This is the second picture in the ShELP series. It is quite different in content from the first but has some features one would usually recognise in a traditional landscape picture.
Looking NE along Fulwood Road, Broomhill, Sheffield.
Again any comments are more than welcome. Is this stil a landscape even though it depicts part of a city. As the definitions Luis gives in his recent post tells us ‘ landscape is generally natural’. But here most of the features in the photo are man-made, there are some plants running down the middle of the picture but they have been placed in concrete pots.
But there is still a foreground and a horizon showing the natural sky all classic features of a landscape picture. However it is framed by the buildings down the sides of the street and the view isn’t restricted by perspective but by a building in the middle of the picture which blocks the further vista. Does this make this scene part of a landscape rather than a whole landscape in its own right? Would this be ‘more’ of a landscape if the photo was taken from higher up so we could see past the buidlings?
Any thoughts? All offerings will be read and thought upon, again, there are no correct answers to this.
what i find interesting about this landscape, in counterpoint to the ring cairn thing is the materiality of control. there are the traffic lights structuring cars movement along the roads, the yellow lines preventing pause and trying to encourage efficiency.
these rules of movement and the architecture all produce ways and times of moving which is the complete opposite of the ring cairn picture. there you can move where ever you want at any speed and can do it whilst keeping all the landscape in veiw. here parts of the landscape are constantly being hidden and new parts coming into view.
The first thing I think when I see this picture is ‘I can’t see the horizon’. The green arrow points upwards to the sky, which is a help. The rain on the pavement also catches the reflection of the sky, which again helps. Then there is the rounded nub of the bollard in the foreground and the wave/curves along the shop front on the left, which help to feminise? or to remind one of nature (which rarely has such straight edges). How much brighter the sky is than the internal yellow light. It is perhaps a picture of man cowering from the elements, there is the sky above, from wence the rain has come, and then there are all the hard edged tightly packed dark looking buildings for us to shelter in, and the metal boxes on wheels for us to move about in without having to touch too much of the natural world. However the mismatched paving gives hope, not everything is straight and ordered.