path must thread its way through a diverse set of infrastructural elements. This use of photography helps to identify feasible points of access and alignments while also communicating important contextual features that support specific site interventions. Several layers of information and analysis were reviewed, including existing land-use plans, established design guidelines and accessibility standards. This joined with an analysis of land ownership opportunities and constraints. The synthesis of this information led to specific site photography visualizing identified opportunities. These photographs are augmented with diagrammatic notions of clearance heights and widths, demonstrations of punch throughs in existing infrastructure, and contextual information at access points along the Path alignment. Finding the best alignment and access strategy for the path was a crucial and complicated step in the development of the design. The Jacobs + Alta Team used multiple sources of photography to analyze and locate these opportunities for path alignments, including new photography made specifically for this purpose, Google Earth photo-imagery, drone photography and existing aerial oblique photography. 1,2,3 Here we see the use of site photography to discuss potential clearances through multiple pinch points created by bridges and other infrastructural elements, such as power lines and railroad tracks. 6 Access points onto the path were also located and analyzed with the use of photography and diagraming. Often not apparent from the existing street rights-of-way, these photographic diagrams highlight potential access points and important contextual characteristics, such as park facilities, schools, employment centers, and Metro transportation stops. The use of aerial obliques allows the viewer to clearly see how specific characteristics of the urban fabric fit together to support these potential access points. These same characteristics, experienced on the ground, may be far less tangible. Opportunities for punching through existing infrastructure could also be located and contextualized through the use of annotated photographs that 4 show either larger context or 5 detailed site conditions. Project information provided by Deven Young, Emily Duchon, Donny Donoghue and the Alta Planning + Design LA office. All images by The Jacobs + Alta Team.

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Alta Planning + Design: Setting POB Example Portland, Oregon During a site survey visit designers at Alta look for the most efficient and easily understandable place to locate the point of beginning (POB) when creating a new drawing set for, in this case, a new bikeshare station. This process of determining the best POB is used on a regular basis for Alta’s work in active transportation planning and design projects. 1 Typically, large existing site elements are used as a point of beginning, such as building corners, traffic light posts, storm drains and so forth. These elements are not always shown on the existing base drawings taken into the field, so often designers improvise by using 2 a hand to point to the proposed POB or 6 placing a clipboard adjacent to the POB, and capturing this “notation” with a photograph that shows context, which will later help to locate the POB. Then the POB is “found” by measuring its location from major existing elements, such as 3–5 face of curb or building face. After the design team has captured and 6 located the POB, 7 they photograph the proposed POB location in sequence, beginning with the POB and then stepping back and away systematically to create photographs that contextualize its location. The sequence of images is critical for the staff member who later drafts the new base plan, so he or she can clearly understand the progression of the existing site conditions. These drawings are then used when physically placing the station on the site. Project information provided by Olivia Burry-Trice and Hanna Hefner. All photographs by Alta Planning + Design.

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Alta Planning + Design: CV Link Coachella Valley, California Alta typically uses photography as an analysis tool to check and refine design decisions. Here for CV Link, a linear 50-mile multimodal trail running through the Coachella Valley in Southern California, designers make a site visit at 60 percent to ground truth their design proposal and analyze design choices. The visit, combined with this photographic method, helps the design team, based in Portland, Oregon (which has very different climate and geography), contextualize the work and bring a sense of place back to the office. These photographs document significant landscape characteristics of this arid valley and display the visual impact of the Santa Rosa, Little San Bernardino, San Jacinto and San Gorgonio mountains.

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6 By incorporating in-process drawings, strategically placed tools and colleagues into site photographs, a better sense of scale is gained for further design development. Angling the printed plan and orienting it correctly in relationship to the existing landmarks help check if the design proposal is working and later prepare visualizations of the design in perspective. This method creates a process of both checking and remembering. For example, photographs can help the designers understand layers of physical conflicts in a proposed project area and double-check understanding of scale and heights of objects. Project information provided by Hanna Hefner, Olivia Burry-Trice and Christo Brehm. All photographs by Alta Planning + Design.

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Coen + Partners: Heart of the City Rochester, Minnesota Photographer Andrea Rugg worked in partnership with Coen + Partners to develop an exacting method of transforming existing condition photographs into photographic-based images for design development and presentation. Associate Amber Hill worked with Rugg to develop a multistage process that included site analysis, photography and 3-D model

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development. Hill identified, through construction of a digital 3-D model, crucial viewpoints within the project site. 1 Rugg made a series of photographs based on the identified viewpoints, focusing on eye-level experience. She also made detail photographs of brickwork and windows that allowed her to 2 construct a seamless base image, removing any existing elements not included in the design proposals. Hill wrapped Rugg’s edited images into the 3-D model. Design proposals could then be tested with detailed contextual information. As the design developed, the 3–5 the features of the new design were layered in, coming together as 6 final seamless visualizations of the design proposal. Coen + Partners crafted this approach as a means to create representations that helped community members immediately identify the interrelationship between the existing conditions and their proposal. Working this way actualized the Coen + Partners design for the Rochester community. Project information provided by Amber Hill and Andrea Rugg. 1–2 by Andrea Rugg for Coen+Partners. 3–6 by Coen+Partners.

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Coen + Partners: Peavey Plaza Minneapolis, Minnesota Photographer Andrea Rugg continued to hone this process (see the case study “Coen + Partners: Heart of the City”) for Peavey Plaza, the well-known “living room” of downtown Minneapolis, designed by M. Paul Freidberg in 1975 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Because this was a smaller-scale project, Shane Coen, founder and CEO, was able to work on site with Rugg to choose a handful of key views through which to envision the revitalization of this iconic plaza. Rugg explained how this working relationship demonstrated the benefit of photography being “integrated into the design process in order to make the project successful in all ways.” On the south end of Nicolett Mall, Peavey Plaza serves as the primary outdoor gathering space for Orchestra Hall. Similar to many plazas of this era, it was in great need of revitalization. Honoring the reflecting pool as the central axis of the design, Coen + Partners proposed simple targeted design moves improving visibility and accessibility for reinvigorated use during cultural events. The Plaza also serves as an everyday nexus along the linear corridor linking downtown Minneapolis to Loring Park and the Walker Art Center. Rugg’s meticulous process led to a series of images characterizing the familiar, well-loved plaza and its iconic context (e.g., the Westminster Presbyterian Church on the south side of the plaza). In this project, Coen + Partners fit the 3-D digital model to these key experiential views. They then introduced subtle design transitions, maintaining the familiarity of the beloved plaza while introducing necessary updates. Project information provided by Amber Hill and Andrea Rugg. Photos 1–2 Andrea Rugg for Coen+Partners. Images 3–4 Coen+Partners.

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Claude Cormier + Associés: Berczy Park Toronto, Canada The use of obvious photocollage and montage strongly conveys the design concept of Berczy Park. Inspired by dogs, 5 a collage of dogs on a tiered tray was created to introduce the proposal for the fountain. Playful, engaging and self-consciously humorous, the use of photocollage clearly and literally reveals layers of meaning and intent. 1 The primary montage for the fountain utilizes a diagrammatic illustration of the fountain, with visual callouts depicting design inspirations and uses, such as a spiked dog collar, a tasty bone and a dog water trough. The fountain is framed by flat decorative leaves and fruit of the Horse chestnut, often found in historic Victorian-era photos of Toronto. The collage reads as an obvious construction, instead of a landscape scene. Site photographs of the finished park focus on the 2 details of the fountain (dog collar spikes, pug frieze) and the interplay of humans and dogs in and around the fountain. 3–4 The built-work photography shows the site as a whole and the human-canine (sculpture or real) interactions anticipated through the creation of this park. Viewing CC+A’s web page for the project, one will also view dog-themed paintings explaining the legacy of dogs in art, as well as construction of the fountain trays and the dog sculptures. In combination, all of these different types and uses of photography tell a full, complex and at times humorous story of the creation of this place. Project information provided by Claude Cormier. Images 1, 5 CC+A. Photographs 2– 4 by Industryous Photography for CC+A.

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Mayer/Reed: 30/40 Reflecting on milestones and place making In celebration of the combined 30-year anniversary of the landscape architecture practice at Mayer/Reed and the 40-year anniversary of Mayer/Reed as an interdisciplinary design firm, Carol Mayer Reed and Michael Reed, founding principals, decided to take a visual survey of the perception of their work. Instagram photographs proved to be a rich source of visual information. This collection of photographs displays the current state of many projects and how they are actively used. 1 Mayer/Reed collected hundreds of photographs that depicted their built work in diverse ways – from standard scenes showing space and scale, to details of use, such as a very happy dog on his daily walk. 3 Sifting through these became a process of reflection and evaluation. Not only were the principals able to see how places were “holding up,” they were able to learn how people valued and viewed their designs. These values expressed themselves through photographs made at favorite times of day to visit, from favorite spots to sit or meet, and of favorite details. Mayer Reed found this process “incredibly enlightening” and a “defining moment” in the practice. This method of collecting and viewing helped them to step back and understand the collective value of their work through other people’s photographs. 2 To celebrate, Mayer/Reed displayed this vibrant photographic collection in the halls of their office during their anniversary party in 2017. Instead of selecting and showing a smaller set of iconic images, this larger set of subjects includes a plurality of uses, values and experiences – a much better depiction of the diverse perceptions and uses of these landscapes and Mayer/Reed’s work and ethic as a whole. Project information from Carol Mayer Reed. All photographs by Mayer/Reed.

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Mayer/Reed: Waterfalls Travel photography as design inspiration Travel photography is an active means to understand how a type of landscape functions and feels. In this case, Carol Mayer Reed has collected photographs of waterfalls over time to understand physical flows and patterns. This process of photographing is also about memory and experience. Mayer Reed states, “[T]he photographs do not record my experience; instead they remind me.” These photographs are triggers for nonvisual haptic events and feelings as much as they are a means to study water flow, water volume and rock placements creating patterns. Similar to Lawrence Halprin’s own drawn studies of waterfalls, the making of the photos is a process of knowledge creation. Through seeking, finding and choosing how to photograph, Mayer Reed is synthesizing and internalizing the experience of these unique waterfalls. Back in the office, the photographs may be taken out and looked at and trigger

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4 memories of the experience. “They inspire us to consider the play of light and way water fractures over stone,” Mayer Reed explains. The accumulation of these photographs results in a catalog about a long-term relationship with a single dynamic process – the hydrologic action of waterfalls. Process information from Carol Mayer Reed. All photographs by Carol Mayer Reed.

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Mayer/Reed: Willamette Falls Inventory Oregon City, Oregon Often a place is characterized by its materiality. The existing material conditions of the Willamette Falls site, in Oregon City, Oregon, are the expression of its layered industrial history. As a means to understand how materiality can inform and inspire design development, Mayer/Reed created a material inventory of the site for the Willamette Falls Riverwalk project. The inventory also served as a first step towards choosing what to keep and what to remove from the site. This inventory – consisting of a collection of photographs, counted instances of each material, and era assigned to each material type – created a reference document for the early stages of the project. Jeramie Shane, principal, explained, “The photography makes these repeated elements no longer anonymous.” The act of photographing the site for this purpose allowed for a deep-dive site exploration. “The act of photography drew you to do things, exploring more deeply,” Shane continues, explaining how this complex site was more fully investigated through the process of photographing it – photographing gave license for more extensive physical exploration.

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With the agenda of colleting material information, the designers looked at the site in a new way and encountered relationships they had not realized previously. The process of photographing for this specific goal led to the discovery of design opportunities that may not have occurred without such a specific photographic task. Thus, the material inventory document is just one result of this process. The process of photographing revealed new opportunities. Project information from Carol Mayer Reed and Jeramie Shane. All photographs by Mayer/Reed.

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MIG: Yosemite Lodge Treatment Plan Yosemite National Park, California As part of the larger cultural landscape report for the Yosemite Lodge Historic District, MIG developed a treatment plan addressing the current obscured views from the lodge. 2, 4 Photography of current conditions was prepared from similar viewpoints of 1, 3 available historic photographs. These photographs, displayed side by side for comparison in the document, show change – the typical repeat photography method. For this treatment proposal, the photographs also received a diagrammatic overlay clearly delineating vegetation that had grown and obscured the views. These delineations specifically articulate the growth of conifer trees from the time when the viewshed was considered to be intact. The conifers are outlined in both the establishing and existing conditions photographs. Other beneficial trees, such as Black oak, Canyon live oak and Bigleaf maple, are not delineated. These diagrams make

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visible the rationale for targeting specific trees for removal and support the discussion about strategies for tree removal and on-site use in the treatment plan. Several methods for removal are presented, including rapid removal of bark beetle–affected conifers and a gradual process of artificial snag development in perimeter areas as an ecological service. This example combines common repeat photography approaches with diagrammatic overlays to support specific solutions for tree species types, supporting the treatment vision statement: “Restore select character-defining features, such as views from the Lodge to Yosemite Falls and adjacent cliff faces that have been obscured over the years by maturing vegetation” (Yosemite Lodge Historic District Cultural Landscape Report, p. 350). Project information provided by Laurie Matthews, Casey Howard and Yosemite Lodge Historic District Cultural Landscape Report. Before photographs from Yosemite Archives. All photo-diagrams by MIG.

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MIG: Lithia Park Ashland, Oregon These photocollages are an augmented approach to the common method of repeat photography in cultural landscape preservation. Repeat photography is a process of side-by-side comparison of a photograph from the past to one made from the same viewpoint in the more recent present in order to understand change over time. In “melding” the historic photograph with the current conditions photograph, the past and present are literally inlayed together. The use of transparency in this layering prompts the viewer to look deeply and see two times simultaneously. For this project these visualizations reveal how much or how little has changed over time. In some cases, 1 very little change has occurred, but in other cases, 2 such as the Bandshell, there has been significant change. Photo composites like this assist contemporary audiences in understanding these changes. Visual signals, such as combining black and white (past) and color (present) and obvious merging of past and present, help viewers notice unique characteristics. These obvious constructions invite comparing, looking and searching, while still depicting a single scene. This results in a more curiosity-driven mode of looking at single images. Lithia Park, 3 established as a site of healing springs, sits in the center of Ashland, Oregon, best known for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places, in part because of its history with the Chautauqua, Lithia Park is now being revitalized as a significant cultural landscape in Oregon. Project information provided by Casey Howard and Laurie Matthews. Photo composites by Casey Howard for MIG.

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Nelson Byrd Woltz: Passports Karen Cragnolin Park, Asheville, North Carolina NBW creates passports to contextualize the complex history of landscapes in relationship to design proposals. These passports 1 are handed out at community events, such as this Field Day for Karen Cragnolin Park. Within these passports are 2 annotated timelines that reveal invisible yet crucial aspects of site history and context. These timelines use photographs and drawings to visualize the history of the place and highlight important events.

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In this case the histories of the local Native American tribes along the French Broad River are discussed in relationship to later industrial uses that led to recent phytoremediation by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Brownfield Program. This method of communication attaches the past to the present, helping stakeholders understand how future proposals relate to these histories. 3 Walking the site with the passports makes design proposals more tangible. 4 The passport also outlines information about on-site opportunities and constraints. It provides a reference for the topics and themes introduced 5 during community presentations that can then be taken home and considered further. Project information provided by Tim Popa and David LePage. 1, 2 and 4 by NBW; 3 by John Ross; 5 Bob Ware/ SlowGlassPictures.com.

