As landscape photographers we are fundamentally solitary predators. Away before the dawn and skulking home long after sundown. Shying the pack culture. Lost in "the zone" of image capture meditation. It is a personal space of peace and calm I love to frequent. A place I feel I am at my best, away from intrusions and thoughts that invade much of the reality of the every day.

And indeed, when seeking to express through the lens ones thoughts and emotions of the scene before us I for one find myself horribly distracted when I feel constrained by the presence of external undesired intrusions. When out with other photographers whose style I know I have in the past found it difficult not to be influenced by their presence and have even found myself creating images that reflect their work more than my own. Time to retreat to the comfort of being alone with my thoughts and ideas. A much safer place to reside.

And there is definitively something to be said for this approach. Some of my favourite personal work has come out of these solitary excursions. To the point where I rarely consider taking my camera out if I am walking with a friend. This lesson I learned many years ago when travelling in Ireland with my brother and a camera. The "third party" on the trip did little for bon accord and at one point I was nearly left at the side of the road having apparently taken more than an hour setting up and wait for the light. My brother is a very patient man but this was the end of the line as it was my umpteenth stop to get a snap.

A decade and a half later I purchased and lived for a year in a campervan as I pursued the solitary dream concept of being alone with my camera in the wilderness. But as the weeks and months passed I realised that solitude, whilst having is place, is a lonely existence. At least it was for me. After about ten days out in the field I would rush to visit a friend or town for a modicum of civilisation. It was a very interesting time and I learnt a great deal about myself. I am sure some would survive and excel in such an environment and part of me wishes that I could but it simply wasn't the case. I love the solitude but not, obviously, over significantly extended periods.

So when I met my wife Morag a new approach to my photography materialised. As a fellow photographer we could go out into the field as individuals and yet at the same time learn from each others experiences, emotions and reactions to the moment. With digital technology we could even learn in the field, reviewing each others ideas and developing concepts as we went along. Sharing the joy of being in "the zone
" whilst out the field.

Our first "project" developing this very new way of working for me, was our Impressions series of portfolios, which we worked pretty much consistently and exclusively on for a period of some two to three years, barely taking any traditional images over that period. This Intentional Camera Movement (I avidly dislike this terminology as I think it reflects only the science of a capture method and not the emotion of the resulting image) at the time was a relatively new concept to single frame, in camera digital capture. The LCD screen allowed us to review and learn as each shoot progressed, enabling us to make step changes in our approach as we went along and examine the styles and techniques of the other which in turn we could use to influence our own images. We could instantly explore new themes and emerge from blind alleys. At some point one or other of us would take the image that reflected our combined vision at the time and that would become the statement shot for the shoot. It didn't really matter which one of us had taken the final photo as we had both played an equal role in arriving at the final shot. As such we adopted the joint signature approach for our collaborative work, which had the additional advantage of reducing marital competitiveness!

As we designed, built and subsequently moved into our new Eco-home in south west Scotland this approach continued with the commencement of the Zero Footprint portfolio. Having spent 5 years of our lives working to minimise our carbon footprint at home we felt it would be interesting to see if this could also be adopted in our work lives. With respect to any commission works we began to charge the client for "carbon dioxide free" petrol and planting native species of trees to offset the fuel use. More recently we have installed a domestic wind turbine to produce our electricity, and the digital darkroom for us is a more pleasant and environmentally friendly place to be (although there will always be a part of me that would love to dive back into that cocktail of pungent chemicals and muted lighting).

We then looked at our fine art work and decided that we could shoot a portfolio of work from the same location, allowing ourselves the luxury of any lens and shooting in any direction. Either one of us could take a photo at any time, as long as it was from the same location, the patio of our house (we are extremely fortunate that despite be a very remote location our house is blessed with a fantastic view). No travel meant no carbon emissions from the shoot.

