Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011

Scottish amateur photographer, Robert Fulton has won the title of Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011 for his stunning picture of a Winter Field in Snow.  The Cumbernauld-based photographer is the fifth person to win the overall title and the £10,000 prize.

Robert Fulton – Winter Field, Stirlingshire, Scotland

An exhibition of the winning and commended entries in the 2011 competition is to be held at the National Theatre in London.  It opens on 5th December 2011 and runs until 28th January 2012.  

A book has also been published - see Landscape Photographer of the Year Collection: 5 (Photography)

There were thousands of entries for the award - which encompasses different perspective on the landscape including urban landscapes as well as classic landscapes.  The competition also has a number of awards including one category for young photographers.

You can see a slideshow of the various photos which won awards or were highly commended on the Telegraph website

Photograph by Oscar Stewart-Packe

Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011 - Awards

Below are the names of those who won awards.  The place names relate to the location of the landscape in the image.

• Landscape Photographer of the Year: Robert Fulton – Stirlingshire, Scotland.  Robert was 49 before he started taking photography seriously - although he'd always been interested in the visual arts.  He became a digital convert 11 years ago and is now a Scottish landscape photographer with an interest in Natural History.  He's very pleased to have won "the big one"!  The winning image is at the top of this post
• Young Landscape Photographer of the Year:  14 year old Oscar Stewart-Packe – London.  His winning image is on the right.

Classic View:

We are looking for an image that captures the beauty and variety of the UK landscape. An iconic view; a view along a cliff-side path or of a historic village; a view down a valley; an urban skyline or snow-capped peaks; maybe showing the drama of our seasons. Recognisable and memorable; a true classic.

• Winner Classic view:  Tim Harvey Guernsey, Channel Islands
• Runner-up Classic view:  Angus Clyne River Tay, Scotland - this was the first photography competition Angus had ever entered

Living the View

This is a category for images of people interacting with the outdoors – working or playing in the UK landscape. Possible subjects include mountain bikers, kite boarders, walkers, shepherds or even your best friend biting into a sandwich - as long as your picture shows people within their outdoor environment.

• Winner Living the view:  Baxter Bradford Hampshire, England
• Runner-up Living the view:  Mark Bradshaw Diner on A69, England

Urban View

It’s hard to pin down an exact figure, but statistics suggest that up to 80% of the UK population lives in towns or cities. That’s a huge number, so we wanted a category that highlights the surroundings that many of us live in every day. It has always been possible to enter city skylines in Classic view and concepts in Your view (and you still can), but this category really focuses on the subject - from historic to modern - but no underground car parks, tube stations etc please – anything urban and outside is eligible. 

• Winner Urban view:  Howard Kingsnorth London
• Runner-up Urban view:  Tim Morland London

Your View

What does the UK landscape mean to you? A stream rushing over pebbles, a foggy day in the Peak District, fish & chips on a deserted beach, you and your friends on your first big summit. Pretty much anything goes, as long as it is in the UK and in the outdoors. Use your imagination, as you have the scope for a very conceptual and personal approach. 

• Winner Your view:  Peter Clark Cheshire
• Runner-up our view:  Dietmar Herzog Scottish Highlands 

Youth class (16 and under)

• Winner Classic view - William Lee Lincolnshire
• Winner Living the view -  Jessica Nineham Hampshire
• Winner Urban view - Matt Woods Hampshire
• Winner Your view - William Lee Lincolnshire

The Cityscape: modern perspectives on London

I normally stick pretty much to drawing and painting on this blog - however now and again I'm happy to include photography.  This post is about cityscapes and a recent competition run by the National Gallery in conjunction with Flickr to try and capture London in a photograph. 

The cityscape

A cityscape is a view - typically represented by a drawing, painting or photograph - of a city.  The cityscape is the urban equivalent of the landscape.  It's also known as the townscape although this tends to denote differences in the size and significance of the urban environment rather than the size and significance of the artwork.

There have been a number of artists particularly renowned for cityscape scenes.  They include Wenceslas Holler - who was renowned for his views of London - and Canaletto and the Italian verdute painters.  Canaletto of course visited London and lived her for a period of years and painted scenes up and down the Thames.