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Nelson Byrd Woltz: Orongo Station Poverty Bay, New Zealand The story of Orongo Station is one of complex and dynamic inter-species and inter-systems relationships. To explain the rationale for extensive, long-range restoration plans for this human-altered landscape, narratives about these relationships needed to be clearly explained. Photographs of key species, such as the 1 tuatara and the 2 petrel, joined with complex narratives, such as the unique story of their shared-home mutualism, create relatable understandings about current landscape conditions.

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Making and viewing photographs of species in place along with the interventions helping support the native animal species thrive again – 3 such as acoustic attraction methods (bird calls broadcast from loudspeakers) that have successfully lured 4 seabirds, such as the petrel, shearwater and gannet, to the newly restored breeding habitat – produce visual and tangible knowledge of what are often large, invisible and abstract sets of relationships. Explaining animal species’ significance through photographs and narrative creates a ground from which to understand the need for large-scale design changes in the landscape, such as extensive grading to recreate fresh- and saltwater wetlands. These 5 before and 6 after photos reveal the significant grading necessary to reinvigorate functionality of the designed saltwater and freshwater wetlands. Photographic comparisons continue to evolve as the native wetland plantings mature and new photography from varying seasons and tidal conditions becomes available. Viewed individually, and without a narrative, these photographs may be illegible. The process of creating deeper understanding of a place through combining photographs with rich narratives results in knowledge far greater than the sum of the parts. Information provided by David Le Page and Tim Popa. 1 and 3–6 by NBW; Photo 2 by Zoo Pro.

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Nelson Byrd Woltz: Duke Pond Duke University, Durham, North Carolina The Duke University Water Reclamation Pond derives its inspiration from several landscape narratives. 1 Originally envisioned in Duke’s 1920 master plan by the Olmsted Brothers as part of a picturesque campus within 5,000 acres of remnant Piedmont forest, the system now accommodates functional, ecological and experiential uses. Photographs helped reveal the past degraded conditions of the stormwater system, especially when the 2 sites of disturbance were remote to everyday life on campus. The pond, initially envisioned as a strollable respite, is now also a highly functional stormwater system, 3 providing a memorable and accessible experience of forest and pond ecologies and new wildlife habitat. The pond replaces a significant portion of the potable water used in Duke University’s cooling systems and improves the quality of collected stormwater before it moves into the watershed beyond the campus. Experienced throughout the year, Duke Pond can look very different based on the current rain cycle. 4 Simultaneously viewing the spillway at different seasons, through photography, reveals the dynamic nature of the design accommodating the ever-changing hydrological system. Different types of photographs shown together, such as site documentation and picturesque scenes, relate a more complete story about the complex interrelated functions of this site. Project information provided by David LePage. 1 by Horace Trumbauer; Photo 2 by NBW; Photos 3–6 by Mark Hough.

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SCAPE: Stapleton Waterfront Park Color cataloging of vernacular landscape elements Staten Island, New York Photographically documenting dominant, unique and idiosyncratic features of a place to generate design inspiration is an indicative approach for SCAPE. This once active naval base is the only surviving deepwater pier on Staten Island’s north shore.

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5 Investigating existing site infrastructure through photographs establishes a sense of place and space, anchoring the project in both past and present conditions. Themes in materiality, texture, form and color are identified through this process. For example, examining historic photographs of the 1 rail infrastructure and 2 patterns of the large turning radii for the rail lines informs the organization of the overall site. Further inspiration comes from identifying two major color palettes through this photographic investigation. 3 The gray-blue palette expresses dominant features of the Verrazano Bridge and surrounding landscape east of the site. 4 Goldenrod, profusely self-seeded throughout the site, rusted metal tanks, pilings and safety paint inspired the second color range, yellow to deep orange. 5 Manifestations of this color range present themselves in the vernacular detail interested photographs, from paint striping and nylon rope to rust and plastic construction fencing. 6 Collecting and then viewing the photographs revealed the dominance of this color range. This process acknowledges past infrastructures, histories and uses, while also embracing current conditions of the site as a means to inspire new potentialities. Project information from John Donnelly. All photographs by SCAPE, except 1–2 from historic archives.

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Public Sediment/SCAPE Team Bay Area, California The proposal for Public Sediment is interested in this entire watershed system, not simply the immediate surrounds of specific design sites. To convey these values the Public Sediment/SCAPE Team developed a process of compositing several aerial-type photographs to construct an image successfully representing this complex landscape system. 1 Drone photography shows the primary portion of the site but does not show the mouth of the river. 2 An augmented Google Earth image shows the mouth and delta, but flattens the urban infrastructure and lacks detail. 3 By combining these two photographs with a third aerial photograph, the expanse of the delta landscape system becomes legible. 4 This representation is further morphed into a visual narrative about the dynamic processes of this river system. Alluvial fans are highlighted and wetland revitalization is projected. The viewer is shown design proposals at multiple scales through the use of bubble overlay details. The inclusion of these photo-based details within the larger constructed aerial allows for the interplay of diverse systems at multiple scales: hydrology as a whole, specific opportunities for fish habitat, sites for educational programing and spaces for social engagement, to name a few. Diagrammatic use of color denotes the two major design interests: yellow is sediment specific and pink indicates social opportunities. Project information provided by Nans Voron and Public Sediment Team. All images by Public Sediment/SCAPE Team: SCAPE, Arcadis, The Dredge Research Collaborative, TS Studio, UC Davis Department of Human Ecology and Design, Cy Keener, Architectural Ecologies Lab.

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SCAPE: Town Branch Commons Lexington, Kentucky For this project, the act of photographing is a method of knowledge creation for the processes of the karst landscape common in the Lexington, Kentucky area. 1 Photographing in the local landscape helped train the eye to look for and identify physical traces indicating the hydrologic and geologic karst characteristics. 2 Photographing helped the design team internalize a deeper understanding about these processes.

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5 Both design form and function were informed by this photographic method. 3 Inspired by the layers of rock and how these layered patterns fit together in triangular and trapezoidal forms, many of the stream corridors throughout the project, such as Midland Avenue, replicate these forms. 4 Key photographs articulate these patterns clearly and present a visual means through which to explain the design rationale. Primary functions of the design are also informed by this investigative photographic process. 5 The constructed urban water flows are inspired by the karst hydrology patterns and translated into four activities: Clean, Connect, Reveal, and Carve. Project information provided by John Donnelly and Towards an Urban Ecology. All images by SCAPE.

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Snøhetta: Willamette Falls Riverwalk Oregon City, Oregon The design for Willamette Falls Riverwalk is a complex activity of uncovering to reveal and removing to restore. Matthew McMahon, landscape architect and project manager for Snøhetta, referred to this process as a combination of “physical and visual spelunking through site and historic archive.” This “spelunking” assisted in locating physical and temporal benchmarks that anchor the design proposal to significant sub-sites and time periods within the overall site. Featured here is the investigation of the relationship between a historic falls side channel and the original Oregon City Woolen Mills foundation. This interrelationship tells the story of how the Falls were augmented to capture water energy to power the original wool mill. Previously the side channels, called alcoves, were unique riparian habitats of the Willamette River ecological system.

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6 Several sources of photography (historical, aerial drone photography, and site photography made specifically for design) combined with other site information (historic site surveys, oral histories, news articles, historic architectural drawings, a cultural landscape report, and on-site verification of current conditions) uncovered intertwining narratives. McMahon explained how the site expresses many moments in time and how those moments are attached to key physical structures and relationships on site. Visual clues would reveal themselves as different pieces of the complex puzzle came together through examining photographs and placing their location within the 3-D digital model. Often the importance of certain site characteristics didn’t reveal themselves until synthesized through this iterative process. Project information provided by Matthew McMahon and Michelle Delk. Photo 1 provided by Clackamas County Historical Society. Photo 2 provided by Clackamas County Historical Society, Blue Heron Collection. Images 3–6 by Snøhetta.

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Snøhetta: Times Square Reconstruction New York City, New York Photographing people in place directly informed the design scheme for the revitalization of Times Square. Michelle Delk, partner and landscape architecture discipline director for Snøhetta, described how “observing the subtlety of human behavior” gave important “hints about how people use spaces.” These photographs revealed people attempting to use the place in ways they desired: 1 trying to eat lunch, 2 using the newspaper box as a place to lean and rest, 3 sitting and people-watching on a curb and 4 standing atop a platform to get a better view for photographing this New York City icon.

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These photographic observations led to a design scheme featuring 50-foot-long granite benches that accommodate the desired uses throughout Times Square. 5–10 Some benches encourage leaning while others are placed at crucial junctures to get above the crowd and photograph. The morphed seating allows for few or many people to comfortably sit and lean in all manner of ways. Additionally, the benches direct more legible pedestrian circulation through the bowtie square, easing congestion and doubling the pedestrian space of this busy hub. Project information provided by Michelle Delk. Photos 1–4 by Snøhetta. Photos 5–10 by Michael Grimm.

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West 8: Longwood Gardens Master Plan Kennett Square, Pennsylvania The master plan development for Longwood Gardens required extensive study of the current and historic conditions of the site, resulting in both short-term goals and long-term guiding principles for this world-famous garden. This being the first-ever masterplan for Longwood, West 8 focused on the bones of the site, considering the larger topological and infrastructural connections in relationship to specific sub-site developments and redevelopments. Webb Barn, an iconic visual presence atop the topological spine of the site, was assessed in relationship to the overall visual connective corridor of the south-facing slopes. Through analysis of 1 historic photographs, combined with photography made specifically to demonstrate the 2 interrelationship of the Webb Barn to its sloping surrounds and the resulting 3 gathering space at the center of the building grouping, West 8 proposed 4 new revitalized uses for this space, reactivating this significant historic site within the larger garden masterplan. This is one example of how 5 the slope analysis of the site, through the physical model and photography of that model 6 overlaid with diagrammatic indicators of watershed flows and significant sub-sites, led to crucial decisions about places such as Webb Barn. Photographing physical models for these purposes creates a more tangible and relatable visual representation. Project information, photographs and images provided by West 8.

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West 8: Simco Wavedeck Toronto, Canada Photography is used as a means to both envision potentialities and document design process. Physical models are often visually experienced through photographs, thus the framing and viewpoint of model photographs are crucial to the conveyance of design concept and physical form. Physical model making is a primary component of West 8’s design process. For Simco Wavedeck, Adriaan Geuze was inspired by 1 the local folded sedimentary rock formations found along Lake Ontario and the Great Lakes region. An interplay of 2 physical and 3 digital models explored playful expressions of these forms. 4 Examining these models through photography refined design form. These model photographs also helped stakeholders understand the inspiration and intent of the project. Bringing the quintessential lake experience to the city was central to the design concept and detail development for the Toronto Central Waterfront plan, which Simco Wavedeck is a part of. Two other wavedecks designed by West 8, Spadina and Rees Wavedecks, were inspired by similar processes. Project information provided by West 8. All images by West 8 except Photo 1 by Mike Beauregard.

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West 8: Irma Logs Florida Coast Hurricane Irma devastated the Florida coast in 2017, 1, 2 uprooting and destroying thousands of native trees. West 8 developed a collaborative process for repurposing these trunks and posted photographic documentation of this process on social media to raise awareness about the aftermath of the storm. 3 Logs were collected and 4 slabbed at multiple on-site locations with mobile mills. The extensive photographic record of this process shows multiple sites and people engaging in a grassroots effort to clear and productively repurpose the fallen native trees. 5 The slabs, of various shapes and sizes, were custom fitted to 6 steel cutouts of the letters I R M A. 7 Each letter could be individually attached to accommodate the unique shape of each slab. 8 Multiple volunteers worked with landscape designers from West 8 to construct 101 benches, 9 first appearing at 2017 Design Miami, and later distributed to multiple sites. This photographic storytelling for Irma Logs is just as important as the benches created. It demonstrates community coming together as a way to heal and recover. Irma Logs can be viewed on its own Instagram account. Project information and photographs provided by West 8.

PART THREE

Expanding possibilities

8 More than both ways with photography Beyond the objective and subjective for landscape architecture

For most of these essays, photography is considered a subjective representation, reliant on the biases and desires of both the photographer and the viewer. The influence of the context in which a photograph is presented has been detailed and examined. There is still a strong desire to use photography as a means to describe, validate and prove the fact of a particular condition. “See, there it is, I photographed it.” As landscape architects we want to use facts to describe a place, event, a situation or a set of information. We often use photography as a tool to visually describe and even prove these facts. In doing this we get into a cognitive trap. In most cases, usually without realizing it, we want photography to do two things – be amazingly aesthetically pleasing and subjective, yet also show objective facts that “truthfully” describe a place. We want photography to be both subjective and objective. This gets at the very essence of a problem with photography. We want it both ways with photography. We want photography to be evocative, emotional and full of feeling and desire – all totally subjective concepts. Yet we want photography to prove, show, describe, tell and document – the objective side of the coin. Lots of slippage occurs when we want an easy and tidy outcome. Pinning photography to a single purpose is not possible. The motivations behind the act of making photographs and the resulting uses of photographs are not solid by any means. Our desire for photographs to be both aesthetically compelling and factual is just another example of many dualistic (often oxymoronic) values in society. We want women to be beautiful and smart (but not too smart). We want men to be strong, yet possess moral fortitude (except for certain elected officials). We expect people to be honest, yet the ladder climb of individualism portends twisting the facts to gain access to higher rungs. We want children to be playful and adorable, yet still under our control. And we want our dogs to provide unconditional love, yet obey the master. We tie our dualistic ideas together into some very interesting, complicated and virtually untangleable knots. These cognitive constructs trap us. Similarly, we are trapped by our simplistic desires for photography. This trap disallows us to see how powerful photography is in determining our understanding of the world. We simply do not see the reality; we see and comprehend only the construct. We believe in the possibility of having it both ways with photography. The dualistic construct of simultaneous objectivity and subjectivity flattens the richness and complexity that exist when we look at photography. There is more to photography than subjective

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and objective representations. As has been discussed, photography is a complicated action: an activity of making, looking, contextualizing and interpreting. Photography is a thick, multifaceted process of creating, not just copying. Allan Sekula, in his seminal article “The Traffic in Photographs,” states, “Here yet again are the twin ghosts that haunt the practice of photography: the voice of rectifying technocratic objectivism and the redemptive voice of a liberal subjectivism.”1 Granted, Sekula qualifies objectivism and subjectivism with loaded terms (technocratic and liberal), but even when we strip these descriptors away, the truth of the matter still stands. We want photography to do the work of both the objective and the subjective all at once, without really realizing it. It is as if we live in a dream where there is only clarifying truth and pleasurable desire, and nothing in between. But what does that really mean? Photography is both a device and a form of representation that we use. It is important to remember that photography is a tool, like all other tools of representation. It has inherent qualities that guide and determine certain capabilities of the representation. We use the tool of the camera to make photographs. The photographs are also tools that are used by us to represent places, ideas, things, relationships, people and values. Roland Barthes takes this argument to a further extent. He states, “Whatever it grants to vision, and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”2 For Barthes a photograph is what the viewer thinks.3 Viewing is the action that gives meaning to the photograph, dare I say to the contents of the photograph. The photograph is invisible because the viewer sees and thinks about what the content means to him or her. The viewer’s interpretation is what gives meaning. The photograph itself has no meaning. The viewer imbues the content of the photograph with meaning, and thus the photograph is invisible. Yet how a photograph is made determines the content. Therein lies the complexity. Choices made by the photographer are transmitted to the viewer via what is shown through the photograph. Barthes explains, “The photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated by destroying them both, the windowpane and the landscape . . . dualities we can conceive, but not perceive.”4 Thus the photograph is the tool or delivery apparatus for the representation. The viewer’s perception of the representation is what activates meaning, not the photograph itself, yet the photograph is the tool for the conveyance of the referent that signals or catalyzes meaning making for the viewer. If there was no photograph, there would be no conveyance (Figure 8.1). The viewer is the user of photography. The photographer is also the user of photography. The only difference is the concept of directionality. Receiving vs making. Instead user/viewer is intertwined. Like the maintained relationship between the windowpane (frame) and landscape (what is depicted in the photograph) the role of the user and viewer cannot be separated without destroying the true nature of the relationship. We simultaneously use and view photography. Especially in landscape architecture. Landscape architects view and use photography to understand places, describe conditions, explain design rationale, show quality, demonstrate use and show relationships of systems. We also view and use photography to convince others of the worthiness of design proposals, display successful design outcomes, examine post-occupancy and document significant places to be saved or rehabilitated (to name a few). Photography is viewed and used to legitimize all parts, pieces and processes of the practice. Yet often, landscape architecture doesn’t critically address the intertwined multidirectionality

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Figure 8.1 147 Marine Drive, Buffalo, New York (October 1978), by John Pfahl. Source: Picture Windows, 1st edition (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1987).