At times we would work together and at others alone, it just depended on who was where at the time when the light shines gold (or grey or dark or bright). The project has remained collaborative and as such maintains the joint signature. With our current exhibition at the Joe Cornish Gallery we present the end of the first phase of this project, which depicts the amazing mists and fogs that permeate our valley throughout the year. These moments are rare and it has taken many hours waiting for the occasional few seconds when the tides of fog roll up and down the valley to reveal the mysteries beneath. In future phases of this ongoing lifetimes work we will explore a variety of techniques and approaches as we attempt to capture our glen in its many guises.

I still absolutely love and crave the solitude of being out there on my own and fully appreciate and admire those who adopt nothing but this approach to their work. But in collaborations with Morag, learning form every person that comes on our workshops and the odd shoot with fellow photographers in the field, I now feel as though I have a new string to my bow as I head to the hills and glens with my sole mates.

A recent article written by Ian Thompson on his wave photograph at Porth Cawl generated just a little bit more feedback than I or Ian expected. The main gist of the comments were along the lines of ‘this has gone too far’ or ‘this isn’t photography’. I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the idea of truth and photography in a little more detail.

The Camera Doesn’t Lie

A very famous phrase suggests that what appears in a photograph is a direct reflection of reailty. However, even from the very first photographs we have had varying amounts of metaphorical or literal distortion. For instance, Louis Daguerre’s photograph taken in 1838, supposedly the first photograph of a human being, shows a street scene where a single figure stands on a corner having his shoes shined. Anyone who saw this picture at the time would think that the street was empty, early morning possibly. However it was the extremely long exposure needed that made all the people dissapear (a technique used by many architectural photographers).

And if we are talking about landscape photography, many of the early landscape photographers (Gustav le Gray for instance) used to have a library of sky photographs that they could combine with their landscape images in order to create a convincing whole or would have to take multiple shots with filters to capture the sky and foreground (Frank Meadow Sutcliffe).  This could be taken as a necessity to capture skies because of the film used but they regularly picked skies from different locations for instance (skies that probably couldn’t exist in these locations because of atmospheric/geographic conditions). The following image by Camille Silvy is very well blended but for all we know those clouds would never form like that in that location. Although it is thought that they may be taken in the same location, there is no guarantee of this - hence the beginnings of doubt in landscape photography.

Camille Silvy, "River Scene" 1858

Or quite common in the mid 19th century are photo montages, combinations of multiple images into a single scene such as Henry Peach Robinson's "When the day's work is done". A scene as fictitious as the sentiment recorded and the following "Two Ways of Life" by  Oscar Rejlander - a blend of many, many pictures.

Most of us probably know about the intentional photographic lies where individuals have been ‘darkroom’d out of photographs such as Trotsky from images where he stood close to Lenin or the Reichstag Flag raising. More recent changes such as OJ Simpson’s ‘darkening’ in Time magazine show a different distortion that is insidious in its subtlety.

However, let us take a look at a photograph taken in 1939.

Dorothea Lange- Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California. 1939.

What we have here is a mother and baby looking like they are enjoying themselves having just gone to pick up the shopping. The more famous version of this picture, taken a few moments earlier is this..

Dorothea Lange- Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California. 1939

So here we have the image chosen by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration’s representation of the Great Depression. Which one of these photographs is the truth? Obviously the choice of photograph was made influenced by the message the FSA wanted to put forward. (more info here)

Both of these are a lies to some extent - the first is a lie where the subject has decided to show the photographer that they are happy and have a happy, clean baby (the father cleaned the babies face). The second photograph, the one that was taken first, lies in that it only shows a single aspect of the subjects life having just arrived at a food shelter after a long car journey (I look pretty bad after eight hours in the car too).

