Since my ideas are going into the the theme of human body
within/combined with nature I was looking into different views and perspectives
on this idea. I found an article by a Photographer Mike Green who makes valid
points and views on why we try to see human shapes and forms in landscapes and
the natural world.
Mike Green looks at the Human Form
By Mike
Green | Posted June
26, 2011 7:23 pm | 17, Editorial, Free
Mike Green
When making
photographs, my inspiration lies in catching and interpreting those types of
light which are less familiar. Currently, many of the images I am creating are
when the sun is below the horizon, or thoroughly hidden by cloud, revealing the
subtlety of colours inherent within water, rock and foliage. Having travelled
widely, and been an active mountaineer on four continents, I am now keen to use
my experience of the many forms of light I've seen to envisage and create
photographs which capture the character of those wild landscapes, and I am
using photography as a reason to revisit favourite countries and locations. I
am based in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales, in the north of England. More of my
work may be viewed on my portfolio ( http://www.mikegreenimages.co.uk/ ) or on
my Flickr site ( http://www.flickr.com/seaofvapours/ ). I've also just started
a blog, mostly as a diary of how I came to make certain images and general
musings/thoughts on photography. ( http://mikegreenimages.wordpress.com/ ).
SEEING
GHOSTS?
I keep seeing human behaviours and emotional states in photographic
subjects which I know full well are not human and don’t have such
characteristics; trees, rocks, clouds, that sort of thing. In other words, I’ve
recently been anthropomorphising images wildly. Obviously, I know I’m
merely projecting these human characteristics, and I’ll
assert my confidence up-front that it’s not just me sliding into early dementia
here: Flickr and the like are awash, judging by the comments, with ‘malevolent‘ weather systems, ‘brooding‘ mountains, ‘dancing‘ streams,
and generically ‘moody‘ examples of just about
everything. Beyond that, people have historically named features and built
folklore around them: the countryside is littered with named rocks and trees,
and Scottish mountains often translate as body parts. It’s apparent that people
like to see their landscapes in terms of human characters, and the starting
point of this article is that I’ve come to think that anthropomorphism helps inappreciating images; but does it help in creating them too, or could it?
I’M NOT
TALKING ABOUT ANIMALS AND BIRDS….
To define the scope of what I’m musing about here: it’s obvious that
shots of animals behaving, or appearing to behave, like humans are engaging,
eye-catching and have an emotional impact ñ after all, we can readily project
our own emotions onto the subject and thereby feel that we identify and
empathise with it, making the image more appealing. As simple examples, think
‘happy dog’ or ‘playful kitten’. Apart from anything else, those projections
may well, on some level, be entirely reasonable; the dog may well be happy and
the kitten may indeed be feeling playful. But what about landscapes? I’m not
taking much risk of argument (I hope!) in asserting that a large rock doesn’t
actually feel like a ‘guardian of the cove‘, or whatever!
Nonetheless, even for non-sentient objects, does anthropomorphising make
landscape images more accessible to the viewer; more alluring? Does an image
with which we can create an emotional connection, or whose subject’s motivation
we can imagine that we understand, whether consciously or unconsciously, help
the image itself, in the sense of making it a better photograph?
Before leaping into
whether, and how, this habit we have of seeing things as exhibiting our own
characteristics is useful or good, I’d better briefly define the primary rationales
for anthropomorphising ‘stuff’. It seems generally held in psychology circles
that there are three principle reasons for our doing this:
1. Projecting our own
behaviour onto things is an attempt to understand them. Essentially, this
is a typically child-like habit which we largely grow out of when we realise
that the World really doesn’t quite work that way. This is mostly applied to
things which actually look human to some degree, often featuring eyes, ears,
arms, etc. Think dog and kitten again.
2. Seeing things as
human in order to provide a connection with them, to develop empathy. Consider people ‘sharing‘ a quiet, contemplative moment with their
favourite tree. This is more the realm of literature than visual images, though
I’ve certainly seen images in which people are supposedly ‘enjoying
sitting with the tree / flowers / rock / stream’; the very
words ‘sharing‘ and ‘with‘ imply a
connection both ways.
3. Attributing motive,
intent or emotion to objects as if they were human. This is, I
believe, the most interesting in the context of photography, or any other
visual art; at least, it’s the one we’re using most obviously when describing
images in human terms. Again, think of those ‘angry‘ storms, ‘marching across the landscape’.
So, whilst anthropomorphism is simply attributing human-like
characteristics to any non-human objects, I’m writing about landscapes only
here. I’m not talking about animal and bird behaviours: I’m considering
assigning emotion, intent, motivation, thought and other distinctly human
features to various aspects of a landscape image. This does include trees which
look like people and mountains with faces, but it applies to weather systems as
well: think ‘threatening clouds‘, ‘menacing darkness‘,
‘joyous light‘ and all those other fundamentally human
emotions which we project onto landscapes.
WHAT’S THE
VALUE IN SEEING TREES, ROCKS AND WEATHER AS HUMAN?
Tim Parkin
Here’s an image by
Tim Parkin where the two trees look very much like legs and feet, standing in
the water. I see this mainly as an example of the second type of
anthropomorphism, but it has elements of all three if you start imagining the
body attached to the legs, and perhaps the purpose it has in being there, even
where it might be going, in that I see the legs as being braced, ready to move.
I’m convinced that this vision of the subject as having near-human purpose
makes me engage more with the image.