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of using and viewing, which contributes to our ease in wanting it both ways with photography. Let’s look at this more closely through two metaphors: our already familiar window and also the slice. Photographs are like a window. That is simple. A frame and a window are interchangeable metaphors for one another. John Pfahl’s series Picture Windows5 literally photographs through windows, using the window frame as the frame itself. This is a conscious activity playing with the metaphor of the photograph as window. Pfahl lets us see the inside of the window frame a bit, showing a window sill and a magazine on a table (Figure 8.2). We see streaks on the panes of glass in some. This creates a visual and metaphorical tension, perhaps a feeling of an inside joke, or at least a sense of self-reference. Various landscapes are viewed through these “picture windows,” creating a double meaning for the use of the frame. These views are carefully composed, not just a snapshot through a window. Pfahl raises and lowers the camera to create a conscious, careful composition through the window. Evidence of this is shown in how much of the surface of the sill one sees. Jeff Wall similarly includes a frame within a frame for his photograph A View From an Apartment 2004–5.6 He chose that particular apartment for this photograph because of the view out the window. He positioned his camera to create a strong composition not only of the activity inside the apartment but also of the view outside. In both Pfahl’s and Wall’s photographs the window makes the view and the view makes the window. They are indivisible. Another familiar metaphor is that photographs are like a slice of time. A photograph stops motion and captures a slice in time. As John Szarkowski7 states in The Photographer’s Eye, “Immobilizing these thin slices of time has been a source of continuing fascination for the photographer.”8 We think of a photograph as a single moment, a slice (actually removed) from the continuum of time, from the movement of the event. The window and the slice are convenient metaphorical concepts that are often treated too literally. In this more simplistic application, these ideas become too slim. Barthes addresses this to a certain degree by stating that one cannot divide the window from the subject depicted without destruction, that the two are reliant on one another.9 Barthes’s idea scratches at the notion that this is a relational system existing in the ongoing passage of time. Looking happens over and over, as does interpretation. Those interpretations change and shift, accreting more and more meanings. A photograph accumulates more layers and thickness of meaning over time. When we make too literal the concepts of a window pane or a slice we don’t allow for the implications of passage and process. These metaphors stop being metaphors. The life of the photograph starts well before the release of the shutter, or the “decisive moment,” as Henri Cartier-Bresson states.10 This is one very important aspect about photography that is often forgotten. Photography is not simply as singular or isolated a moment as we would like to believe. The photographer thinks about the subject and makes decisions about how to photograph it. This is certainly the case for both Pfahl’s and Wall’s work. This happens for various lengths of time before the photograph is made. This can be as simple as walking through the woods, seeing something compelling in the light, in the trees or in the color of moss on the branches. I walk up, bring the camera up and then choose the framing. That is simple yet takes time, usually from several seconds to a minute in casual photography. On the other end of this planning scenario, a photographer may spend a year or more on the process of making a photograph. This could include making plans for a trip to a particular

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Figure 8.2 2 Balanced Rock Drive, Springdale, Utah (June 1980), by John Pfahl. Source: Picture Windows, 1st edition (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1987).

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scouted location, buying new equipment, practicing with the new equipment, looking at other photographs, eventually traveling to the location and experiencing that place in multiple ways, from eating to talking to local people. Finally, the photographer gets to her chosen destination. She wanders and looks, searching, experiencing, thinking, assessing, finding, setting up the camera, framing and composing and then finally releasing the shutter. Often, she will make the photograph again, adjusting white balance, exposure and depth of field. And again, bracketing, reframing, relooking. That moment is simply part of the much longer process and experience in making that photograph. The photograph is made and takes on physical or perhaps simply visual form as a digital entity. The photograph enters the world. It is shared, sold, looked at, observed and interpreted. It is titled or retitled, or has a caption attached to it. It is placed in multiple contexts, from the computer screen to the gallery. It is gazed at, and through that gaze it is transformed over and over and over again. It accumulates more layers through this process: layers of history, layers of reading, layers of use, layers of influence, layers of interpretation. It becomes thicker and more complex as time passes. The photograph is both invisible and thickly complex at the same time. We cannot get out of this paradox, as Barthes has suggested, because in the end the content of the photograph is what activates the thickness.11 If we think of a photograph like a thickening entity constantly accumulating, perhaps like a growing crystal, we allow ourselves more depth of thickness in understanding how photography works. We can have a rich, multifaceted understanding of what we do when we make and look at a photograph. This accumulation is created by the passage of time and the interpretations added to the photograph by viewers based on both context and viewers’ experiences. There is far more complexity and richness beyond the flat duality of objective and subjective when we embrace the ongoing transformation that occurs when looking at photography. A photograph does not have a single meaning that solely defines it. The photographer’s meaning for making is just one of the many meanings that accumulate with the photograph as time passes. Katheryn Moore argues there is “no need to choose” – we need not be bound to bouncing back and forth between objective and subjective thinking when it comes to how we relate to the visual, and how we think about making and experiencing place, design and process.12 Her pragmatic approach asks us to simply allow for more.13 There is no need to limit, contain or even at times categorize. Instead it is a matter of acknowledging what is actually happening, not tidying things up into neat little categories. When we acknowledge the possibility for a complex relationship with photographic meaning, the richness of its use increases into possibilities for robust multiplicity. We need not remain beholden or limited to simply the love of aesthetic pleasure, or the desire for fact telling. Instead we can embrace the many thick ways photography means within and beyond the subjective and objective. We can have it all ways with photography.

NOTES 1 Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 20. 2 Roland Barthes and Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981; New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 6. 3 Barthes considers the photograph to be a referent.

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4 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography 6. 5 John Pfahl, Picture Windows, 1st edition (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1987). 6 Jeff Wall, “A View From an Apartment, 2004–2005,” Transparency in lightbox, 1670 x 2440 mm, www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/beyond-threshold (accessed February 3, 2017). 7 Szarkowski (1925–2007) is often credited with elevating photography to art form status in the mid-twentieth century. During tenure as director of the department of photography of The Museum of Modern Art (1962–1991) he maintained significant influence over primary concepts about photography, based in Modernist ideals. 8 John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art; distributed by Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1966), v. 9 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 10 Henri Cartier-Bresson, “The Decisive Moment,” India International Centre Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1993): 47–54. 11 The word “thick” is used in reference to several ideas. Within landscape architecture we can look to James Corner’s discussion of thickness in “The Thick and Thin of It,” in Thinking the Contemporary Landscape, edited by Christophe Girot and Dora Imhof (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017), 117–135. Corner discusses the idea of landscapes having several types of thickness: materially, temporally and culturally (119). He also discusses “layers of interaction,” including the layers of design that make a type of new “synergy” (125). The contemporary idea of thickness, as used here, comes from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s concept and discussion of “thick description.” This approach is interested in events unfolding, narrative accumulating, and multiple experiences acknowledged. The concept embraces multiple ways of experiencing and knowing and seeks to document/capture as many of them (thickness) as completely (thickly) as possible. Certainly, the concepts, ideas and practices of thick description have evolved into the twenty-first century, but it continues to be interested in the idea of many and the accumulation of multiple contextual parts that create and describe an experience, event or phenomena. See Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. 12 Kathryn Moore, Overlooking the Visual: Demystifying the Art of Design (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 30–33. 13 Ibid., “The Sensory Interface and Other Myths and Legends,” 17–33.

Active Landscape Photography: Anne C Godfrey

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9 Many uses, many contexts, many meanings Fluid photographic practices in landscape architecture

Landscape architecture’s use of photography is fluid. This fluidity reflects the contemporary uses of photography in everyday society. Marvin Heiferman asks, in Photography Changes Everything, to more closely examine all types of photography – “the photographs that don’t get framed [and hung on the wall] . . . that play equally important and vital roles in our lives.”1 This comment supports the diverse ways landscape architecture makes and uses photographs. Heiferman argues all of these uses are valid, interesting and significant. A benefit of the growing ubiquity and multiplicity of photographic representation in everyday life is that the once strict boundaries confining “types” of photography continue to blur. These definitions (photography as art, photography as data) that used to be so precious in the early and mid-twentieth century now seem constrained and overly essentialist. We use many types of photographs as a means of understanding places and making design decisions. We make different types of photographs and later put them to new or different uses, again, transforming their original use or intention. We don’t get hung up on the idea of the archive, or perhaps without even knowing it, transcended or skipped this part of the complex narrative about photography in the late twentieth century.2 Instead of labeling a photograph as a particular type – “historic,” “material inventory,” “art,” “species documentation” – and then confining it to that type, landscape architects actually put photographs to a variety of uses, at times in quite different ways than the original intentions of their making. We are well positioned to read and understand the diverse content of photographs. Our training and the demands of our profession are unique – our work asks us to utilize knowledge across a diverse set of disciplines. We use this knowledge in fluid ways for design decision making. We see many things when we view photographs (Figure 9.1) and we are able to ask many questions. Acknowledging this fluidity allows us to move beyond Allan Sekula’s observation that we want photography to be both objective and subjective.3 We already transcend this way of thinking in our everyday use of photography for landscape architecture; we simply don’t always consciously acknowledge it.4 A photograph can show many things within a fuller spectrum of meaning, including subjective and objective information. For example, a photograph for our uses in landscape architecture can be read simultaneously as a compelling emotional scene and describing a geomorphological condition and documenting a historic moment. Thus we use photography in fluid ways, without much thought. Through identifying this condition explicitly, we can actively and critically examine what it is that we are doing when we make and use photographs. The twentieth-century desire to constrain photography into discrete narrow types starts to fall away. In her foreword to Photography Changes Everything, Merry

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Figure 9.1 Grain Silos, The Palouse, Eastern Washington (August 2013), by Anne C Godfrey. Many questions come up when looking. Where is this? What is beyond the frame? What is the significance of the star? What time of year is this? Is this grain silo still in use? Then, associations unfold: le Corbusier’s interest in grain silos; thinking about grain silo photographs by Walker Evans, Edward Weston and Frank Golke. Thinking about active grain silos in cities, such as Portland and Minneapolis . . . Source: Author.

Foresta welcomes a return to understanding how multiple disciplines use photography in multiple ways. “What we discovered during our investigation [for the compilation of this book] was that photography was embedded in all disciplines and, even more importantly, that it was the ubiquity and multiplicity of photography that lends [sic] it its deep cultural meaning.”5 We already possess the ability to meet Christophe Girot’s plea “for an open, differentiated, and non-dogmatic reading of landscape, where both past traces and potential futures can be grasped synchronously”6 while looking at photographs. We bring so much knowledge to looking at and making photographs. When we are active lookers, seers and thinkers, we have a vast ability to interpret the visual information at hand for multiple purposes and uses. The image does not do things to us – we interpret it. We transform it. As thoughtful landscape architects we have the complex skills, experience and tools we need to look, see and identify the complexity occurring in our framed representations if we choose to.7 Practitioners and academics alike discuss the application of complexity and multiplicity as paths towards inclusive design thinking. Elizabeth Meyer, in “Sustaining Beauty,” explores how dynamic aesthetic aspects of a designed landscape can increase understanding of interrelated ecological systems.8 Kristina Hill, in “Nexus: Science, Memory, Strategy,” argues for multiple sources of knowledge applied to design problems, asking for a “combined use of empirical and predictive science, memory and strategy”9 instead of “exaggerate[ing] the conflict between the practices of science and art.”10 James Corner discusses in “Terra Fluxus” how nature is not “exclusive of the city.” He continues: “The promise of landscape urbanism is the development of space-time ecology that treats all forces and agents working in the urban field and considers them as a continuous network of interrelationships.”11 We are moving beyond excluding one area of knowledge from another, continuing to acknowledge how all landscape systems, cultural and ecological, are intertwined.