A more subtle lie that photographers make is through elimination and choice. For instance, a documentary photographer, Supanit Riansrivilai, was criticised recently when they produced a series of photographs depicting the Polish city of Krakow. The criticism was based on the fact that through choosing only to take photographs that depicted her own vision of what communist depression was about. This scenario mirrors the photographs taken by Russian spies of the US where they wanted to depict the human fallout of a capitalist state. By only showing one part of reality they created a new version of it that didn't exist.

Given these particular ‘lies’, lets try to construct a list of ways in which photography can lie without ‘manipulating’ images.

1) Through conscious choice and elimination of parts of a ‘reality’ in a series of images, thereby creating a distorition of the truth. This is particularly true in landscape photography where many people want to create ‘beautiful’ photography in crepuscular light, showing bucolic pastoral scenes. However, the countryside isn’t like this - much of it is agricultural, it spends most of it’s time under high sun with contrasty shadows etc and in many cases it can be quite dull or barren.

2) Through choice of subject or by cropping of the subject to represent a different truth. For example this image from the front pages of most newspapers at the time ...

.. looks very different when you see the whole picture?

. Does this photograph mean the same thing? I would say the story has changed substantually. We do the same when we photograph many of our favourite icons - eliminating the fact that they are next to main roads or popular paths and doing our damndest to make people think we are in the deep wildernerss. Take the tree at Lochan Na h’Achlaise (since blown down)

copyright Christopher Hawkins (cc)

this is literally a few dozen feet from the biggest road on the west coast of Scotland and yet a viewer would think it was in the middle of the wilderness and that the photographer was an intrepid explorer.

3) Through the use of non standard focal length lenses, particularly wide angle lenses. The most recent example of this in my experience was that when I visited the Isle of Eigg, I expected to see Rhum quite small on the distant horizon.

In actual fact Rhum sits quite close to Eigg and encompasses so much of the horizon that it is difficult to take photographs from the north side of the island without including it. Here is a shot showing how close Eigg and Rhum actually are..

In fact when the first very wide angle lenses were used, people struggled to understand what they were seeing in pictures because the distortion of perspective did not make sense - they didn’t recognise the locations in photographs for instance.

4) Through colour balance. Our eyes do a fantastic job of correcting colour casts in the real world, we are so good at doing this that we don’t notice that at midday in blue sky weather, the landscape is quite cold looking. Our eyes adjust for this and keep on adjusting until the sun gets very low in the sky and has become very warm. It is only when the sun gets very low that are eyes cannot compensate for the colour cast any more and everything takes on the hues of the ‘golden hour’ (which is why you can still get great light well before you can see it with your eyes).

With the camera though, we can adjust or fix the colour balance and show images with intense tones that are dramatically different than that which we would have experienced had we been there ourselves.

One of the intriguing things about colour balance is that we can override our subconscious and learn to see it. For instance, most people who have not looked hard at the world will not say that shadows are blue. However, if you get used to this fact, you start to see the blue shadows on clear sky days - so when one person says the shadow is blue and the other one says it isn't, who is correct and who lies?

5) Through saturation. Don’t we all know this one - I think everyone has seen a picture or two that has had their eyes itching and even the subtler levels of saturation boosting depict a strange form of reality. Although this is not necessarily lying, it is certainly deceiving to some extent.

A second aspect of saturation that lies is the total elimination of colour - black and white photography is the original distortion. By removing one of the important cues we have about reality, we are creating a fiction, however aesthetically pleasing that fiction is. Black and white also allows us to us colour filters to change a blue sky to a black one using a red filter or to make foliage 'glow' using a green filter.

6) Through the actions of the photographer whilst taking the photograph. I'll stick to landscape photography here to keep things on topic but there are many examples outside (include Capa's Spanish civil war 're-enactment' and various other staged ware photographs). I suppose the most extreme example of this is Edouard Muybridge's admission of clearing "trees by the score that interfered with the cameras / best point of sight". I suppose you could say he wasn't lying because that is what the landscape looked like, after he had finished with it at least.