The Thames and the City of London from Richmond House (1747) - by Canaletto

We are probably most used to thinking of cityscapes as skylines and outlines - with the shape of the buildings characterising the nature of the city. 

Modern Perspectives on London

To coincide with the exhibitions Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals and Modern Perspectives, the National Gallery invited you to contribute your own modern perspective of a cityscape to the Modern Perspectives Flickr competition group – inspired by Ben Johnson, Clive Head and Canaletto.

You can see the Modern Perspectives competition winners here.

I contacted Bob Lambourne, one of the winners, who had produced a photo which both appealed to me and at the same time intrigued me.

Thames Sunrise by Bob Lambourne
(courtesy of Bob Lambourne)

This is a view I'm really familiar with.  I worked for three years in an office over looking the Thames just the other side of this bridge.  Every time I walk past - on the Thames Path on the South Bank of the Thames, I look at it and think about how to do it - and Bob has answered the question!  Now I know where I was going wrong - I keep walking past at and looking at the wrong time of day!

I contacted Bob for permission to use his photo on his blog and found a bit more about how he produced it.  Here's what he had to say

I had got up really early one Saturday morning to capture the light of dawn on the river, it must have been about 6.30 am when I took the picture using a Canon 5D with a 28mm lens. I haven't done much more other than a few tweaks to the curves and levels in photoshop. The picture was hand-held (I hate lugging tripods around with me, they make me feel so conspicuous.

In case you are interested the picture has also been selected to appear in "The Spirit of London" a commemorative book presented to every Olympic and Para-Olympic athlete at the London 2012 games by Mayor Boris Johnson.

I am not a professional photographer and work as a graphic designer in the marketing sector. I discovered my passion for the art back in the 80's when I took a 4 year photography course at night school in the days when the ILEA and GLC were still around. 

I guess the best quote on photography and the one that sums me up is:

"I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I take them for myself first and foremost - that is important." Jaques Henri Lartigue

You can see the other photographs which were entered in the competition in the Flickr Group Pool.  For some, the notion that it was about London got a little bit lost in the translation!

You can also buy prints of this photo from Bob.  Try contacting him via his Flickr Account boberator or his website or

Links:

• Canaletto - Resources for Art Lovers
• The Art of the Landscape: National Gallery: "Venice - Canaletto and his rivals"
• The Art of the Landscape: Canaletto - Painting Britain
• Bob Lambourne - on Flickr, at Saatchi Online - plus his website
• Flickr - Modern Perspectives: National Gallery Photography Competition

Landscape Photographer of the Year 2010

Landscape Photographer of the Year 2010:
Antony Spencer - Winter mist at Corfe Castle, Dorset, England
copyright Antony Spener - all rights reserved / used with permission

Winner of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2010 Award - and a £10,000 prize - is Dorset’s Antony Spencer for his stunning view of Corfe Castle: Winter mist at Corfe Castle, Dorset, England.

The ‘Landscape Photographer of the Year’ Exhibition is currently on display at the National Theatre in London.

• You can also see images of all the winners on the website 
• Click here for complete Winners' List 2010

Here's some of the winners - and links to their websites

• The Young Landscape Photographer of the Year award was won by Taliesin Coombes for a picture of a steam train taken from his local café in Cardiff.
• The Network Rail ‘Lines in the Landscape’ award for the best image of Britain’s modern rail network. Chris Howe from Hertfordshire picked up the prize of a walking tour of the Forth Bridge
• The Best Landscape on your Doorstep award sponsored by Natural England was won by Sławek Staszczuk for his intimate and striking image of the South Downs

The exhibition runs until the 16th January 2011 and admission is free.

• Times: Open Monday to Saturday, 9.30am to 11pm, all year round (except for Bank Holidays) and on a number of Sundays from noon to 6pm (check NT website for dates).
   