Active Landscape Photography: Anne C Godfrey

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Thus, multiplicity acknowledges the actual condition of our world, our practice and the people, animals and systems we work with on a daily basis. “Moving forward, we need to think analytically about the interconnectedness of social and physical systems, knit these strands together and derive new territories for action,” states Kate Orff in Toward an Urban Ecology.12 The work of Orff’s firm, SCAPE, epitomizes this stance across projects of multiple scales.13 An explicit visual display of intertwining multiple systems and relationships is possible and compelling in our photographic-based representations. Revealing multiple layers of information is a means towards which to become more conscious and thoughtful about the implications and usefulness of our fluid use of photography. An example of how this is possible is the partnership between Richard Misrach and Kate Orff for Petrochemical America.14 Misrach’s original photographs of Cancer Alley, along the Gulf Shore of Louisiana, made in 1998 and 2010, appear as stand-alone, captioned photographs in the first half of this book. Misrach’s long-established method of including descriptive captions is utilized.15 These captions describe both the visual information presented in the photograph and contextual information (physical, cultural, historical) not visibly available in the photograph. In the second half of the book, Misrach’s photographs are imbedded into Orff’s larger dynamic graphic representations discussing the multiple systems affected by petrochemical extraction. Yet each of Misrach’s photographs remains discrete. Subtle crop marks delineate the corners of the original frame. The plate number and title (as it appears in the first half of the book) float next to the marks for reference (Figure 9.2). This treatment of Misrach’s photographs makes the origin of the original work obvious, using diagrammatic notation to identify and honor his photograph as primary visual information, instead of suffusing the work by disappearing its original frame. Orff and her office SCAPE contextualize Misrach’s photographs with additional information in the form of dynamic graphic representations describing both visual and nonvisual circumstances of petrochemical production. The inclusion of this information reveals the implications of the larger systems at play. Simultaneously Misrach’s original photographs act as the touch point, as they describe the outcome of these systems with tangible landscape scenes (Figure 9.3). The often abstract nature of such data about extraction, pollution and economy becomes real to the viewer through Misrach’s photographs and SCAPE’s graphic tactics. The visual texture of the photographic image is relatable to the viewer, and thus creates an entry point into the complex information laid in, as well as its implications. The interplay of written data – abstracted vector lines describing flows and exchanges, and representations of various species (in various ways from photorealistic to silhouetted) – with Misrach’s photos creates searchability and inquisitive looking not possible with a single pictorial image (be it photography, Photoshopped imagery, or a type of chart visually depicting data). The final representation presents multiple scales. This helps the viewer understand the scope of the problem, yet also allows her to enter and associate personally with Misrach’s compelling landscape photography. Orff states, “Embedded in each of the photographs is this entire poem that is not direct. It allows a sort of breathing room in a way, opening it up to interpretation.”16 Recontextualizing photographs, when done in a rigorous and thoughtful way, as we see with Orff and SCAPE’s work, does not diminish the original photograph. Instead it adds new meaning. In this case, Misrach’s photographs have now taken two paths – they continue as original, single, powerful captioned images, and they play a new role as primary visual information in Orff’s work. Orff and SCAPE’s work demonstrates methods for communicating and confronting

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Figure 9.2 Requiem for a Bayou (2012), by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff. Source: Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture, 2014).

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Figure 9.3 Process work for Petrochemical America displayed in the Aperture Gallery, New York. Kate Orff and her office SCAPE diagramed many processes, working with analog overlay methods to develop eventual final representations that intertwine Richard Misrach’s photographs with complex information about Cancer Alley, a petrochemical landscape on the Gulf Coast. Source: Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, SCAPE.

complex landscape issues. Orff concludes, “My hope is that by integrating emotion and analysis, photography, research, and speculation, the book can play a role in sparking a deeper discussion about the future of energy and our shared climate and the landscape that we have made.”17 Petrochemical America serves as one example of how the discipline of landscape architecture can use photography to make dynamic, thick and rigorous representations of places. We can do this as part of a research agenda, such as Orff and SCAPE have done. We can also apply this way of working with photographs to design development and the communication of our design proposals. This is a matter of treating photographs not just as points of illustration, or parts and pieces we cut out and reassemble, but as primary information that motivates decision making. Photography, as a form of visual research and visual narrative telling, can be the vehicle, not simply the illustrator, of our design processes. Martha Sandweiss, in her research on photography and the American West, asks us to consider photographs as “primary source documents, as sources of meaning in and of themselves, rather than simply as illustrations that support what has already been established by other means . . . that photographs can, indeed, be rich primary source documents.”18 The treatment of Misrach’s work for Petrochemical America is a reminder that photography is one of the best research tools we have. Making photographs produces knowledge; it does not just capture or copy circumstances. As Anne Whiston Spirn has explored across her body of writing and photography, making photographs is a process of telling narratives, showing relationships and making meaning.19 For our work in landscape architecture, photographs are always used in a particular context. It is also possible for a photograph to be used in multiple contexts. Misrach’s original photographs, displayed in galleries and standing alone as single captioned images in the first half of Petrochemical America, are highly effective and evocative in those contexts. Orff’s inclusion of his

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photographs intertwined and layered with graphic representation of complex information about this petrochemical system creates a different context, equally evocative, that reveals new and different information to the viewer. This example supports transcending the subjective/objective divide. There is a multiplicity of meaning, use and context that exists within a spectrum. As landscape architects, we fluidly work across this spectrum. Often the subjective and objective are mixed together, creating a hybrid experience with multiple meanings that don’t fit tightly into the definitions of subjective or objective. Orff and Misrach’s collaboration is an example of this. Our practice itself is constantly hybridizing a spectrum of possibilities. Elizabeth Meyer states, “Sustainable landscape design flourishes when fixed categories are transgressed, and their limits and overlaps explored.”20 Similarly, we use photographs in ways that are often different than the original intention of the photograph. As investigators of places, processes, systems and people, photographs are a means towards understanding. One can learn about historic hydrological change over time by looking at photographs from one of the Surveys of the American West (e.g., Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs for the King Survey of the fortieth parallel in the American West, 1867–1881) (Figure 9.4). Similarly, historic photographs not made specifically to document materiality can inspire the use of a particular material, or tell about a pervasive pattern that influences design choices. Complex hybrid photo-constructed imagery can utilize images from past and current site condition photographs and combine them with renderings of proposed designs. These hybrid photo-based images are also a way to create complexity within the images. They can signal or make more available complex contextual information stakeholders may identify with. Making

Figure 9.4 Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 1868, by Timothy O’Sullivan (1840–1882). Source: United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel (1867–1881). Library of Congress.

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Figure 9.5

Figure 9.6 The interrelationship between the Willamette River and Willamette Falls is made clear through the use of vivid section obliques made by Snøhetta for their design proposal for the Willamette Falls Riverwalk. Riparian habitat restoration, human uses along the river and path and adaptive reuse of existing structures sit in clear scale to the volume and character of the dynamic hydrologic activity. Source: Snøhetta.

searchable, intricate hybrid images is another way to lay in many types of complex information. These hybrid photo-based constructions may not need or use a frame as an end result but rather augment familiar conventions or morph into something new. An example is the design renderings for the Willamette Falls Riverwalk. The Snøhetta and Mayer/Reed design team21 demonstrated to stakeholders how they understood and respected the physical and cultural complexity of this site through intricate design proposals supported by dynamic hybrid representations. Specifically, the morphed section obliques combine views of the intertwined proposal for stream-side restoration and open spaces for multipurpose activity with the

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profile of the Willamette River. This river, considered the spine of Oregon west of the Cascades, is a strong place maker in all histories of the region. Instead of stopping at the river’s edge, the dynamic volume of the river is included in several design renderings. Thus, the inclusion of its depth, profile and scale in relationship to the project proposal acknowledges the significance of the river as part of the site (Figures 9.5–9.6). With its diverse history, Willamette Falls is a place of multiple narratives, uses and meanings for a wide group of stakeholders. Willamette Falls is a sacred site for the Five Confederated Tribes.22 The narrative of the Oregon Trail intertwines with this site, Oregon City being the geographic end of the trail. The history of industry in Oregon occurred in microcosm on this site, from wool production to logging, to cycles of paper production. It is the site of the world’s first long-distance electrical power transmission line.23 Historic photography and current site photography were utilized to construct images revealing how multiple times and histories would continue to remain present on the site. Collecting and then locating historic photographs in relation to the current site conditions played a significant role in both understanding the site and making significant design decisions (seen in the case study “Snøhetta: Willamette Falls Riverwalk”; also see the case study “Mayer/Reed: Willamette Falls Inventory”). By creating complex hybrid representations that are searchable, closer looking is activated. Engaged looking allows for subtle information to be discerned and for the viewer to have a sophisticated conversation with the imagery and the concepts conveyed. . . . It is important to note the use of photography in these hybrid, constructed, complex ways for landscape architecture usually does not fall under the same category as what Christopher Phillips and others24 critique as the practice of removing photographs from archives and holding them up as single aesthetic objects (as referenced earlier – see note 2). Photographs are always viewed in a contemporary context with current personal and cultural values influencing reading. Often, we cannot know the original intentions under which photographs are made, such as my example of the Wisconsin family in Chapter 5. Lucy Lippard illustrates a process of looking and creating knowledge around a photograph removed from its original context that allows for the consideration of both the original intention of the photographer and a contemporary interpretation. In “Double Take: The Diary of a Relationship With an Image”25 Lippard discusses her evolving understanding of an image (originally a postcard she acquired) of a Stoney First Nation family taken c. 1906 (Figure 9.7). Her investigations lead to collecting and applying information about the historical and cultural time frame of the photograph and the potential intentions of the photographer. Yet Lippard acknowledges a chasm will always exist between herself, the photographer and the family depicted. That chasm is one about specifics. Lippard’s largest concern is about why the photograph was made and what the implications were/are of a white woman traveler photographing a Stoney First Nation family in their home in 1906. Gathering of information from various sources closes the gap, but also opens up a whole new raft of questions for Lippard. She learns more about Mary Schäffer’s (the photographer) biography and that only makes things more complicated. Lippard acknowledges all of these contexts of reading, looking and understanding. Lippard does not remove or exclude her own personal humanistic interests in the people depicted from

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Figure 9.7 Samson Beaver, His Wife Leah, and Daughter Frances Louise, 1907, by Mary Schäffer Warren (1861–1939). Source: Lucy Lippard, “Double Take: The Diary of a Relationship With an Image,” in The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells.

her larger search for understanding the context in which the photograph was originally made. A tension centers around the personal response one has with the subject matter (I am just as drawn to the three people, their open faces addressing the camera, as Lippard) and the larger social history of “Indian photography” and the issues of power and exploitation often associated with colonizing Anglos photographing First Nation peoples.26 Though that critique did not exist at the time the photograph was made, Lippard does not relegate a post-colonial reading to the side. Instead she puts that critique front and center in her search for contemporary meaning. All of these aspects of the life and meaning of this photograph come together in complex, layered multiple histories. Lippard does not try to land on a single ultimate meaning, nor does she exclude more contemporary understandings because they are not the intention of the original context or archive of the photograph. Foresta states, “[T]he weight of the archive will be forever in the context of the present moment.”27 This concept is a clearer way to approach our use of collected photographs from multiple sources/archives and interpret them in multiple ways, including original context (in as much as we can) and contemporary context. When landscape architects take photographs out of their original contexts and use them to gain more information or create a better understanding about a place (e.g., the use of Misrach’s photographs in Orff’s work, or Snøhetta’s use of historic photos of Willamette Falls and Oregon City), we are removing them from some sort of archive28 and placing them into another context. As Lippard and Foresta show us, we can be responsible in this activity by acknowledging that this is a process of recontextualization. Thus, we must ask active questions while looking: Where did this photograph originally come from? Can I gain a better understanding of why it was made? How can that information help me better understand what I am looking at to better understand

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this place? How does this contextual information influence how I am interpreting the information I am looking for? What is the relationship of a contemporary interpretation to an interpretation at the time it was made? This is another opportunity to allow for multiplicity in photographic meaning. We are allowed to interact with a photograph in multiple ways, from multiple positions, increasing our options for understanding and our possibilities for knowledge to grow and accumulate. We can interact with a photograph in a way that allows new assessment of the meaning of its contents. We also need to be conscious of what we are doing, and what happens, when we take a photograph from one context and place it into another. The result is often a shift in meaning – because of the change in the viewer and the context. We need to acknowledge the implications of doing so, as well as take responsibility for this activity. . . . We have the capacity to engage in active, multilayered use and investigation when we look at and interpret photographs for design decision making. There are many ways. The new lines of cultural theory developed in the postmodern era give us the capacity to call upon many relevant contemporary positions as we make, look at and use photography (broadly: feminism, post-colonialism, critical theories in cultural studies, media studies, contemporary political theory, and developing ideas from cosmopolitanism, object-oriented ontology, affect theory and anthropogenic studies). We can draw upon any and all of these positions to help illuminate what we think and how we react when we look at photographs of landscapes. Herein lies our responsibly to take multiple pieces of information, history and knowledge into consideration as we use photographs from other sources to assist us in our design decision making. To treat a photograph removed from its original context as simply an aesthetic object or a collection of categorizable items is a passive activity, which is one of Phillips’s main arguments.29 Lippard’s method demonstrates a more complex path – investigating histories and contexts significant to the photograph as well as acknowledging the contemporary context in which it now sits and is understood. Lippard’s initial feelings about the photograph jumpstart her curiosity and remain a valid context throughout her investigation. “I am trying to deconstruct my deep attraction to this quiet little picture.”30 Complexity is at the very core of our practice. It defines our discipline. We work in a fluid way with a diverse set of knowledge and experience. Complexity facilitates hybridity. Hybridity thrives on multiplicity. This is what we do. Showing more of these interrelationships in our representations, at all stages of the design process, brings our complex way of working to the foreground. It reveals the process we consider, demonstrates our facility with multiple bodies of knowledge, and educates our diverse audiences. Creating hybrid images uncovers our work and makes it visible.31 Diana Balmori, Meyer, Corner and Girot32 all argue that single scenes alone do not reveal the multiplicity in our work, or in landscapes as a whole. In Drawing and Reinventing Landscape Balmori lays out an argument for drawings to transcend the nineteenth-century fixation on the creation of the scene and move into a twenty-first-century application of hybrid drawing types to better represent changing dynamic interrelationships. Many of her arguments easily apply to our use of photography in landscape architecture. “[F]inal renderings can no longer be viewed as images of an everlasting, paradisaical landscape or Arcadia that speaks of an eternal equilibrium. We are now in a new era.”33

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Hybrid images, combined with complex visual information, including photographic images, drawings and even landscape scenes, are a means towards revealing the complexity of our work. The wide interest in Misrach’s and Orff’s work, in part earning her a MacArthur award, shows it is both possible and worth it. The Snøhetta Mayer/Reed design team won a National ASLA Honor award in 2018 for Willamette Falls Riverwalk. These are just two examples. How can photography-based representations of our work be as complex as the work itself? Each office, project and individual could answer this question differently. NOTES 1 Marvin Heiferman, Photography Changes Everything (New York: Aperture, 2012), 12. 2 See Christopher Phillips, “The Judgement Seat of Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by Richard Bolton (1982; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 14–47. Phillips outlines the argument that late modernists, such as John Szarkowski, removed single photographs from larger photographic archives, and turned them into purely aesthetic objects. This articulates a general aestheticization of photography that Phillips argues occurred in the late Modern era, erasing or delegitimizing the many ways photographs are made, reduced to simply caring about art and aesthetics. These curatorial practices, attributed specifically to Szarkowski and Beaumont Newhall, were motivated by the desire to elevate photography to the same fine art spheres as painting and sculpture – not just documentation, journalism, surveying or some kind of pedestrian middle-brow activity. This practice did engage in taking and using a photograph made in or starting in one context and putting it into another (archive to art piece). Phillips argues this removal of single images from a body archive, in which photographs were made for reasons other than aesthetic, and placement of them into an art setting are manipulative. This removal negates and disrespects the original intention of making. Though this argument is compelling and reveals a form of aesthetic appropriation, Phillips’s augment does not allow for multiple readings to adhere to a photograph over time. The reader is dependent in meaning making, as much as the context. Though removing these photographs from their original context can be considered manipulative, one has to realize that today photographs are moved around all the time for multiple purposes. Photographic images, though starting a life in a particular body of work or archive, now more than ever are movable, transformable and changeable. I say landscape architecture skipped this debate, in that we have always applied photographs to many uses, from aesthetic to forms of data collection, such as assessing what is present or absent in the current condition of a site. We collect and gather photographs from multiple sources and investigate them through our unique skill sets to create knowledge for design decision making. 3 Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 15–25. 4 See Chapter 8. 5 Merry Foresta, “Foreword,” in Photography Changes Everything, edited by Marvin Heiferman (New York: Aperture, 2012), 7. 6 Christophe Girot, “Vision in Motion: Representing Landscape in Time,” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 94. 7 Girot, as well as James Corner, repeatedly states that landscape architecture is constrained by our representational conventions. Girot continues: “The quest for such comprehensive vision for landscape is, however, almost impossible to attain with the current means at our disposal. We know that our conventional tools for recording and projecting landscape deliver all but an extremely partial and reductive glimpse of the world.” (94) True enough, yet don’t we know this, and are we not individually actively addressing these issues in big and small ways every day? We could, even more so, if we chose to show more of our in-process work, which is often less constrained by the singe frame or view, and is often more hybrid in nature. Girot’s argument builds towards film, or moving pictures, as a solution. See also James Corner and Alison Hirsch, The Landscape Imagination: The Collected Essays of James Corner, 1990–2010 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), specifically Corner’s 1999 essay “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes.”

