Customer Reviews

Landscape Beyond: A Journey into Photography

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There are plenty of photography books that instruct on technique. There are fewer showing how technique can be used to disclose vision. Fewer still are those showing how to develop vision. David Ward's first book,"Landscape Within: Insights and Inspirations for Photographers", is a part of this latter group.

Now Ward has returned with further ruminations upon this topic. Although Ward is primarily a landscape photographer, emphasizing the intimate landscape, all photographers can benefit from reading his books. Like the first book, this one consists of a portfolio of Ward's photographs, which, while related to the essays, illustrate his points generally, rather then being tied to any specific point. Ward says the essays illustrate what he considers to be the three essential elements of his work: simplicity, mystery and beauty. The fourth essay, called "Questions or Answers", suggests that there are two different types of photographs (or perhaps photographers - I'm not sure): Those that raise questions and those that provide answers. Ward also provides useful technical data on his pictures, and to appease some critics, but not me, information on where photographs were taken.

Ward's pictures are magnificent. His essays proved thought-provoking and, sometimes, troubling.

In the simplicity essay, he urges the importance of simplification to the photographer; most thoughtful photographers will agree with him. The second essay, which I found the most interesting, averred that he sought to provide an air of mystery in his work through the manipulation of scale, spatial ambiguity, lighting and incongruity. Hopefully, after perusing this chapter, one will explore one's own work but I wish there had been even more discussion of each of these topics. I do admit to wondering why Ward limited ambiguity to spatial relationships, but on the other hand he stimulated me to consider this issue and I expect that if he succeeds in provoking introspection, the essay will have achieved its goal.

I was quite disturbed by the chapter on beauty. Even though he was no more successful in defining beauty than Hume or Kant or Hegel (I reread their work in "Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts (2nd Edition)" edited by David Goldblatt and Lee Brown) I was most disappointed by his attack on post-modernist photographers, especially his singling out of Andreas Gursky, one of the most accessible of these artists. While I am not a fan of the post-modernists, I believe that photographers can expand their boundaries by trying to push beyond their own genre, rather then rejecting others that do not conform to their own internal model and expectations. To fail to do so is to relegate one's self to taking the same pictures, over and over.

I found this attack particularly surprising in light of Ward's assertion in the final essay that we grow the most as photographers and human beings when we make difficult pictures with which the viewer (and perhaps the artist) are required to grapple. (Those are my words, not Ward's)

If one has to choose between "Landscape Within" and "Landscape Beyond" I would recommend the former. But since I believe that the artist in us will be continually challenged to better his or her work by thinking about and confronting it, I see no reason why the serious photographer should not read both.

This book contains 3 essays by the author on what he considers the essential ingredients of his landscape photography: Simplicity, a sense of mystery and beauty. In addition there is a closing essay examining questions of the photographers intent.

This is not a technical book that will teach you exactly how to or what to do in practical terms, but an argument for the importance of each of these three elements in creating an image. The argument is not formal but rather explores the authors own thoughts on the subject. As such I find it hard to become upset about his expressed dissatisfaction with postmodernism and Gursky as an example. I found it quite fitting for his argument - although I hardly agree with it all, and actually admire some of Gersky's work. The discussion is lucid and easy to follow, and makes a fairly good case for the importance of these three elements. One can hardly read the essays without obtaining food for thought on one's approach to photography.

The text is complemented by the authors photographs. Some caption information on the images is presented on the last two pages. The images are much to my liking and nicely reproduced in the print, making this a really wonderful collection of beautiful images.

I believe almost any photographer will benefit form reading these essays. Perhaps the beginner will find the argument a bit lacking in practical information, but the images will inspire and one can only benefit from a second read at a later stage. The seasoned photographer will no doubt have some thoughts of her own on the subject, and may find the lack of rigor begging some questions. However, there are horses for courses and at times it is nice to put rigor aside and simply enjoy the privilege of listening to an other seasoned photographer share his thoughts on how to unlock the inner secrets of how to create captivating images.

Highly recommended.

David Ward's work has appeared in a number of books available on Amazon, but this one, and his previous "Landscape Within" are the only two soley of his work. Both are dedicated to understanding the internal and external motivations of nature/landscape photographers. Of course the images are exciting, but so is the discussion; not the common fare of f/stops and shutter speeds. Along with Freeman Patterson, David Ward seems to be the only other photographer that believes these ideas are as important, perhaps more important, than the technology.

Much like its predecessor, "Landscape Within", this book is not intended to be instructional. Instead, you'll find a selection of short essays on the topics of simplicity, mystery, beauty, and questions/answers. Also like the previous book, every other page contains an excellent photograph, printed with very high quality. It's enjoyable to just flip through these again and again even after reading the text.

I thought most of the essays were okay. There were some interesting things to think about, but I didn't find anything particularly profound about what was being discussed. The one topic I did not like was "beauty", which seemed overly abstract and I lost interest in this quickly. I found myself wondering what the point of that chapter really was.

In both books, although I liked the images, I would have appreciated them more if there was some text describing why the image was put there. Ideally, there is some discussion of how that image might relate to a particular topic. This may be intentional (as it's not a how-to book), but there could clearly be instructive qualities of those images that would have made this book even better.

In summary, this is a short, easy read, with great photographs. While I don't think I got a whole lot out of reading it, I found it reasonably enjoyable all the same.