• Venue: Lyttelton Foyer, National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 9PX 020 7452 3000

Notes:

• The exhibition is organised by Take a view and this year’s competition was co-sponsored by Network Rail and Natural England. 
• You can also purchase a print of the winning photograph from the website of the photographer.

Framing the West

Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan is an exhibition which opened yesterday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan (1840–1882) was a photographer for two of the most ambitious geographical surveys of the nineteenth century. He traversed the mountain and desert regions of the western United States under the command of Clarence King and Lt. George M. Wheeler for six seasons between 1867 and 1874. O'Sullivan developed a forthright and rigorous style in response to the landscapes of the American West, and returned to Washington, D.C. with hundreds of photographs that revealed an artist whose reach far surpassed the demands of practical documentation. He created a body of work that was without precedent in its visual and emotional complexity, while simultaneously meeting the needs of scientific investigation and western expansion.

This is O'Sullivan's biography on the Smithsonian website. He became an official civil war photographer at the age of 21. Subsequently he joined Clarence King's geological survey of the fortieth parallel—the first federal expedition in the West after the Civil War.

Interestingly King was very interested in the arts and I speculate that it well be this influence which helped O'Sullivan create photographs which were artistic as well as scientifically useful.

Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle, N.M.
(No. 11, Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian) 1873
Timothy H. O'Sullivan(1840- 1882 )
albumen print on paper mounted on paperboardimage and sheet: 10 3/4 x 7 7/8 in. (27.3 x 20.0 cm.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum

I'm very much minded to let this blog cover landscape photography as well as drawing and painting - in part to highlight what photography does well - as well as what drawing and painting do well.

The Landscape Genre within Modernist Photography

Over on Making A Mark I recently posted my Reflections on landscape painting after 1900 - which generated a fair old discussion.

One of my reflections from doing my research into the development of landscape art was as follows

I really don't understand how the painting of landscapes can be such an enduring form of art across cultures, continents and centuries - until we get to the 20th century. In the last 50+ years, landscape art just doesn't seem to be produced by the sort of contemporary artists who get into major galleries, have exhibitions in the important museums and sell for big sums in the auction houses.

I suggested a number of reasons why this might be the case - one of which was linked to our treatment of the environment and our capacity to travel and the ability to make our own pictures and videos using cameras (and now phones).

One of the nice things about this new blog is that people are writing to tell me about different aspects of landscape art - and also responding to points made.

This morning I got an email from Alan Mynett who is a retired college lecturer and keen photographer who doesn't have a blog but does have an interesting website. Do take a look at the various different types of photography he has used.

WaterLine (Venice 2009) - A handmade concertina book of pictures taken in Venice.
copyright Alan Mynett

I have lately become much more interested in drawing, painting and printmaking. As a photographer, landscape never interested me much, but I'm finding it much more amenable as a subject in these other media, so your new blog on landscape is extremely interesting to me.

It was the latest one on Kenneth Clark's Landscape into Art which triggered a memory. Clark's classification was taken up (expanded and explicitly acknowledged in their Introduction) by Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock in their book 'Landscape as Photograph' (1985), Yale University Press:

the chapter headings are

1. Landcsape as Artistic Genre
2. Landscape as God
3. Landscape as Fact
4. Landscape as Symbol
5. Landscape as Pure Form
6. Landscape as Popular Culture
7. Landscape as Concept
8. Landscape as Politics and Propaganda

Sadly, this book has long been out of print, though I was fortunate to salvage a slightly tatty copy when my college library had a clear-out just before I retired from teaching.

I mention this simply because you raised the query of why there is relatively little landscape work in the work of those artists who make up the mainstream Modernist canon.

The rise of photography, and the development of such a strong landscape genre within Modernist photography (Adams, Weston, Minor White etc etc in the States) may be significant.

Equally, though, it may have more to do with the switch of emphasis from objectivity (start with the external to cast light on the internal) to subjectivity (start from the internal and find a suitable visual expression - not necessarily originating in the external or in traditional materials and methods) in the early 20th century. In this last respect, photographers have very limited options, photography being ultimately rooted in the external.

Does anybody have anything to add? What's your view?

Link: www.mynett.me.uk