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8 Elizabeth Meyer, “Sustaining Beauty. The Performance of Appearance a Manifesto in Three Parts,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 3 (2008): 3, 6–23. 9 Kristina Hill, “Nexus: Science, Memory, Strategy,” in Thinking the Contemporary Landscape, edited by Christophe Girot and Dora Imhof (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017), 193. 10 Ibid.,186–195. 11 James Corner, “Terra Fluxus,” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 30. 12 Kate Orff, Toward an Urban Ecology (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2016), 9. 13 SCAPE’s work with photography serves as a touch point, discussed throughout this book. 14 Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture, 2014). 15 Misrach often includes narrative captions or narrative introductions with his photographic bodies of work (e.g., Bravo 20, Desert Cantos) as a means to contextualize the meaning and making of the work. These longer captions, collaborating with his journalist wife, Myriam Weisang Misrach, contextualize the photographs with information not visually available in the photograph. This is a method of recontextualization. Richard Misrach and Myriam Weisang Misrach, Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Richard Misrach and Reyner Banham, Desert Cantos (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). 16 Melissa Harris, “Richard Misrach and Kate Orff Discuss Petrochemical America,” Aperture. https:// aperture.org/blog/richard-misrach-and-kate-orff-in-conversation/2/ (accessed May 17, 2019). 17 Ibid. 18 Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, CTCT: Yale University Press, 2004), 7. 19 Anne Whiston Spirn explores these concepts explicitly in The Eye Is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery, 2014. 20 Elizabeth Meyer, “Sustaining Beauty. The Performance of Appearance a Manifesto in Three Parts,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 3 (2008): 15. 21 Which also included DIALOG and project partners Oregon Metro, City of Oregon City; Clackamas County; State of Oregon; and PGE Falls Legacy, LLC. 22 The Five Confederated Tribes consist of: Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Confederated Tribes and Bands of Yakama Nation. 23 Willamette Falls Legacy Project, “Cultural Landscape Report,” www.willamettefallslegacy.org/ wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Appendix-E-Cultural-Landscape-Report_draft.pdf (accessed May 15, 2019). 24 See Douglas Crimp and Louise Lawler, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993); Rosalind E. Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape – View,” Art Journal / College Art Association of America (1982): 311–319. 25 Lucy Lippard, “Double Take: The Diary of a Relationship With an Image,” in The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells (1996; London: Routledge, 2002), 343–353. 26 See Sandweiss, “Mementos of Race,” in Print the Legend. 27 Foresta, “Foreword,” 9. 28 This could be from a historic collected archive, or simply a social media photo feed, or anything in between. 29 Christopher Phillips, “The Judgement Seat of Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by Richard Bolton (1982; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 14–47. 30 Lippard, “Double Take: The Diary of a Relationship With an Image,” 343. 31 See Amoroso’s compilation of hybrid representation experiments occurring primarily in university settings in: Nadia Amoroso, Representing Landscapes: Hybrid (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016). 32 See Meyer, “Sustaining Beauty”; Corner, “Terra Fluxus”; Girot, “Vision in Motion”. 33 Diana Balmori, Drawing and Reinventing Landscape (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2014), 184.

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10 Combining photographs Complex processes, complex landscapes

Multiplicity can be achieved by making work in combination. Possibilities include: combining multiple photographs with one another; combining photography with drawing or other mark making; combining photographs with other digital imagery; combining photographs with information through text and diagraming.1 In combining, there is a thickness2 of information that accumulates, viewpoints expand, and a greater degree of visual stimulation is possible. In combining the result is greater than the sum of its parts. Combining transcends the sanctity of the single static photographic image. Combining photographs with other visual information has existed as long as the medium itself. Two contemporary examples situate this conversation: David Hockney’s work with photography and the essays and exhibit from Composite Landscapes,3 edited and curated by Charles Waldheim and Andrea Hansen. Composite Landscapes as a project is squarely situated within landscape architecture, while Hockney, as one of the best-known living painters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, helps widen our conversation. Those familiar with Hockney know he has little love for photography. His relationship with photography is motivated by his desire to critique the conventional practices and break its confines. Hockney is highly dissatisfied with photography’s single perspectival view, its static nature of freezing a scene and the limits of the frame: “a photograph sees it all at once, in one click of the lens from a single point of view, but we don’t.”4 His well-known “joiners” aim to eradicate each of these functions of photography simply by breaking the “one-eyed camera” through the construction of multiple photographic pictures.5 Hockney does not recreate a “scene” with the joiners that would depict the typical monocular viewpoint of the static lens pointed at a single place in space. Instead the joiners combine multiple photographs taken from multiple points of view. The photographs are arranged to show multiplicity of movement, action event and time. For instance, we see the same hand multiple times, in multiple positions, in his Polaroid collage Noya and Bill Brand With Self Portrait, Pembroke Studios, London, 8th May 1982. Hockney walks through the space as he photographs, disallowing a single perspective to form as he makes these sets. Multiple planes and points of view are depicted, change is shown, and time clearly passes as, for instance, someone swims back and forth in the swimming pool, in Ian Swimming L.A. March 11 1982. “The joiners were much closer to the way that we actually look at things, closer to the truth of the experience,” Hockney conveys to Paul Joyce the year Ian Swimming was made. He continues: “I realized that very quickly. It seemed that these pictures had added a new dimension to photography.”6 Hockney uses and breaks photography – time, experiences and spaces accumulate in these combined sets of joiners. These are no decisive, singular moments.

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Making multiple photographs to create a single “image” literally and conceptually destroys the precious single slice in time.7 By roaming the scene with the camera, making multiple photographs from multiple points of view, Hockney disallows one-point perspective to form, again removing the possibility of singularity of a static scene from one position. Hockney comes at this from primarily a Cubist position, which is interested in depicting experience of perception, not a single fixed static object in place to produce a scene. Multiple planes and time passing can then be shown simultaneously in this Cubist inspired process. Time expands as movement is depicted – for example, by showing the same subject changing position. For the early joiners Hockney, using a Polaroid camera, would construct the final joiner in situ, placing each Polaroid out (on the ground often) creating a grid of square-frame Polaroid images (Figure 10.1). Once he started utilizing roll film instead of Polaroids, the idea of a frame or grid of framed photographic images ceased to be part of the construction process. With the use of roll film the “edge” of the work meanders, displaying Hockney’s wandering interest with the camera (continuing to destroy the primacy of a single framed scene). As he photographed with roll film, Hockney was required to construct the finished work in his mind, now having to wait to reconstitute the work until after the film had been developed and printed. The rectilinear frame of the Polaroid no longer acted as a visual constraint.8 See, for example, Photographing Annie Leibovitz While She Photographs Me, Mojave Desert, February 1983. Similarly, there is no frame to seeing the world. Our eyes don’t have a rectilinear frame. Hockney explains, “We think that photography is the ultimate reality, but it isn’t because the camera sees geometrically. We don’t. We see partially geometrically, but also psychologically.”9 Hockey brought that idea into his paintings with several of his most recent work displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.10 One painting of his home in Los Angeles, A Bigger Interior With Blue Terrace and Garden, 2017, has angled edges, instead of a four-sided rectilinear frame, depicting multiple angles of recession while looking down the veranda in multiple directions. This painting is not beholden to a single-point perspective.11 These joiners do end up being a single image, yet as we look there is so much more activity, information and context occurring. The activity of the eye roaming through the work activates this, in part because the static single perspective is removed. This Cubist approach more accurately represents what physiologically occurs when we look at places: the eyes always roam and the relationship with the eyes and the brain creates the image. This is a combination of creativity and mechanics, memory and the observed, feelings at the moment in time and then space and distance afforded by looking again later, and in this case reconstructing later. This thickens the process, creates more points of entry and inquiry, and thus creates a much more complex set of dialogues and relationships. This way of working with photography is many things: painterly, constructive, montage, narrative and very obviously made, not taken.12 The eyes search, look and wander because the construction is just as much what the work is about as the subject matter itself. The work is also much more obviously conceptual. The construction is making a point, standing in opposition to the single framed scene. Hockney frequently argues that a viewer does not look very long at a single photograph, but with the joiners looking lingers, as with painting or drawing. He also believes the joiners are “much closer to the way we look at things, closer to the truth of experience.”13 (I will return to Hockney in the following essay, discussing his most recent work in moving images and photographic drawings.) Some may consider Hockney’s joiners montage, even though Hockney himself believes this work is much more like drawing.14 Regardless, Waldheim and Hansen take a similar position to

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Figure 10.1 Here, David Hockney spreads out Polaroids poolside in Los Angeles while constructing one of his swimming-themed joiners (c. 1978). This is an activity of in-process making with photography, as Hockney chooses which photographs to use in situ. He then decides what additional photographs to make to finish the construction. This also demonstrates the accumulation of time – the joiner is a set of photographs made over a longer period of time that represents the passage of an activity (swimming), instead of a single photograph made in a split second. In the pool are David Stoltz and Ian Falconer. Ian was the subject in Ian Swimming L.A. March 11, 1982. Source: Michael Childers, Getty Images.

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Hockney on the idea of complexity – the act of construction allows for an expansion of time and space: “Above all, montage has been privileged for its relative ease of use and accessible visual language. Beyond simple photorealism montage has the capacity to distill complex perceptual and phenomenal experiences in a visual medium easily understood by broad public audiences.”15 Photomontage can quickly get to some complex narrative points by combining things in new ways. But the stumbling block still is the last part of this statement: “easily understood by broad public audiences.” Colleagues, students and practitioners debate this point. In academic settings montage and collage are widely experimented with.16 Students take all kinds of risks in trying out different means of image construction. Yet in professional practice, we still don’t see obviously constructed montage on a regular basis for the use of communicating our designs to the public. Some individuals or firms do utilize this method of making as part of their ideation and design development, and at times present it publicly (e.g., West 8, So_il and Charcoalblue’s proposal for Artpark Master Plan),17 but this is still an exception in daily practice.18 As landscape architects, we design for others. It is easier to make representations that are expected. This is tricky. We play into the expectations of our (faulty) cognitive construct about photography – that it shows the real. So, in certain terms, montage is “not real” to a casual public audience and thus we may think it has little use for showing or persuading people about design proposals. There may be little capacity for acceptance of something that does not “look real.” On the flip side, our Photoshop visualizations can be “too real” because they look/act like a conventional single photograph. This type of representation signals literalness to the average viewer. Many practitioners cited this as a specific reason they have moved away from doing very “realistic” Photoshop renderings. The issue becomes one of “too real.” Clients get hung up on specific details, such as a particular animal species present, instead of contemplating the design proposal as a whole. Several firms use 3-D modeling and keep the rendering obviously “digital”19 and constructed. This is a tactic many firms have turned to, especially during design development phases with a client. Perhaps there is more room for montage and constructed techniques in this part of the proposal process than we think? Claude Cormier discusses the usefulness of exploring more obviously made representations or illustrations, instead of relying on careful “photorealistic” images.20 (See the case study “Claude Cormier + Associés: Berczy Park”.) We have seen successful examples from SCAPE, Snøhetta and CC+A that show there is room for many different types of representations at several different phases in the design process. Constructed techniques leave room for interpretation; the viewer has to interact with these images in a much more robust way than a single tight scene, as Hockney argues. Constructed techniques – joiners, montage, collage, composite – stimulate the imagination, asking the viewer to participate in the conceptual construction of what is presented (Figure 10.2). One step forward could be actively implement combining and montage as an “in-house” process methodology – similar to how we use sketch models and concept diagraming and drawing. It’s so enjoyable to walk into offices and see all kinds of experimental things happening and hanging about on shelves and desks (Figure 10.3). Even if it never makes it to the client’s eyes it surely helps stimulate a more rigorous design process. In-house collage/montage/combining can be a generative, thick process and is as easy to engage in as sketch model making (Figure 10.4). Often this discussion has occurred around drawing, with encouragement from several practitioners and academics to pursue less picturesque-based practices (Corner, Anuradha Mater and Dilip da Cunha, Diana Balmori, and Walter Hood, to name a few).21 Often the critique is pointed

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Figure 10.2 TEN x TEN Studio constructed this process work for the Minnesota River Greenway Cultural Resources Interpretive Plan as a means to represent on-the-ground subtle experiences of this landscape which at times, intersects with major transportation infrastructure. This is one of ten pieces made. Each, as we see here, utilizes multiple perspectives and scales, opening up the spatial experience. Also, the panorama function is played with, as we see overpasses bend, which may feel more like the in-person experience. Source: TEN x TEN Studio. Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Figure 10.3 Residuals. Sculptural work made to explore landscape processes for specific site work. Source: TEN x TEN Studio.

towards drawing practices about perspective and plan. Sometimes photo collage is utilized as an alternative practice, as we see in Composite Landscapes, Mathur and da Cunha’s Mississippi Floods and Natalie Amoroso’s Representing Landscapes series.22 Yet a direct assessment specifically concerned with the use of photography has not occurred. Photography is often named in a list of other modes of representation, yet its unique qualities stand in the shadows. We could, as Hockney has done, take the very thing that he does not like (conventional monocular photography) and turn it into something that confronts the critique and provides a solution. Hockney’s critique of photography, and his manipulation of it as a means to remake it into something that functions quite differently, points landscape architecture towards a way of addressing some of the primary issues we face in representing the complexity of our work. What we do is often so complex that it remains invisible or illegible. Sometimes we simplify complexity because of a various set of constraints either imposed or self-imposed – budget, client, number of people working on a project, resources, collaborators, code, stakeholders and so forth. Do we, without even realizing it, create a monocular, single point of view as a means towards handling this complexity? Do we get in trouble because we still believe that photography shows us what we see, or more importantly how we see? By combining, experimenting and making visual representations with photography that include multiple images, multiple points of view, multiple edges and multiple spans of time, we are able to create a thick understanding of place and include complexity while manifesting design possibility. This is

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Figure 10.4 This process collage (2018), created for a design project in Clayton, New York, along the St. Lawrence River, combines site photography by the designer, found photography from postcards, and photography found via Internet searching. These collages explore the interesting and at times conflicting relationships occurring along this stretch of the St. Lawrence. This process helped articulate the multiple factors and time periods influencing the design proposal for a revitalized riverfront park system. Source: By Elena Joudisius.