Less invasive perhaps, but bringing up the same questions is our fond habit of 'gardening' the scene. Removing or arranging parts of the foreground to better suit our composition. Many photographers talk about this as being more morally correct that using photoshop to remove these items in post processing but I do wonder what the difference is in terms of 'honesty'.

Manipulation

So straight photography isn't purely truthful in the first place, even before you consider manipulation. But once we start to look at manipulation, a whole new set of issues appear. How far can we take digital (or analog) manipulation before we start to lie.

Reading through the hundreds of comments on Ian Thompson's article about the 'wave' picture that was composited from multiple photographs, it really makes it clear that this is an issue that photographers feel very strongly about (whatever their opinion). The points of view range from "the capture is sacrosanct" to "everthing goes" but at first glance there seems to be a few milestones along that path. I'll list a couple here..

1) The first milestone can probably be described thus "Items can be removed but not added and those items removed should be transient with respect to the landscape". So this means that it's OK to remove cars and rubbish but it's not OK to remove stone walls and trees. However, when you look closely at this, things get a little messy. For instance, some rubbish does not degrade at all - many plastics will be around long after we've died. And some things we think of as permanent could be gone, for instance the trees on Rannoch moor that have recently been blown over. Does that means we have to set a time limit on how long things last or do we class 'rubbish' as something that is OK to delete regardless of the amount of time it will be there for (and can we class pylons as rubbish in that case?). And as for transient, clouds are probably the most transient thing in most peoples pictures, is it OK to remove a few of them if they aren't adding to the picture?

2) "It's OK to add and remove things as long as the intrinsic documentary nature of the subject is preserved". This sounds easy to understand, the landscape is the truth and as long as we represent it as truth then we're OK. But what truth? It's probably a little fascetious but if a Llama wandered into your photo of Loch Sunart in Ardnamurchan would you keep it in because there are Llama wandering around the shoreline or remove it because Llama aren't a native species? The problem with a definition like this is that it's subjective - we all have our own interpretation of what the landscape is and this interpretation will dictate what we can or can't do - meaning what is OK for one person won't be for another.

So it seems that even when we have some form of shared vocabulary about our level of tolerance of  'distortion', the finer points mean that we might not be in agreement as much as we think we are. So let's take a look at where this idea of 'pure' photography comes from by looking at some of the 'masters' of photography (hopefully biased towards landscape).

Ansel Adams - One of the supposed bastions of truth in photography but the use of black and white images, strong colour filters and quite extreme darkroom manipulations - for instance in Moonlight over Hernandez was manipulated to remove many of the clouds from the top of the picture (particularly the clouds to the right hand side of the moon)

Bill Brandt - A British master of photography and one know to use the darkroom to quite dramatically change the tonality of his pictures. A good example of which is "The Snicket" which when printed straight shows a lot of detail in the building at the top of the cobbled street. Brandt's darkroom work creates a starker picture where any detail in the building has been completely burned in (darkened to black).

When colour arrived in full swing in the 1950's/1960's, photographers did not manipulate quite as much, mostly because it was too difficult to do so. There were a few colour photographers who did have the skills to manipulate and some of them chose to occasionally 'tweak the truths nose' a little. For example, it seems to me quite obvious that some of Michael Fatali's shots have been manipulated in terms of colour and tone but more importantly for our discussion, he also introduced (or enlarged) celestial and atmospheric conditions. Take the moon in this shot - according to some quick calculations, he would have needed a 1000mm lens to capture the moon at this size in the frame. Even on 8x10 this 1000mm lens is equivalent to a 180mm lens, hardly the wide angle suggested by the perspective of the composition.

Now that we live in a world of digital photography where even film captured images can be piped through the magic of photoshop before creating a final 'darkroom' print, the ability to edit images has been democratised. There is a huge range of free and cheap software out there that you can use to 'photoshop' your images, it should be no surprise that some people do so.

