Stéphane Bruchet

Looking at the landscape.

Landscape photography often brings to mind images of natural features, the spirit of the outdoors and natural beauty, clichés traditionally associated with postcards, calendars or jigsaws puzzles.
Similarly, running an image search for ‘landscape photography’ online returns a seemingly endless roll of hyper-realistic and calm inducing sceneries. There are over 78 millions images under this tag on Instagram, and it is becoming difficult to discriminate between photos taken with a camera and images digitally created by people, or increasingly by AI.
Photographer Robert Adams notes in his 1981 essay Truth and Landscape: ’Unspoiled places sadden us because they are, in an important sense, no longer true.’
If the camera captures reality objectively, the photographer’s approach and the viewer’s perspective are subjective. Additionally, the intention to engage in a landscape survey is rarely neutral.
Landscape photographic surveys have been commissioned for political, economical or planning reasons, undertaken by engaged artists to support a cause, or the result of aesthetic curiosity. Surveys from 150, 100 or 50 years ago have acquired new layers of meaning with time and have informed the making of more recent surveys.
Satellite imagery, surveillance and drones have made landscape photography more scientific than aesthetic in its approach. The traditional time consuming, cumbersome and technical image making process has been practically replaced by connected smartphones, allowing the taking, processing and sharing of an image to happens in mere seconds.

The Boggeragh uplands offer beautiful sceneries. Continuous human activity over thousands of years has left traces, and very little remain unspoilt. This project has grown organically through frequent visits and conversations with the locals. It is an attempt at documenting this natural and cultural ecosystem as it continues to evolve.

Technical information.

Concept:
To build an open ended photo archive of the Boggeragh mountains.

Origin / inspiration:
I started to take photos in the uplands since 2010. Over the years, I became familiar with the lie of the land and the local history. I presented the first iteration of this nascent project in Ballincollig Library in 2019. In parallel, I spent time studying landscape photography, with special interest for the works of Timothy O’Sullivan and Robert Adams in the USA, as well as the Mission Photographique DATAR in France.
It is the discovery of the Atlas des Regions Naturelles, an ambitious endeavour started by Eric Tabuchi & Nelly Monnier in 2017 that helped me articulate the direction and development of this archive.

Presentation:
Themes and categories evolve as the archive grows. Sequencing and presenting should be fluid and adaptable to different forums and audiences. The primary support for presentation should focus on prints, with digital or online as a repository.
Presentaion examoples are provided in the sample gallery menu (left)

Potential use cases:

• Talks (supported by presentation of prints) to various audiences.
• Upland communities.
• Secondary school students (link to History or Geography curricula).
• Local Camera clubs.
• Cork County planning Department.
• Presentation of prints in libraries, gallery or commercial spaces.
• Selection of prints in book form.

Relevance:
Photography was invented in the early 1820s. I would like this project to coincide with bicentennial celebration of the the birth of photography.