Keepers

I never get tired of roaming these gardens. Today, I tried to take landscape views with my 50mm lens. I didn’t exactly fail, but I did find lots of ways that did not work. About half way through my walk, I started asking myself, What even is a landscape photograph? Does the word landscape belong only to photographs of nature in broad sweeping vistas? Honestly, I don’t know. I thought about doing a deep research dive into the topic, but then reconsidered the idea. Really, does this matter?

No. I see the world in fragments and vignettes. It’s just my way, I think.

Accepting the Assignment

We pulled over at the beckoning of a nondescript sign that said Wildlife Management Area, and this is what we found. I am fully embracing the assignment for my online photo class to make landscape pictures using my 50 mm lens.

So many go around hoping to influence or create something that lasts an eternity, when the goal should really be to enter the eternal through the gateway of the everyday.

—James Crews, on Allowed to be Ordinary

Understanding Vernacular Landscape

Vernacular landscape incorporates spatial structures intimately associated with regional environments, agricultural production, and rural life.

From Sage Rerference:

Vernacular landscapes, sometimes termed ordinary landscapes, are the surfaces of everyday life that we see all around us and that are created and re-created daily. Cultural geographers study vernacular landscapes to understand the lives of ordinary people who live in those landscapes. Ordinary landscapes take the form of everyday places such as parking lots, tree-shaded suburbs, trailer parks, or a patchwork of fields in Midwestern U.S. farmlands. They are lived in and are continuously changing.

A vernacular landscape is the combination of natural and human structures in the context of ordinary people's lives.

Landscape Practice

I’ve just begun a new online class taught by Paul Sanders in which students use one lens, a 50mm, for an entire year. The first assignment is to make landscape pictures. This is NOT my strength. I started practicing today with more traditional landscape views, but really I’m much more interested in vernacular landscape, so that will likely be my primary direction. We’ll see how it goes.