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a way to question the confines of one of the dominant definitions of landscape, “a scene,” while simultaneously opening up these representations to present experience, not simply a view. These processes of representation act more like landscape processes. This intertwined, overlapped, multi-perspective or non-singular way of seeing and making can lead to an expanded way of thinking, and thus expanded design decision making. This is a perfect time to take some risks and make new work exploring the articulation of complex issues such as climate change (which Balmori and Kate Orff cite23 as strong reasons to make and show complexity and multiplicity in our representations – see Chapter 9). This multilayered way of seeing and thinking is real, a real way of experiencing the world – perhaps more real than a single static view or one- or two-point perspective. Throughout these essays ways of working that include multiple images, multiple histories, multiple knowledges and multiple experiences advocate for creating more possibilities for design. It is also an approach that aligns with the complexity we continue to discover and perceive in all living systems. The bandwidth of problems we take on and their potential solutions can expand when we make work that explores complexity. Let’s return to Hockney’s method for the joiners. First, instead of standing in one place and using the camera to take a single image of a scene, he walks around and makes several photographs of that scene from many perspectives and sometimes from many distances from the primary subject. Those photographs combine to make a composite that includes more time, movement and multiple points of view than the single photograph is able to. By taking this method into our practice of site photography, we can make images that show more time, events and characteristics. Using this method requires roaming through more of the site, and more consciously engaging in the photographic process. We see more parts and pieces of what make the whole (Figure 10.5). As good investigators we can engage in question asking as we work this way. What is this here, and why is this here? I don’t see this, but I do see this. What am I feeling right now, and why? Where is my attention drawn, and what directions am I looking in?

Figure 10.5 Taking cues from both David Hockey and Robert Smithson, this work explores the ubiquitous industrial structures of the rust belt throughout upstate New York. Walking through the site and making photographs in columns from 20 different positions relay texture through individual photographs. Yet the image as a whole goes beyond scene making, instead creating dynamic searchability. Source: By Jesse Smith.

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j Part Three: Expanding possibilities

In 1984, after Hockney had spent a couple of years experimenting with the joiners and contemplating their meaning, he came to this conclusion about photography: Photography will have to wait. It’s only a hundred and fifty years old. It’s not that long when you think that pictures have been made for ten thousand years. It’s not arrogant to suggest that. When I said the camera might have been used wrongly for a hundred years, people said it was outrageous, but it isn’t actually. A hundred years is not that much in the history of images is it?24

Hockney’s assertion brings us full circle: as makers and users, we determine how the machine, the camera, works for us. We determine how to think about it, comprehend it and make images with it. There are more choices with the camera and photography than what we have been attempting over the last 175 years. The individual makes those choices. It is simply a matter of becoming conscious of those choices, instead of remaining passive and deterministic. It is about changing directionality. I can do many things with photography. Hockney’s process of joiners is just one example. We can take hold of our process with photography and create new and groundbreaking work. The examples here are just a few of many directions we could take with constructed work. As has been the theme throughout these essays, there are many ways to work with photography as a means towards pursuing depth and rigor. How exciting to think about all of these possibilities. As we do in other aspects of our design work, we can push the bounds of what we do with photography, and create visions and experiences of places that represent the complexity and richness of the world around us.

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NOTES 1 See Chapter 9 as well. 2 James Corner articulates that landscapes are thick in three ways: materially thick, temporally thick and culturally thick. Our representations of landscape and design can be thick in these three categories as well. James Corner, “Terra Fluxus,” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 119. 3 Charles Waldheim and Andrea Hansen, Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014). 4 David Hockney, “Way Out West: Space Exploration,” in A Bigger Message: Conservations With David Hockney, edited by Martin Gayford (2009; London, England: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 143. 5 David Hockney and Paul Joyce, Hockney on Art (London: Little, Brown, and Company, 1999). 6 Ibid., 19. 7 See Chapter 8. 8 Ibid., Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conservations With David Hockney. 9 Gayford, “The Trap of Naturalism,” in A Bigger Message: Conservations with David Hockney, 53. 10 November 27, 2017–February 28, 2018. 11 Visit, December 12, 2017. 12 See Chapter 4. 13 Hockney and Joyce, Hockney on Art, 19. 14 For example, “Photography and Drawing.” Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations With David Hockney, 116. 15 Waldheim and Hansen, Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture, 17. 16 See Nadia Amoroso, Representing Landscapes: Hybrid (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016). 17 West 8. “West 8, So_il and Charcoalblue Selected as Winning Team for Artpark Master Plan,” May 15, 2019, www.west8.com/news/west_8_so_il_and_charcoalblue_win_artpark_masterplan_com petitcom/ (accessed June 27, 2019). These representations are obviously collaged, and morph scale, creating playful, interesting images. They still construct a loose one-point perspective. 18 For example, a quick survey of Landscape Architecture Magazine from October 2018 to June 2019 found only five examples of photocollage/montage similar in obvious construction to the examples displayed in Composite Landscapes. 19 You may have noticed there are quite a few words in this paragraph and throughout this essay that are quite slippery. What does “digital” mean when we use it to describe how something looks? “Photorealistic,” in terms of my argument, is actually an oxymoronic word. Yet in other cases it is still the best word we have to describe something that looks like or acts like a photograph. For example photorealism is a whole genre of painting. In that case “photorealistic” is self-referential. 20 This was in reference specifically to their work for Love Park in Toronto. In many instances Claude Cormier + Associés’ design proposals remain illustrative and playful and obviously do not attempt to look like a photograph. Claude Cormier, “Serious Fun.” Big Ideas. Oregon ASLA Design Symposium. April 6, 2019. Portland, Oregon. 21 James Corner and Alison Hirsch, The Landscape Imagination: The Collected Essays of James Corner, 1990–2010 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014); Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Diana Balmori, Drawing and Reinventing Landscape (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2014); Walter Hood and Leah Levy, Walter Hood: Urban Diaries (Washington, DC: Spacemaker, 1997). 22 Nadia Amoroso and Walter Hood, Representing Landscapes: A Visual Collection of Landscape Architectural Drawings (London: Routledge, 2012); Nadia Amoroso, Representing Landscapes: Hybrid (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016); Nadia Amoroso, Representing Landscapes: Analogue (London: Routledge, 2019). 23 See Balmori, Drawing and Reinventing Landscape; Kate Orff, Toward an Urban Ecology (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2016). 24 Hockney and Joyce, “Mexico City May 1984,” Hockney on Art, 67.

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11 Near, not-of Complex landscape narratives, complex photography

This last essay is a set of explorations, continuing in the vein of the previous chapter. It continues to explore this question: How can we reconsider what photography is as a means to make representations that are as complex as the landscapes in which we work, the designs we create and the experiences we have in them? We will look at examples primarily outside of the discipline of landscape architecture, and end with some experiments. By looking outside of the field two objectives are served: (1) these outside examples are not bound by constraints of our discipline, so by looking at them, we too may choose to not bind ourselves; (2) these examples open the possibility of understanding that a larger audience might be more ready to receive multiple images and information meshed together than we currently believe. A first example is the pairing of images with other narrative, text-based information. This seems familiar, yet continues to yield new possibilities for understanding. Working this way is about more than a title-like caption. Instead it is interested in how narrative can allow for multiple possibilities and understandings to occur. These narratives also acknowledge the passage of time, in many instances discussing the nonvisible as well as the visible. Richard Misrach’s work in Petrochemical America is one example, in which many of the captions discuss events or landscape conditions that are either not present in the photograph or used to be present but are now absent. He utilizes this tactic throughout his bodies of work.1 Another example is The New York Times Past Tense Storytelling Team, which has recently published a series of photo essays that collect photographs from the past within a particular theme. Several people are invited to discuss, interpret and reinterpret them in contemporary terms. One, about dance, “Perpetual Motion,” invited the author Zadie Smith and the ballerina Misty Copeland to discuss images curated from The New York Times archives.2 Though the following example may at first seem antithetical to this point, it actually expands the concept of multiplicity in photographic viewing. Misty Copeland, the first African American female principal with the American Ballet Theater, captions a photograph of choreographer Twyla Tharp rehearsing with dancer Kevin O’Day (1991) – Tharp has characteristically hung herself upon O’Day’s frame (Tharp explored the meaning of movement and form in all of her choreography). Copeland writes, Twyla Tharp once said “The Ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language.” It is the same with these photographs. There are captions that can inform, but they are not necessary. These photographs of dancers, like dance itself, can tell a hundred stories without uttering a single word.3

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It is those hundred stories that await, and are interesting to understand, and for our purposes, to reveal, tell and share. Copeland discusses another photograph of a set of African American schoolchildren wearing tights and tutus from 1987, revealing another story: I look at this photograph and I think they don’t look very comfortable. They’re also wearing sneakers with their tutus and tights, which says a lot. This photograph feels so representative of how most black kids enter dance. What really gets me are the pink tights. Those tights are such a psychological thing that’s ingrained within the ballet culture: The fact that your skin doesn’t match the tights is a subconscious way of signaling to brown people that they don’t belong without ever having to say it.4

This example is part of a larger project The New York Times has initiated, called Past Tense.5 Working with Google, The New York Times is scanning photographs from its vast photography archive. Included in these scans are the backs of the photographs and any other information that joined them. This information includes marks, stamps, notations and sometimes pasted-on captions or headlines as they appeared in the paper. These marks and notations, en verso, reveal the photograph’s origination date, publication date, section and size printed, payment to the photographer, filing numbers and whether the photograph was looked at again or printed later. This project reveals the life span (still ongoing) that these photographs experience, literally accumulating information and interpretation over time. This project also shares all of the information, perhaps messy, or even contradictory, and, certainly with contemporary interpretation, always changing and shifting. To explore another theme, let’s return to David Hockney. Hockney, in his late career, has developed new processes concerned with his ever-evolving examination of photography and its potentialities. His films and “photographic drawings” continue to question the use of the single frame and the single-point perspective. His video works The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods (Spring 2011, Summer 2010, Autumn 2010, Winter 2010), 2010–2011 involve placing nine cameras in a grid on the top of a vehicle and driving down a country road in Yorkshire, England. This is done four times, once during every season. When viewed either as a moving image or as still outtakes, the nine frames present nine different points of view of this landscape. Thus, as with his joiners, the lenses’ single-point perspective is broken. This is a manifestation of Hockney’s idea that “perspective keeps you out.”6 Hockney introduces time and motion through the use of video instead of still photography, adding more layers and complexity to the visual representation of the landscape. Hockney states, “I think you need lots and lots of pictures to counteract this perspective. . . . I think this is a good way to push photography. You can go into these pictures . . . you can wander around in them.”7 When one looks at this work, either on a screen or in its life-size version in the gallery, the eye moves around the nine screens, looking and noticing not only the changes occurring because of the movement through space but also how the different points of view collected together simultaneously captivate the eyes. This motivates the viewer’s eyes to move and search, instead of insisting they be fixed by a single viewpoint. This is nearer to our own physiological way of seeing (in which the eyes are constantly moving). Thus, Woldgate Woods is “near, not-of,” which heightens viewers’ engagement, motivating them to look and experience more.

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j Part Three: Expanding possibilities

Figure 11.1 Blue Sky Shadow (2014), from Double Memory, by Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author.

Music videos continue to be a rich source of visual exploration, including explorations of the landscape. Courtney Barnett’s video “Depreston” (2015) uses three frames side by side, displaying video of driving through anonymous suburbia. Instead of Hockney’s method of using the exact same landscape with the same forward look for each of the cameras, this work points the cameras each in a different direction: forward and to either side. Yet as one watches, the landscapes unrolling in each frame are near-but-not-exactly-of the same place at that same moment. Looking at first, the mind wants to make it the same place, but it is this nearness of matching, not-quite-of-ness that keeps the viewer looking, engaged and curious. It is like memory and detail combined. This idea of “near, not-of” is augmented from photographer Jeff Wall’s discussion of his own “near-documentary” photography. The photographs in this body of work by Wall are about something that has occurred, often something he witnesses, but Wall “chooses not to photograph it” at that movement – he chooses to not document or report. Instead he creates the idea of the moment later through an often-complex process of photography and construction.8 This near-documentary approach critiques our common activities with photography – shooting, taking and capturing. Wall’s idea of nearness picks away at the notion that photography is exactly what we see. This acknowledges that photography is near, not-of, a place, person, an event or a situation. This nearness, not-of-ness is obvious at some level in viewing Wall’s work. Often awareness of this condition is visceral, instead of explicit, such as when viewing the wellknown Milk (1984) or the more recent Parent Child (2018) and the tryptic I giardini/The Gardens (2017). The viewer keeps looking, wondering, “What is really going on here?”9 For our purposes, this type of engagement between the photographer and viewer is a means to agitate at the experience of landscape complexity.

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Figure 11.2 Through Diablo Pass (2016), from Double Memory, by Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author.

Near, not-of, propels looking. Instead of accepting, something near, but not-quite is picked up on by the eye, then the mind pushes the viewer to linger, think, react and get involved with the image on multiple levels. What is really going on here? My own work, Double Memory, pursues this near, not-of-ness through attachment of two images together. Instead of a space between, clearly delineating two images, they come together. But it is not a clear match. Inspired by diptychs, often attached and hinged, the images come together at a joint (Figure 11.1). The joinings are not meant to be perfect. The disunion or near union of the two photographs heightens examination. It also is another way to reveal that a photograph of a landscape and what we see with our eyes are two different experiences. These images show the ephemeral and fleeting shifts in light and the similarity yet difference in common landscape characteristics of a particular place. They also nod at peripheral vision and the ever-shifting movement of the eye. One looks back and forth at the two images, and then at the seam. They cannot be looked at all at once (Figure 11.2). Similarly, several of my students have experimented with multiple images to convey a more complex and textual experience of the landscape. Inspired by several artists I introduce in my courses about photography and landscape representation, the students try shifting one’s perspective by showing photographic images that are not necessarily expected. For those who are aware of work by such artists as the Bechers, Robert Smithson, Joe Deal, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Anne Hamilton, and Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, this work will feel familiar. What I find most important here is that the process of making such work through these methodologies is just as important as the photographs themselves. Thus, there is far more here than what meets the eyes (Figures 11.3–11.6). Nonetheless they all invite, ask and prompt the viewer to examine, look again, check and engage. Complexity is imbedded in the multiples. Comparing, going back and forth and noticing more through each pass are a means to get into a more layered understanding of the landscape places presented.

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Figure 11.3 A meditation on powerlines and trees along the main route to campus. The near, not-of-ness repetition of tree, powerline and utility pole in each image creates a relationship of comparing as well as a feeling of movement along the sidewalk. Source: Photo by Olivia Pinner (2018).

Figure 11.4 A mundane, often unnoticed ground condition becomes a site of inquiry through multiple close frames joined. Source: Photo by Eric Bischof (2018).