One of the questions that was raised during the discussion in Ian's article was 'Has the bond between photography and the truth been broken'. Having looked at some of the examples above, I would have to say that this bond was fragile to begin with. It may be that in the current era the expectation of truth in photography is weaker than it once was but I would say that it is up to the artist to decide how to answer the question "Did you do anything to that?".

This hasn't stopped people trying to regulate landscape and wildlife photography in some way, even going so far as to propose some form of kite mark to record what level of truth the image includes. Perhaps Ansel Adams' recent exhibition should have contained warnings about 'Moonrise' saying "significant darkroom work applied and elements removed" - would this have helped the viewer enjoy the image? Attempts such as this are always going to be difficult and self regulation seems the only real way to go - especially when the people who are the real villains are those who actively deceive people, suggesting that there pictures are straight out of camera (SOOC) when in fact they have applied all sorts of trickery. Michael Fatali famously set fire to some fire bricks to create some nice smoggy effects whilst leading a course and allegedly added or enlarged moons in many of his desert temple such as Back of Beyond and possibly pasting in mammatus clouds in The Crossing (a meteorologist friends assured me that mammatus such as that don't stretch to the horizon and would be quite small with a wide angle lens). Another photographer alleged to have manipulated his images that insists not is Peter Lik - his latest piece, Bella Luna, is almost certainly a combination of two or more images. The narrative associated with the image "I pressed the shutter, a feeling I'll never forget. The moon, tree, and earth." certainly implied a single moment of capture.

And that is possibly what people want to preserve when they talk about truth in photography - that a single moment of capture created the final image; not multiple captures that have been blended together to create a composite. However, this 'category' of straight photography, however blurred by gardening, subtle cloning etc. is only one aspect. Many photographers wish to evoke the memory or emotion of a place or moment in time and use whatever is in their creative arsenal to achieve this. Ian Thompson's image is perhaps a visualised moment that Ian was unable to capture in a single exposure but he still wants to share what he felt at the time and who is to say that what he did to achieve this is wrong?

Ultimately, photography has been used throughout it's relatively short history as a way of both representing reality and fiction - the viewer is not tied to a single way of understanding the image and it is up to the photographer to suggest ways of viewing just as the cinematographer adds 'based on a true story' to their works of art. No one expects 127 hours to all be the actual recordings of events that happened but they still connect it with reality. Likewise I don't think many people expect fine art to be a pure recording of the truth unless they are specifically told that it is.

As for the limits of what is and isn't photography, like many things in the english language, it is defined by usage and people call images that were primarily recorded by light onto a sensor a photograph. The problem we face if we try to provide definitions is how to cope with edge cases - a colleague runs a roll of 120 through his camera and then sends it to America to get another photographer to expose it again. The constructions don't record the same instant or even the same continent - are they still photographs?

The most sensible course of action is to let each person define their own moral/ethical boundaries and, where possible, help the viewer to understand what they are.

Photographic description alone will never be inspirational, never make a heart beat faster, never bring a tear to another's face. To achieve these things emotional messages must somehow be woven seamlessly into the photographic representation. But beyond what is baldly described by the light captured in a scene, the exact meaning of photographs is elusive. We read them but it’s not like reading prose, there’s no dictionary that we can refer to for definitions. Every viewer reads them in a subtly different way and their meaning may also alter for different viewings by the same viewer. Photographs’ descriptive power is almost overwhelming, sometimes it’s as if the images shout about the contents of their frame. Yet, almost lost in the cacophony of detail, deeper messages are being whispered. Despite the difficulty of hearing them, we know that the messages are there because we know that photographs can move us.

When a photograph evokes something beyond the mere description of what’s in front of the camera I think of it as transcending its subject matter. A transcendent image is therefore more than just an illustration: the message it imparts is more than the sum of the tones and forms that are amassed in the frame, more than the sum of labels that can be attached to its contents; a transcendent image moves us because of something beyond what is described. The question arises, how are these messages transmitted? Where is the emotional meta data held in a photograph? In this article I will be looking for the sources of this secondary information.

