If you haven’t already done so, read ahead to the brief for Assignment One.
Email your tutor a short summary of any ideas you have for this assignment. Use their feedback to help you to refine or expand your ideas. Include a description of how you intend to submit your assignment, as well as any other questions you may have.
Record your correspondence in your learning log.
The substantive part of my email correspondence with my tutor, Matt White is reproduced below (introductory material, salutations etc. omitted). My text in red, Matt’s in blue.
My ideas to date are in two blog postings, referenced at https://chasbedfordocalandscape.home.blog/category/assignments/assignment-1-beauty-and-the-sublime/
Of the three ideas, I would discard Dungeness as being ‘too easy’ – it is a local camera club cliché location and I am likely to produce cliché images as a result.
My first thought was to use ‘beauty spots’ to explore how hard a photographer has to work to produce a traditional postcard or chocolate-box image. The results will vary with viewpoint, focal length, weather and distracting elements. The difficulty that I see is that I will simply shoot ‘deliberate near misses’. [subsequent thought – the flipside would be to start with a crap location and try to make it look good]
The idea that I most favour is to look at pylons and electricity distribution lines, subjects that are not conventionally beautiful but have their own grandeur and graphic shapes. We have several main distribution lines in the county and I have experimented a bit during and after I&P, so I have some ideas of how a contrasty monochrome set would look.
I looks like you have made up your mind already! It is important to follow your own instincts and interests and work with these to develop original and interesting ways to deal with this subject matter. If you go for the pylons, try not to be too prescriptive at the beginning of the project. For example, limiting yourself to black and white (possibly MF film) means that your investigation of the subject will already be based around set aesthetic ideas you already have in your head, rather than what you might reveal about the subject through research and investigation.
I would suggest doing some initial research to frame and inform your practical experiments. Have a think about what these objects actually do and how they are viewed; how important they are to society and culture; how contentious their inclusion in the landscape can be; the danger implications; etc. etc. From this research devise an initial set of practical experiments that attempt to answer a question(s) that emerges from your initial research. Try to think as laterally as you can and look at the different ways that landscape has been dealt with by contemporary artists (Suzanne Mooney’s, Behind the Scenes, Susan Hiller, Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies all spring to my mind).
Thank you. Yes, although the idea of using pylons was the last to occur to me, I have been talking myself into it because it is a topic that came, unbidden, to the fore at the end of I&P and I thought I ought to do more with it.
I am pleased to see that I have already encountered all three of the artists you suggest as starting points. ‘Behind the Scenes’ gets a mention in ‘Perspectives on Place’.(Alexander 2015) Parts of ‘Dedicated to the Unknown Artists’ were hung at the Tate conceptual art exhibition a few years ago and, last year, in the seaside exhibition at the Turner Contemporary. Both ideas (along with the Bechers) are definitely ‘out of the box’, which is useful as a reminder to think outside the box myself – although I know that I have to relate the finished project back to ideas of beauty and the sublime eventually.
For initial research, I have the OS Explorer maps for most of Kent, so I can identify the main power/pylon routes and hubs – and will visit as many as I can to take test snapshots and get an overall feel for pylon typology and the sort of landscape they are set in.
I take the point on wider reading about environmental impact and perceived health risks (is it my imagination or has that particular story faded from the news?). I had been focussed primarily on the formal or graphic aspects.
An important part of Matt’s response is a reminder to do some contextual research. While web-surfing from a Google search on ‘electricity pylons UK’ I came across the Pylon Appreciation Society, which has a website and a generally positive view. The £15 membership fee will be a good investment and give me insight into typology, particularly favoured individual subjects (there is a link to a ‘pylon of the month’ site) and one side of the environmental arguments.
This will have to be balanced with some research into the negative aspects and, particularly, the perceived health risks of living under or close to power lines.
List of illustrations
Anon (2020) Pylon of the month – February 2020 [digital photograph] At: https://www.pylonofthemonth.org (16 March 2020)
References
Alexander, J.A.P. (2015) Perspectives on Place. Bloomsbury Publishing, London.
Landscape Lines 
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