Figure 11.5 Investigating this set of images solicits narrative making that attempts to figure out what is happening. Details become more pronounced. Source: Photo by Jesse Smith (2018)

Figure 11.6 This panorama depicts multiple points of view, not only of perspective but also of what is commonly visible and less so. Roots and water flow are made tangible by combining photographs with other imagery. Passage of time is sensed through obvious layering. Source: Photo by Danielle Ade (2018).

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Figure 11.7 Cottage (2014), by Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author.

Figure 11.8 Verona (2008–10), by Anne C Godfrey. Source: Author.

A similar idea, but different approach, is my ongoing body of work Phenomenal Landscape Experience. I meander in an unmediated mode, creating layered images of both new and familiar landscapes. These images transcend a static, pictorial representation of landscape space by creating a sense of movement and time, more closely representing my psychological and physical experiences. Inspired by the playfulness of the derive, I engage in psychogeographic drifting as a way to detach myself from predetermined agendas in place. In doing so I create a sense of visceral and phenomenal experience in these images (Figure 11.7). I see this work as a more open-ended way to explore iconic and vernacular landscape spaces. Photographs of especially well-known landscapes often predetermine a visitor’s experience of, for example, Yosemite or Kyoto. Many of these places become picturesque photographic icons, and thus become inert and static in terms of how we comprehend them. These images engage depth by presenting multiple spaces, from multiple points enmeshed into a long single image that does not represent any common aspect ratio. Printed at 12–14 feet long, they become a process of walking and meandering, inviting the viewer to literally walk through them. They are physically encountered at human scale. The viewer must physically move around to look at the work – getting up close to peer into the spaces or standing far away and scanning the image back and forth, as a means to see it as a whole (Figure 11.8). Looking, you may discern more and more details, similar to what happens when we walk in the landscape. This work is made to be looked at for long periods of time, and also over and over. The image itself does not orient through perspective or a sense of solid ground; the viewers

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orient themselves through the act of physically looking. The work is meant to be visual, emotional, memory-piercing, and invites the viewer into multilayered space, time and feeling. ... The examples in this essay, and this body of essays as a whole, are presented to inspire your own experimentation and exploration. So much more is possible when we push out of the bounds of singularity and manifest the multiplicity of landscape places and systems through complex photographic work.

NOTES 1 Such as Richard Misrach and Myriam Weisang Misrach, Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Richard Misrach and Reyner Banham, Desert Cantos (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). 2 Past Tense Storytelling Team. Zadie Smith and Misty Copland, “Perpetual Motion,” The New York Times, April 14, 2019. 3 Ibid., special section 48–49. 4 Ibid., special section 10–11. 5 The New York Times, “Past Tense,” The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/spotlight/past-tense?smid=rd (accessed July 6, 2019). 6 David Hockney, “Time and More, Space and More…,” Frieze Studios film, 03:20, October 18, 2018, https://frieze.com/media/david-hockney-time-and-more-space-and-more (accessed June 28, 2019). 7 Ibid. 8 The Hammer Museum, “UCLA Department of Art Lectures: Jeff Wall,” UCLA, https://hammer.ucla.edu/ programs-events/2012/01/ucla-department-of-art-lectures-jeff-wall/ (accessed June 29, 2019). 9 One way to describe this could be the uncanny.

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174 h

Interview bibliography

Alta. Los Angeles, CA. January 7–11, 2019. Emily Duchon. Alta. Los Angeles, CA. January 7–11, 2019. Deven Young. Alta. Portland, OR. July 25, 2018. Christo Brehm. Alta. Portland, OR. July 25, 2018. Marta Olson. Alta. Portland, OR. July 25, 2018. Jill Roszel. Alta. Portland, OR. July 25, 2018. Mary Stewart. Alta. Portland, OR. July 25, 2018. David Werner. Alta. Portland, OR. July 25, 2018, and April 9, 2019. Olivia Burry-Trice. Alta. Portland, OR. July 25, 2018, and April 9, 2019. Hannah Hefner. Coen Partners. Minneapolis, MN. February 8, 2018. Shane Coen. Coen Partners. Minneapolis, MN. March 6, 2018, and August 3, 2018. Amber Hill. Mayer/Reed. Portland, OR. July 25, 2018. Carol Mayer Reed. Mayer/Reed. Portland, OR. July 25, 2018. Jeramie Shane. Michael Grimm Photography. New York, NY. September 12, 2018. Michael Grimm. MIG. Portland, OR. July 26, 2018, and April 8, 2019. Casey Howard. MIG. Portland, OR. July 26, 2018, and April 8, 2019. Laurie Matthews. MIG. Portland, OR. April 8, 2019. Melissa Erikson. Nelson Byrd-Woltz. Charlottesville, VA. March 23, 2018, and July 11, 2018. Tim Popa. Nelson Byrd-Woltz. Charlottesville, VA. July 11, 2018. David Lepage. Reed Hilderbrand. Cambridge, MA. June 4, 2018. Scott Geiger. Reed Hilderbrand. Cambridge, MA. June 4, 2018. John Kett. Reed Hilderbrand. Cambridge, MA. June 4, 2018. Hao Ling. Reed Hilderbrand. Cambridge, MA. June 4, 2018. Jennifer Lee Mills. SCAPE. New York, NY. November 17, 2017, and March 16, 2018. Nans Voron. SCAPE. New York, NY. November 17, 2017, and October 2, 2018. John Donnelly. SCAPE. New York, NY. March 16, 2018. Gena Wirth. Snøhetta. New York, NY. December 11, 2017, March 15, 2018, and July 18, 2018. Michelle Delk. Snøhetta. New York, NY. March 15, 2018. Anny Li. Snøhetta. New York, NY. March 15, 2018. Adam Longenbach. Snøhetta. New York, NY. March 15, 2018. Elaine Molinar. Snøhetta. New York, NY. March 15, 2018. Marc Andre Plasse. Snøhetta. New York, NY. March 15, 2018. Michelle Shofet. Snøhetta. New York, NY. March 15, 2018, and July 18, 2018. Matthew McMahon. West 8. New York, NY. December 17, 2017, and June 7, 2018. Claire Agre.

175 h

Acknowledgments

There are many people to thank. Colleagues and mentors in landscape architecture and architecture: Cynthia Gerling for saying yes, Kenny Helphand for being a model author and teacher. Michael Fifield, Liska Clemence Chan, Mark Eischeid, Chip Sullivan, Robert Melnick, Mark Childs and Judith Wong. In photography, Colleen Choquette-Raphael, Dan Powell, Terri Warpinski and my first photography teacher at the Berkeley Extension in the Castro. Also, Mary Bigelow, who first taught me how to see the landscape. Grace Harrison for her excellent editorship, support and vison. My research assistants Jennifer Lauer and Kim Korioth, whose detailed work made this book possible in a realistic time frame. Jennifer’s archival research and organization of correspondence and permissions streamlined important steps. Kim’s organization, attention to detail and thoughtful assessment helped this very complicated process align to completion. Autumn Spalding for shepherding the production of this book. Doug Johnston for support and time. Matt Potteiger and Rebecca Garden for regular encouragement. I had thoughtful exploratory discussions with many people as part of the process of this book. Thank you for your time and support. I’d like to especially thank Michelle Delk, Mary Stewart, Laurie Matthews, Nans Voron, Carol Mayer Reed, Amber Hill, Anny Li, Casey Howard, Christo Brehm, Olivia Burry-Trice, Deven Young and Emily Duchon. There are many students (now former students) who have positively changed my life in small and large ways. To list everyone would lead to forgetting several people, which defeats the whole point of saying this. Instead, if you are reading this, and you think you are on this list, then you are – no question, no doubt. All the people in my life who make it rich and wonderful. My world of friends in Oregon. Liz Deck, Arica Duhrkoop-Galas and Cindy Rice. Bardwell Smith and Charlotte Smith. Michael Godfrey, Jim Godfrey, Rowan Godfrey and the long line of female Godfrey educators. Don Zolidis, who understands what it means to be a writer. Bardwell the border collie, who understands what it means to take a break. These lists are always incomplete. Thank you everyone.

176 h

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a figure on the corresponding page. Page numbers followed by a ‘n’ plus a number indicate a chapter endnote on the corresponding page. 2 Balanced Rock Drive (Pfahl) 135

Berczy Park project 94–95, 95

147 Marine Drive (Pfahl) 133

Berger, Allen 4 Berger, John 38

access points 85 active photography 48, 70–81

Bigger Interior With Blue Terrace and Garden (Hockney) 151

Adams, Ansel 5, 38–45, 42, 46n19, 60n14, 65

Bischof, Eric 164

Adams, Robert 5, 46n19

Blue Sky Shadow (Godfrey) 163

Ade, Danielle 165

bracketing 72, 82n6

aerial photography 24; bubble overlay on 115, 115; to

bubble overlay 115, 115

document sites 11; investigating 57; in LA River Path

built-work photography 26–27, 61–68, 95

project 85; in marketing materials 61; for Minnesota

burning 40, 47n37

River Greenway Plan 154; obliques, use of 85, 144,

Bye, A.E. 4

144; in Orongo Station project 109, 109; for public education 20; in Public Sediment project 114–115,

cameras: aesthetics of designers of 70; as copy machine

115; in Stapleton Waterfront Park 112; Taking Measures

33–36, 72, 82n8; Hockney’s use of 150–151;

Across the American Landscape on 4; on websites 61;

making vs. taking photos with 33, 36–38, 45,

in Willamette Falls Riverwalk project 118, 119

45n2, 62; optical reality created by 10–11, 14n6;

Alta Planning + Design: CV Link project 19, 88–89, 88–89; Setting POB 86–87, 87

programming of 70 captions 136, 140, 149n15, 160

American Institute of Architects (AIA) 69n9

Cartier-Bresson, Henri 136

American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) 65,

César Chávez National Monument 21

69n9, 148

Charcoalblue, Artpark Master Plan 153, 159n17

Amoroso, Nadia 149n31, 155

Chávez, César 21, 23

archives, photos in 11, 20, 146, 148n2; see also historic

Chávez, Helen 23

photographs Artpark Master Plan 153, 159n17 as-built document set 26; see also built-work photography

Clarence King Sur vey 46n19, 143, 143 Claude Cormier + Associés (CC+A): Berczy Park project 94–95, 95; Love Park project 159n20; on “photorealistic” images 153, 159n20; representations

Backyard, Yorba Linda photograph (Deal) 29–31, 30, 58 Balmori, Diana 147, 153, 157

during design process at 153 Clayton riverfront park design project 156

Bardwell (border collie) 37

climate change 5, 157

Barnett, Courtney 162

Coachella Valley (CV) Link project 19, 88–89, 88–89

Barrett, Terry 51

Coen, Shane 93

Barthes, Roland 51, 59n2, 67, 132, 134, 137n3

Coen + Partners: Heart of the City project 90–91, 90–91;

Baudelaire, Charles 34 Baudrillard, Jean 69n4 Benjamin, Walter 51

Peavey Plaza project 92–93, 93 collage 4, 150, 153, 156, 159n17; see also photocollage

177 h

j Index

“Commercial Photography and the Understanding of Place” (Godfrey) 65 community design 7–8 Composite Landscapes (Waldheim & Hansen) 4–5, 150,

Environmental Protection Agency, Brownfield Program 107 “Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture, The” (Meyer) 52, 60n11 Eye Is a Door, The (Spirn) 4, 149n19

152–153, 155 composite technique 104–105, 105, 153

facts 131

composition 14n9, 18, 74–76, 77

film, roll 14n6, 71–72, 81n3, 151

constructed techniques: collage 4, 150, 153, 156,

films (movies) 23, 131, 148n7, 161; see also video

159n17; composite 104–105, 105, 153;

filters 39–40, 45, 63

interpretation with 153; joiners 150–151, 152, 153,

First Nation peoples 107, 144, 145, 146, 149n22

157; montage see montage

Five Confederated Tribes 144, 149n22

construction documentation 25–26

five second rule 71, 74

Copeland, Misty 160–161

Foresta, Merry 138–139, 146

Corner, James 4, 137n11, 139, 148n7, 153, 159n2

Fort Mason Community Garden 75

Cottage (Godfrey) 165

Fox, William Henry 5

Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture 65

frame: in Barnett’s “Depreston” video 162; of built-work

Crissy Field, User’s View (Godfrey) 66

photos 61; in casual composition 76; decision making

Criticizing Photographs (Barrett) 51

and 11; as formal aspect of photography 14n9; format

Cubist-inspired process 151

of, choices of 70; in Hockney’s works 150–151, 161;

cultural landscape preservation 7, 22, 31n2, 105

of hybrid photo-based constructions 144; knowledge

Cultural Landscape Reports 22, 27

creation and 10, 11; selecting what is in the 11, 13,

Cunningham, Imogen 65

28, 78; subject in center of 74; time and characteristics inside/outside 29; window as metaphor for 134

da Cunha, Dilip 153–155

Freidberg, M. Paul 93

Daguerre, Louis-Jacque-Mandé 34, 45n5 daguerreotypes 37

Gasworks Park 58, 58

Daring to Look (Lange/Spirn) 4

Geertz, Clifford 137n11

Deal, Joe 5, 29, 30, 32n13, 46n19, 58

Geuze, Adriaan 125

Delaroche, Paul 34

Girot, Christophe 139, 148n7

Delk, Michele 77–78, 121

Godfrey, Anne C: Blue Sky Shadow 163; “Commercial

“Depreston” (Barnett) 162

Photography and the Understanding of Place” 65;

digital photographs: annotating 84–85, 85; base images

Cottage 165; Crissy Field, User’s View 66; Double

from 90–91; clearance data diagrams on 84;

Memory 162, 163; Grain Silos 139; in High Line

diagrammatic overlay on 102–103, 103; “photorealistic”

Competition 11–13, 74; Kreielsheimer Promenade,

159n19; sharing of 17; sketching over 17

User’s View 66; Petaluma, California 64; Phenomenal

digital 3-D models 90–91, 93, 119, 119, 153

Landscape Experience 163–166; photographic

diptychs 162

experiences of 63–65; portfolio of 64, 69n6; Stanford

dodging 40, 47n37

Medical Center, User’s View 67; Through Diablo Pass

Double Memory (Godfrey) 162, 163

163; user’s viewer photography 65–67, 66, 67; Verona

“Double Take” (Lippard) 145, 146

166; Willamette Falls Riverwalk photos 72–73, 73

Drawing and Reinventing Landscape (Balmori et al.) 147

Google 161

drawings: camera obscura and Claude glass used to

Grain Silos (Godfrey) 139

create 35; compared to existing conditions 19,

Grand Ronde, Confederated Tribes of the 144, 149n22

88–89; critiques of 9; in Duke Pond project 110;

Grand Teton National Park 38

Hockney’s joiners as 151; hybrid representations

Great West, The (Hume et al.) 5

of interrelationships in 147; making of 62; vs.

