Contemporary landscape photography

Some recent research into the originality of landscape photography has produced a rich vein of material to comment on and one development is the popularity of contemporary landscape photography. I had always thought this was the New Topographics territory, but it is is now a genre apparently dedicated to the application of 'creative or artistic effects' to landscape scenery and we're not talking tilted focal planes or tobacco filters. Nope, it is more the combination of intentional camera movements, long exposures and blending of multiple exposures, the resulting images have a definite look to them and the keepers are the ones that aesthetically evoke a positive emotional response from the hundreds/thousands of images taken. It is fair to suggest that the optical performance of the lens is a minor consideration.

Being kind, I'll speculate that photographers who gravitate to the contemporary landscape photography community have tried conventional landscape photography and found it not to their liking. The toll on the spirit of early mornings and late nights, schlepping the gear, the travelling, rocking up at an iconic landscape to find it saturated with workshop clients, the weather lottery, all that effort and oftentimes so little reward. Happily, social media favs and likes for images are easily at hand with the contemporary landscape photography meme, it is marketed as photography for creatively artistic people and these people have plenty of time to engage on social media, which they do, prolifically. This application of creative effects to landscape scenery doesn't require a tripod, although there are heated debates on this, as some feel it isn't proper landscape photography without a tripod, whilst others insist breaking the link between the camera and tripod frees up artistic energy.  It has the dubious appeal of taking 1,000's upon 1,000's of images, the photographic equivalence of the Infinite Monkey Theorem and can be combined with 10 stop or 16 stop filters, awesome! Aside from the Shakespeare's Monkey appeal, the deal sealer is that it is fairly weather resilient, even high wind and leaden overcast skies are ok and any bland bit of countryside or seashore will do, which there's no shortage of near many urban population centres, throw in a 'loose' photographic technique and it's no surprise to witness the popularity of this contemporary landscape photography meme.

Digital cameras even facilitate the new genre with in camera blending/exposures modes too, so the 'art' can be accomplished in camera, in the field and in a delicious twist of irony, the creative contemporary landscape photographer can take the moral high ground and berate the digital fine art landscape photographers, who have to resort to photoshop manipulation for their creative vision. As the imagery has a definite modern look, the serious creative contemporary landscape photography artist can use the images to hang on almost any concept e.g deconstructivism, nihilism, political statements, poetry, folklore, environmentalism, eroticism .. the list is seemingly endless.

Despite being the proverbial 'low hanging fruit' of landscape photography, lower even than minimalist long exposure seascapes, the contemporary landscape photography meme offers a new market to exploit. So the media have put aside any principles and cashed in on the punters embraced it with articles, how to videos etc to boost flagging sales, click bait and landscape photography competitions have even allowed contemporary landscape images, no doubt as a cherry to attract new punters, keep the sponsors happy and most importantly of all, the filthy lucre rolling in. It will come as no surprise that that there are contemporary landscape photography workshops.

It's a funny old world.