CONVEYING
EMOTION IS KEY…
…an oft-quoted, and
paraphrased, piece of advice for making effective landscape photographs, and
not necessarily one which requires any anthropomorphism whatsoever. It’s
perfectly possible to have an emotional response to a scene due to association
and memory, but eliciting that sort of reaction in the viewer is, from the perspective
of the photographer making the image, pure luck. Whilst I may have an emotional
response to a particular view of a particular hill, based on my past
association with it, or even to a completely unknown hill which is reminiscent
of something, you, as the viewer, may not, so the photographer has no real
control over your response.
More interesting,
at least in my view and from the standpoint of aiding composition, is the idea
that we can use archetypes to deliberately induce an anthropomorphic view of
the subject. Those archetypes can be very wide-ranging and depend not only on
the subject itself but the way it’s used compositionally. Imagine a large rock
on a beach:
·
photographed close up on a sunny day, with its bulk dominating the frame
and the breaking waves in the background, it might be imagined as an impassive
sentinel, casting its gaze out over the sea; keeping watch and confident in its
role;
·
photographed from above and behind, on a stormy, dark day with waves
forming the majority of the scene and the rock shown as small compared to the
enormity of the ocean, it could be seen as a beleaguered guardian, apprehensive
and about to be overcome by the power of the ocean.
Both those examples, whilst arguably fanciful and exaggerated to make
the point, are typical of how we collectively describe features of landscape
images. Sometimes it’s subtle and non-specific: ‘moody‘ is rather
imprecise, for example. Sometimes it’s very pointed: the image to the right,
by Duncan
George,
Duncan George
is of an abandoned hide on the Blackwater estuary. Duncan says that it ìlooks out over lonely salt marsh.î Whether or not I’d
have seen this image that way without the caption, I don’t know, though I
suspect I would, but, having read the caption, I’m unavoidably thrown into
imagining myself standing there, not beside the hide
but as the hide, surveying the bleakness of the scene
ñ and yes, feeling lonely! On one level, and ignoring the technical aspects of
colour, texture and detail, this is just an old wooden shed on stilts on a
rather banal, flat landscape; adding the emotional overlay and identification with
the hide’s situation (or predicament!) gives the image a great deal more
impact, engendering a sense of isolation and abandonment. To my eyes, that
emotional and situational identification with the hut helps the image a great
deal.
Bruce Percy
Another example is the following image, which Bruce Percy has kindly
allowed me to use, of Olstind, a mountain on the Lofoten Islands of northern
Norway. Bruce describes this mountain, in his ebook on Lofoten, as looking like
an old man with a beard, perhaps wrapped in a nice, warm cloak, and talks about
how he began to see the mountain as a presence whilst there, one to be engaged
with. This anthropomorphic interpretation of the scene illustrates Bruce’s
emotional engagement with the composition and with the surrounding landscape,
and also conveys more interest in the image to me, as the viewer. It makes my
whole experience of studying the photograph more involved and empathetic, both
to its creation and to the end result.
BACK TO
NAMING AND LABELLING THEN?
In each of the
above two examples I drew their anthropomorphic quality from their names or
captions initially, though of course I don’t know whether I’d have felt similar
emotions had I seen just the images and no accompanying text. It’s obvious that
words are not essential, that we as viewers can project human thoughts and
emotions onto landscape elements without either being told to do so or told
what those projections should be; but perhaps the use of words links the
creating artist to the viewer and assists the process of appreciating their
art?
COMPOSE WITH
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN MIND?
I think visualising
and creating compositions with anthropomorphism in mind may be a useful
technique in creating the ‘emotional engagement’ so often cited with reference
to images of all sorts. And whilst engendering anthropomorphic feelings for the
subject in the mind of the viewer is clearly easier with some subjects, and
landscape photographs are certainly not amongst that group, it’s undoubtedly
possible and potentially a very powerful tool in helping the viewer to engage
with the finished image.
Perhaps, however, rather than seeking to deliberately construct an image
with the intention of inducing the viewer to attribute emotion to weather,
rocks, trees, bodies of water or mountains, it’s most effective to simply allow
oneself to see things that way during composition and hope that the resulting
image will produce a similar response in people looking at the finished item,
as I know Bruce did with his Olstind photograph? Whichever of those two
approaches you take, I have written before about the potential
benefits of naming and captioning images and I still think it’s useful.
If anything, this idea of using a caption or name is reinforced by the idea
that we can pass on the anthropomorphic view we had when capturing the image.
At this point in my
development as a photographer, all of this is very much just speculation. I’m
not remotely suggesting that every image should, or indeed can, use
anthropomorphism, either in itself or via associated titles and captions. What
I am putting forward is the idea that doing so may well be, surprisingly often,
a means of creating that much sought-after ‘emotional engagement’ between the
viewers and the resulting image, and that it can therefore be a useful tool in
composing images.
Anthropomorphising
something can make it seem more understandable and predictable: we ascribe intent or
intelligence, even purpose, to the objects in the frame and this helps us in
our basic wish to make sense of, and connect emotionally with, an uncertain
environment. People’s need to use anthropomorphism to interpret and accept
their surroundings is a long-established one, and using that seemingly inherent
trait must surely be a useful tool to landscape photographers.
My notes for this
piece included whether or not actively treating subjects anthropomorphically is
a good or a bad thing, and I’ve failed to think of any way in which it’s bad.
So, I’d welcome comments on any of the above, including whether you think this
is generally either positive or negative, both from the perspective of the
photographer and from that of the viewer.
Oh, and I just remembered that I called by most recent image ‘Talon’, as
described in my previous article on being
aware of the ‘right kit’ and at the time I wasn’t even thinking consciously
about this subject!
Note
from the editor: You can see more of Mike Green’s photography at http://www.mikegreenimages.co.uk/
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