Greylock WORKS 12

photographs 9, 28, 34, 46n14; picturesque-based

ground-truthing method 19, 88–89

practices in 153; in NBW passports 106, 106–107; see also paintings Duke University Water Reclamation Pond project 110–111, 111

Haag, Richard 58, 58 Half Dome, The (Watkins) 44 Halprin, Lawrence 98

178 h

Index j

Hansen, Andrea 4–5, 150, 152–153, 155 Hayden, V.F. 35 Heart of the City project 90–91, 90–91 Heiferman, Marvin 7, 14, 36, 138–139

photographic practices in 16–31, 134; sustainable design in 143 Landscape Architecture Foundation, “Landscape Performance Series” 27

Helen’s Park 23

Landscape Architecture Magazine 65, 159n18

Hill, Amber 90–91

Landscape as Photograph (Jussim & Lindquist-Cock) 5

Hill, Kristina 139

landscapes: catalogue of past cultural 7; definition of

historic photographs 20–23; cultural landscape preservationists use of 7, 22; design inspiration from

157; as dynamic system ix; as process 5; thickness of 137n11, 159n2

143; diagrammatic overlay on 102–103, 103, 112;

Lange, Dorothea 4

of Lithia Park 104–105; of Longwood Gardens 122,

Language of Landscape (Whiston Spirn) 4

123; “melding” with contemporary photos 104–105,

LA River Path project 84–85, 85

105; New York Times Past Tense Storytelling Team on

light 14n9

160–161; as objective documents 23, 49; physical

Liliuokalani (Queen) 21

and visual characteristics from 22; sociocultural

Lindquist-Cock, Elizabeth 5

information from 22; of Stapleton Waterfront Park

Lippard, Lucy 5, 145, 146, 147

112; viewing and interpretation of 49–52; as “visual

Lithia Park project 104–105, 105

spelunking” 22, 118; in Washington Place project 21;

Longwood Gardens Master Plan 9, 122–123, 123

in Willamette Falls Riverwalk project 22, 118–119,

looking at photos see viewing photos

118, 144; in NBW passports 56, 106, 106–107; in

Love Park project 159n20

Yosemite Lodge Treatment Plan 102–103, 103 Hockney, David 150–153, 152, 155, 157, 161–162

Magritte, René 65

Hudson River remnant pier pilings 80

Manchester, Ellen 5

Huerta, Dolores 21

Marien, Mary Warner 36, 45n2

Hume, Sandy 5

Mariposa Trail (Watkins) 44

Hurricane Irma 127

marketing materials 61

hyperrealism 62

“masks” 47n37 Matthews, Laurie 21, 103, 105

Ian Swimming (Hockney) 150, 152

Mathur, Anuradha 153–155

iconic photographs 61, 97

Mayer Reed, Carol 97, 98–99

impact studies 27

Mayer/Reed design firm: anniversary party at 8, 96–97,

“Indian photography” 146 Indians see First Nation peoples

97; waterfall photos as inspiration 98, 98; Willamette Falls Inventory 100–101, 100–101

inspiration photographs 24–25, 124, 125

McLean, Alex 4

Instagram 8, 20, 97, 127

McMahon, Matthew 22, 118–119

Internet, photographs on 11, 20

Melnick, Robert Z. 21

Irma Logs 126–127, 127

Metz, Gary 5 Meyer, Elizabeth 52, 60n11, 139, 143

Jacobs + Alta Team, The, LA River Path project 84–85, 85 joiners 150–151, 152, 153, 157 Joudisius, Elena 156 “Judgement Seat of Photography, The” (Phillips) 148n2

MIG: Lithia Park project 104–105, 105; Washington Place project 21; Yosemite Lodge Treatment Plan 102–103, 103 Mill Ridge Park 56 Minnesota River Greenway Cultural Resources Interpretive

Karen Cragnolin Park 8, 106–107, 106–107

Plan 154–155

Keene Cafe 22

Misrach, Richard 5, 140–143, 141–142, 149n15, 160

Krauss, Rosalind 60n11

Mississippi Floods (Mathur & da Cunha) 155

Kreielsheimer Promenade, User’s View (Godfrey) 66

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer

Land Matters (Wells) 7

modernism 13, 137n7, 148n2

landscape architecture: complexity in 26, 81, 147, 155;

Moholy-Nagy, László 36

(MODIS) 25

Girot on constraints on 148n7; investigations in 55–57;

Monolith (Adams) 40, 41

179 h

j Index

montage: for Berczy Park project 94–95, 95; capacity of 153; in Composite Landscapes 4–5; Hockney’s joiners as 151; in Landscape Architecture Magazine 159n18

Phillips, Christopher 146, 147, 148n2 photocollage: as alternative practice 155; for Berczy Park project 94–95, 95; in Composite Landscapes 4–5;

Moonrise (Adams) 40, 42, 43

in cultural landscape preservation 105; in Landscape

Moore, Katheryn 136

Architecture Magazine 159n18; for Lithia Park project

moving pictures see films (movies)

104–105; for Longwood Gardens Master Plan 9;

music videos 162 Muybridge, Eadweard 5, 42

memories and 9; techniques, what they represent 9 photographer 53; biases of 18, 74; choices of 11, 70–71, 132; factors influencing 33; motivations of 23;

NASA images 25

preparations of 136; values of 3

“near-documentary” photography 51, 162

Photographer’s Eye, The (Szarkowski) 134

Nelson Byrd Woltz (NBW): Duke University Water

photographs: active making of 70–76; collecting and

Reclamation Pond project 110–111, 111; Karen

choosing 28–29; content of 132, 136, 138; vs.

Cragnolin Park passports 8, 106–107, 106–107;

drawings 9, 28, 34, 46n14; editing of 73, 82n7;

Mill Ridge Park passport 56; Orongo Station project

gathering up 54–55, 58–59; influences on 3;

108–109, 109

interpretation of 29, 49–53; investigating 29, 53,

Newhall, Beaumont 148n2

55–57, 79, 148n2; as invisible 132; as living

“New Territories” conference 14n2

document ix, 31; making vs. taking 33, 36–38, 45,

new topographic movement 5, 32n13, 46n19

62; meaningful 81n5; as objective 11, 23, 131–132,

New York-Presbyterian Chapel Garden project 26

136–137, 138; omissions in 53, 78; vs. paintings 34;

New York Times Past Tense Storytelling Team, The 160–161

postmodern theories on 13, 52; as product 28; as a

“Nexus” (Hill) 139

referent 137n3; as subjective 131–132, 136–137,

Niépce, Joseph 34, 45nn4–5

138; as time slice 134; visualization of 40; see also

Noya and Bill Brand With Self Portrait (Hockney) 150

specific types photography: aestheticization of 148n2; as art

O’Day, Kevin 160

62–63, 65, 134, 148n2; birth of 45n5; as constant

Olmsted Brothers 111

construction ix; constraints and limits on 71–73, 81n2,

“On Photographic Interpretation” (Ward) 62

82n8; contemporary theories on 51, 59n1; as copies

“On the Making of Icons” (Ward) 61–62

36, 63; deterministic mind-set on 35; dualistic construct

Orff, Kate 5, 140–143, 141–142, 148, 157

of 131–134; as experience surrogate 10; formal

Orongo Station project 108–109, 109

aspects of 14n9; Hockney on 157; as magic 35,

orthographic photography 24

45n2, 46n23; as a means of representation 28, 132;

O’Sullivan, Timothy 46n19, 143, 143

modernism and 13, 137n7, 148n2; narratives about 14; as process 4, 19, 28, 36, 62; purpose of 131;

paintings: camera obscura and Claude glass used to

questions to ask during 74; as relational 48, 59n2;

create 35; Hockney’s Bigger Interior 151; by Hudson

slowing down during 71; Talbot on uses of 45n9;

River School 46n19; vs. photographs 34; photorealism

teaching of 9–10; universality of 13–14; users of 134;

genre of 159 n19; in NBW passports 56, 106–107; see also drawings

see also specific types Photography (Wells) 36

passive photography 18, 71

Photography, a Cultural History (Marien) 36

passive viewing 11, 67–68

Photography and Its Critics (Marien) 45n2

Peavey Plaza project 92–93, 93

Photography Changes Everything (Heiferman) 7, 36,

Pencil of Nature, The (Talbot) 34 perspective 49, 89, 154, 166; Hockney’s critique of 161–162; one-point/two-point 77, 151, 157

138–139 photomontage 153 photorealism 159n19

“Perpetual Motion” (New York Times) 160–161

Photoshop 153

Petaluma, California (Godfrey) 64

photo voice 80

Petrochemical America (Orff & Misrach) 5, 140–142, 141,

Picture Windows (Pfahl) 133, 134, 135

142, 160

Pinner, Olivia 164

Pfahl, John 133, 134, 135, 136

Plasse, Marc Andre 17

Phenomenal Landscape Experience (Godfrey) 163–166

Poe, Edgar Allen 34

180 h

Index j

point of beginning (POB) 86–87, 87

Smith, Jesse 158, 164

point of view 14n9, 150–151, 157, 161, 165

Smithson, Robert 5

Polaroid cameras 150–151, 152

Snøhetta: photo deck exercise 80–81, 81;

postmodernism 13, 52

representations during design process at 153; San

post-occupancy evaluations 27

Francisco Museum of Modern Art expansion project

precedent photographs 24–25, 26

17; Times Square Reconstruction project 77–78,

Project for Public Spaces 27

120–121, 121; Willamette Falls see Willamette Falls

Public Sediment project 114–115, 115

Riverwalk project

punch throughs 85

So_il, Artpark Master Plan 153, 159n17

punctum 51, 67

Solnit, Rebecca 5 Sontag, Susan 51

Reclaiming the American West (Berger) 4

spatial analysis 18

Red Hoek Point 59

Spirn, Anne Whiston 4, 9, 14n5, 149n19

Reed, Michael 97

Stanford Medical Center, User’s View (Godfrey) 67

repeat photography 21, 103, 105

Stapleton Waterfront Park 112–113, 113

Rephotography Project 5

Steichen, Edward 13

Representing Landscapes (Amoroso) 155

Stoney First Nation family 145, 146

Requiem for a Bayou (Misrach & Orff) 141

survey photographs: Clarence King Survey 46n19, 143,

Rodriguez, Artie 22

143; of Green River Valley 35; hydrological change

Rugg, Andrea 90–91, 93

over time in 143; recontextualizing 5; settlement and

Russell, Andrew J. 35

economies of Western US and 35; of water, timber, and geologic resources 46n19

Samson Beaver (Warren) 145

sustainability 52

Sander, August 13

“Sustaining Beauty” (Meyer) 52, 139

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art expansion 17

Szarkowski, John 13, 46n19, 134, 137n7, 148n2

scale 14n9, 89 SCAPE: interconnectedness in work of 140; New YorkPresbyterian Chapel Garden project 26; Petrochemical

Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (Corner & McLean) 4

America 5, 140–142, 141, 142, 160; Public

Talbot, William Henry Fox 34, 45n4, 45n9, 46n22

Sediment project 114–115, 115; Red Hoek Point 59;

TEN x TEN Studio, Minnesota River Greenway Plan

representations during design process at 153; Stapleton

154–155

Waterfront Park 112–113, 113; Town Branch

“Terra Fluxus” (Corner) 139

Commons project 116–117, 116–117

Tharp, Twyla 160

Schäffer Warren, Mary 145, 146

“Thick and Thin of It, The” (Corner) 137n11

Schaick, Charles Van, Wisconsin Family 50, 51, 52–53,

Through Diablo Pass (Godfrey) 163

60n13

time 31; amount of, spent viewing photos 77–78; in

Sekula, Allan 13, 132, 138

Cubist-inspired process 151; as formal aspect of

“Sensing Place” college course 9, 14n5

photography 14n9; in Hockney’s works 150, 161;

Setting POB 86–87, 87

passage of, in narratives 160; slice of, photos as 134,

Shane, Jeramie 100

151; understanding of, when viewing photos 57–59,

Shoshone Falls (O’Sullivan) 143

78–79, 134, 136

Siletz Indians, Confederated Tribes of 144, 149n22

timelines, annotated 56, 106

Simco Wavedeck 124–125, 125

Times Square Reconstruction project 77–78,

site documentation 18–19; for Berczy Park project 95;

120–121, 121

deep-dive exploration during 100–101; design decisions

Toronto Central Waterfront plan 125

based on 16; goals of 101; Hockney-based approach

Toward an Urban Ecology (Orff) 140

to 157; methods for 10–11; POB 86–87, 87;

Town Branch Commons project 116–117, 116–117

seasonal 111

“Traffic in Photographs, The” (Sekula) 13, 132

site visits, by AIA 69n9

travel photography 98

sketch models 153

Tribe, Marc 5

slope analysis 123, 123

Tucumcari downtown revitalization project 10

181 h

j Index

Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of the 144, 149n22

waterfalls 98–99, 98–99 watershed: in Duke Pond project 111; of Longwood

United Farm Workers (UFW) 21–24

Gardens 123, 123; in Public Sediment project

urbanism 139

114–115, 115; remote sourced photos of 20

user’s viewer photography 65–67, 66, 67

Watkins, Carleton 42, 44 Webb, Walter Prescott 35, 46n18

Verona (Godfrey) 166

websites, built-work photos on 26, 61, 65

Very Large Array (VLA) 49

Weed, Charles Leander 42

video 26, 161–162; see also films (movies)

Weisang Misrach, Myriam 149n15

Viewfinder (Fox) 5

Wells, Liz 7, 36, 59n1

View From an Apartment 2004–5 (Wall) 134

West 8: Artpark Master Plan 153, 159n17; Irma Logs

viewing photos: active, critical approach to 11, 48,

126–127, 127; Longwood Gardens Master Plan 9,

67–68, 76–81, 139, 145, 160; aesthetics and

122–123, 123; Simco Wavedeck 124–125, 125;

77; amount of time spent 77–78; beliefs and biases

Toronto Central Waterfront plan 125

in 76–77, 82n11; with casual compositions 76;

Weston, Edward 36

decision making and 78, 80; differences of opinion

wetlands 109, 115

when 80; evaluation during 97; factors influencing 4;

wildlife photographs 108, 109

historic, interpretation of 49–52; knowledge and 79;

Willamette Falls Riverwalk project: aerial obliques for

as layering process 134–136; memories while 31,

proposal 144, 144; alcoves and wool mill in design

76, 80, 98; for ourselves, for others 53–54; passive

for 118–119, 118; design and engineering team

11, 67–68; reflection during 97; understanding of

81n4; display for 55; Godfrey’s photos of 72–73,

time when 57–59, 78–79, 134, 136

73; historic photos used in 22, 118–119, 118, 144;

viewshed 19, 27, 103 visual impact assessment (VIA) 27 visual resource assessment (VRA) 27, 66

material inventory for 18, 100–101, 100–101; National ASLA Honor award for 148 Winter Sunrise (Adams) 39–40, 39 Wisconsin Family (Schaick) 50, 51, 52–53, 60n13

Waldheim, Charles 4–5, 150, 152–153, 155

Woldgate Woods (Hockney) 161–162

Wall, Jeff 5, 51, 134, 136, 162 Ward, Alan 4, 61–62 Warm Springs, Confederated Tribes of 144, 149n22 Washington Place project 21

Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes and Bands of 144, 149n22 Yosemite Lodge Treatment Plan 102–103, 103

182 h