Consider this postcard image of the Austrian Tyrol:

When we ‘read’ a photograph, the first thing we do is to look for things we recognise and mentally attach linguistic or pattern labels to these objects. Our first read of this image might therefore go something like this: ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘tree’, ‘sky’, ‘sky’, ‘sky’, ‘mountain’, ‘mountain’, ‘snow’, ‘mountain’, ‘cow’, ‘cow’, ‘grass’, ‘grass’, ‘grass’, ‘grass’ more ‘grass’ and ‘cloud’. A list of nouns isn’t very exciting is it? (Incidentally, it’s a myth that in the Western world we read a photograph left to right. Our eyes actually move across an image in a complicated pattern, moving up and down, right to left and left to right at seemingly random angles according to what we find interesting in the image. We also frequently return to some points, such as the eyes in a face. It may be a convenient stick for a judge to beat an image with but it makes no difference to how an image is read whether the principle object in a scene is placed on one side of the frame or the other. The ‘preferred’ placement is simply a matter of tradition.)

You’ll notice that all the labels I’ve mentioned are nouns. Yet we rarely get an emotional response simply from a noun – tax-inspector being an obvious exception! To signify emotions we need to look for adjectives or adverbs in the image such as ‘green’, ‘blue’, or, even better, ‘peaceful’, ‘still’ or ‘sunny’. Obviously there is degree of consensus on the definition of some visual adjectives – ‘green’, ‘blue’ etc. – whilst others have more plastic definitions – ‘wild’ for instance. But the central problem with wanting to use photographs to express how we feel about our chosen subject is that whilst every photograph is heavily laden with visual ‘nouns’ (description) there is no single fixed interpretation of their emotional significance. To show how complicated the question of interpretation is let’s consider just the colour adjectives for a moment. Any colour has a wide range of emotional information associated with it, some of it cultural, some personal and, as I shall point out later, some of it hardwired into our brains. Red, for instance, is the colour of blood, said to be the most emotionally intense colour but it is also thought of as optimistic and sexy. In Russian there is a linguistic link between the word for red and the word for beauty. This might be why the Bolsheviks chose red for their flag. But even if it were not it means that red now also has a political connotation. It’s also thought of as aggressive, it stands for danger and stop! It stands out from the background better than any other colour; perhaps this is why some wag once suggested that RPS stands for red patch somewhere? That’s quite a range of possible responses and I’m probably only scratching the surface. There will be other attributes of red that are of personal significance to individuals; perhaps that shade was the colour of your first bike, or the colour of your beloved’s lipstick, or the colour of your favourite football team’s shirts. And it’s not simply a question of any sign being present; how it’s interpreted will depend upon its context. And how the viewer is feeling… Complicated, isn’t it?

So, our reading of the visual nouns would seem straightforward enough but for the fact that we all habitually and unconsciously attach a personal history and significance to objects and places which colours how we interpret them. Our personal experience and the cultural symbols that we have absorbed throughout our lives can lend significance to any part of an image. This level of meaning is classified as residing in signs. Hopefully you can see from my brief look at the colour red that the adjectival labelling is an example a subtle sign system. Signs can exist as text, images, symbols, flags, objects, sounds, colours, smells, facial expressions or physical gestures. Signs can be grouped into languages (body language for instance) in a similar way to words, though the boundaries between these languages are not as distinct as those between spoken languages. Signs are literally anything that communicates a meaning or emotion to us, whether that meaning can be expressed in words or not.

So anything that we see in a photograph might be suggesting something other than just itself. For adherents of the mystical tradition in photography a cloud in a photograph isn’t always just a cloud but, as Tim pointed out in his recent article, in the case of Alfred Stieglitz it was also an expression of how he felt. Beyond this personal perspective, objects or places have often been widely adopted in a culture to stand for things other than just themselves. To grasp this idea one need only think of how living things have been used as symbols to suggest specific attributes; a lion for valour, an oak for strength or an owl for wisdom. Sometimes, as in heraldic symbols, this system of representation is meticulously codified.

