Landscape is ... from Shaun Huston on Vimeo.
With "Landscape is ..." I attempt to put Jackson's formal defintion of landscape from "The Word Itself" into practice. I take two points of emphasis from his essay:
- The significance of the visual.
- The primacy of the everyday.
As indicated in the second quote I pulled for the film, Jackson finds "virtue" in defining landscape to include, "the visual experience of our everyday world." To underscore the intertwining of these qualities - the visual and the everyday - I chose a mundane space, the riverfront in Corvallis, Oregon USA, where I live, as the subject for "Landscape is ..." As a park and site of the farmers market, the riverfront functions as a critical place in the regular social and cultural life of the city.
Following Sarah Pink's (2015) outline of "sensory ethnography," I treat "visual experience" as embodied, as related to other forms of sensory experience, notably, sound, and not as an isolated form of engagement with the world (11; see also 122-126). While Jackson is consistent in foregrounding the visual, there are also indications of a relational and multi-sensory perspective on landscape in his work as well, most clearly in "The Abstract World of the Hot-Rodder," where he draws attention to the ways in which recreational activities like downhill skiing and water sports transform the participant's experience of nature, not just visually, but also haptically and aurally. Other essays, such as "Other-Directed Houses" and "The Stranger's Path," clearly evoke sight as well as sound, and, arguably, smell, especially in the case of "Stranger's Path."
The riverfront and the farmers market also allowed me to draw out Jackson's claim to landscape as, "above all a social space shared by a group of people," and to make a particular point of his implication of landscapes having a temporal aspect, i.e., landscape as a "space with a degree of permanence." In representing the transformation of the riverfront from "empty" to "full" for the farmers market, I intended to signify the shared or social aspect of landscape as well as the relativity of the "degree" of permanence to the space. I draw this out most explicitly in the rough time-lapse sequence of the vendor booth being taken down, a series that also suggests how Jackson's definition resonates with contemporary theoretical conceptions of landscapes as mutable and performative (see Wylie 2007, 198-217).
I use the camera - a Canon XA10 HD Camcorder - to play with Jackson's reference to landscape as, classically, "A portion of the earth’s surface that can be comprehended at a glance." In the shot sequence of the Denison Farms booth, I had the camera at a fixed position, but changed the angle of view and lenses (wide angle, stock, and telephoto) to change the "glance." My selective use of a slower shutter speed so as to emphasize the movement of people also draws attention to how what is seen, and, therefore, what is "comprehended at a glance," can be affected or transformed by technological means. This device draws further attention to the relative permanence and mutability of landscape. Jackson, himself, used drawing and photography to show landscape in particular and selective ways.
I chose to remain at ground level, but another way in which the concept of the glance could be addressed is by adopting a high angle and shooting from longer distances. I decided to shoot at eye-level in the spirit of seeing landscape in an "everyday" way (on the ground and at eye-level being the way that I typically experience the world). I also think that a further interesting way to expand on Jackson's definition would be to incorporate explicit reference to the non- or more-than-human qualities and actors that can also be seen in landscape and with which landscape is a shared social space. I shot video footage of, for example, seasonal changes in foliage, with this intent, but, at the time of making the current work, deferred this theme for later, either in a second version of this film or in response to a different essay.
The J.B. Jackson drawing is from "Other-Directed Houses" (1956-57) in Landscape in Sight (1997, 184).
This film was originally presented to the Social Science Symposium at Western Oregon University as part of a talk on the geohumanities during Geography Awareness Week (November 16, 2015).
Cited works from J.B. Jackson, Landscape in Sight, ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (Yale University Press, 1997):
- "The Word Itself" (1984).
- "The Abstract World of the Hot-Rodder" (1957-58).
- "The Stranger's Path" (1957).
Other cited works:
- Pink, Sarah. 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography, 2d edition (SAGE Publications).
- Wylie, John. 2007. Landscape (Routledge).