A rigorous study of signs began at the beginning of the 20th century when a group of philosophers began looking, as Daniel Chandler noted, “for ‘deep structures’ underlying the ‘surface features’ of phenomena.” These ‘Structuralists’ included the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. He proposed a study of signs; anything that signifies something to us and not just the kind that read ‘Keep of the Grass’ or ‘No Waiting’. Perhaps appropriately, philosophers can’t agree a name for the study of signs; it is known variously as semiotics or semiology - it hasn’t even been agreed whether linguistics is part of the study of signs or vice versa! Throughout this article I will refer to the insights Frenchman Roland Barthes who was for many years, until his death in the 1980’s, the leading theoretician using semiotics to analyse photography.

Linguists, like Saussure, realised that words are arbitrary symbols: there can be no innate link between the object and the word attached to it. Such a link would deny the possibility of naming the same thing ‘dog’, ‘hund’ or ‘chien’ - it would preclude the existence of more than one language. This arbitrary nature extends to all other sign systems and therefore any sign may have a multiplicity of meanings. Consider, now, how a photograph of a single crooked tree atop a rocky hill might stand for ‘loneliness’ or ‘deforestation’ or ‘perseverance’ or ‘old age’ or ‘life’ - or maybe even ‘wind’. Semiologists would recognise the tree as a sign and refer to its ‘standing for something else’ as connotation and its ‘standing for itself’ as denotation; so our example tree would, amongst other things, denote crookedness and hawthorn and might connote life and loneliness. As soon as you place two connotations next to each other the complexity of the result is much greater than just double, since it calls to mind yet more signs that evoke the same idea.

The principle difference between words (so called natural language) and other kinds of signs is that words have widely accepted definitions of meaning (otherwise there could not be dictionaries) whereas the latter usually do not – though of course the meaning of some is prescribed, just think how much more chaotic our roads would be if we didn’t all agree on what road signs meant! The lack of definition is because our reading of signs, other than words, is both culturally specific and partly subjective. It is also because, as Emile Benveniste asserted, “We are not able to say ‘the same thing’ in systems based upon different units.” Others, though, have asserted that all other signs can be expressed in written language; Marvin Harris opined that, “human languages are unique among communication systems in possessing semantic universality… [in being able] to convey information about all aspects [of experience] whether actual or possible, real or imaginary.” Lucky chap, he has obviously never been ‘lost for words’! Just think about how inadequate words can be for describing smells or colours and you will see that, whilst it may be true that we can describe anything with them, words are not truly equivalent to the thing described. In a similar vein, the curator, photographer and critic John Szarkowski wrote that, “The meanings of words and those of pictures are at best parallel, describing two lines of thought that do not meet. If our concern is for meanings in pictures, verbal descriptions are finally gratuitous.”

Signs that have a wider cultural meaning are referred to as icons and form a particularly interesting group. Examples from different fields might be Marilyn Monroe, Everest or a Rolex watch. Each of these icons connotes a wide range of subtle but powerful messages. For Monroe for instance we might read movie star/tragedy/beauty/glamour/sex. Icons are potent signs because their range of connotation is widely accepted. The inclusion of any well-known cultural icon in a photograph strongly affects how we read the image. (This has implications for how we caption images since the mere naming of a well-known place will to some degree alter how people think about the image.) Perhaps the best example of a landscape icon in the UK is the Buchaillie Etive Mor, or more correctly the east-facing crag called Stob Dearg. It appears in so many images because its shape mimics the classic pyramidal shape drawn by any child asked to depict a mountain. You might say that it represents mountain-ness in its most concentrated form – especially when covered with a mantle of snow. The problem with including icons in a photograph is that they have a tendency to polarise interpretation because there comes a hard to define point where an icon tips over into a cliché. For some people photographing Stob Dearg is still a dearly held goal whilst for others its mere mention turns them off because they see it as having been done to death.

When Barthes wrote in his last book, ‘Camera Lucida’, that, “A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see”, he meant that the meaning we gain from a photograph derives from a whole range of signs and symbols that we understand in a wider context external to the image. The key point is that we read a photograph; viewing one is an active, not a passive process. Some of these signs appear to be universal (e.g. some facial expressions), others are widespread but culturally specific (e.g. religious symbols) and still others are peculiar to the individual viewer arising from their personal experiences (e.g. I hate that shade of green!). The response to some other signs is very deeply seated, perhaps even hardwired. Research has shown that some of the light entering our eyes transmits signals directly to the hypothalamus, one of the oldest parts of the brain and part of the limbic system. Light shifted towards either the red end or the blue end of the spectrum evokes an instinctive emotional response from the limbic system relating to temperature. We even call these colours, respectively, warm light and cold light.

All forms of visual representation, including photography, share one attribute; the image is not only a mirror for the artist's experience but also for those of the viewer. The meanings that we extract from an image are necessarily flavoured by individual responses since every viewer brings his or her own intellectual and emotional baggage to the viewing. The precise source of these personal responses is by rights the domain of psychology and psychoanalysis in the Freudian or Jungian tradition and beyond the scope of this article but we must always be aware that these personal responses are inevitable. This individuality of response means that not only will single signs evoke different connotations for different people but also that any given sign may evoke no response at all in some individuals. There will be common points of contact but also areas where meaning drifts for each individual, in the same way that no two people will get exactly the same meaning from a poem. Just as the conjunction of words produce indefinable and unstable thoughts and feelings which change from one person to another, and sometimes subtly from one reading to the next, so the effect of an image on the viewer changes from one person to another. For some the reflection of the photographer’s viewpoint by the image is smooth and almost perfect, for others it resembles more the grotesque distortions encountered in a fairground Hall of Mirrors.

As I mentioned earlier, the great American photographer Alfred Stieglitz proposed that a series of his photographs of clouds where in a sense equivalent to how he felt about his subject. The problem with the notion of Equivalence is that not only should the object photographed evoke an emotional response in the photographer but that, by dint of his expertise and insight, he is thought able to evoke the exact same response in the viewer. John Szarkowski curated an exhibition entitled ’Mirrors & Windows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978 that has greatly influenced subsequent ideas about the interpretation of photographs. The premise for the show was that all photographs are either mirrors reflecting the photographer who made them or windows presenting the photographer’s view of the outside world. The former tell us more about the photographer than about reality, and the intent of the latter is to tell us more about reality than about the photographer. In Szarkowski’s terms Stietglitz’s Equivalents are mirroring the photographer’s concerns and presenting them as a perfect reflection to the viewer. This could only possibly be true if there were single fixed meanings for visual signs and, as we have seen, there are none. Another American photographer, Minor White, offered little practical advice on how to achieve ‘equivalence’ beyond his somewhat gnomic comment that, ‘When a photograph is a mirror of the man and the man is a mirror of the world, Spirit might take over.’ However he seemed to realize that something more than a simple intent to express emotional response was needed because he added that, ‘It follows that “self-expression” as the aim of the photographer is not in itself sufficient.’

There can never be a guarantee of Equivalence, only a striving towards it. Individual responses do not mean that interpretations are cut entirely adrift, at the mercy of unstable currents of meaning. The photographer suggests a course by the content of the image but cannot ensure that the viewer will safely reach the intended port. The reading of an image can be directed further by captioning the image, which serves to emphasise certain aspects over others.

Is, then, a common inner meaning really unreachable and if so aren't we then left just with the surface gloss? Photographer and theorist, Victor Burgin insists that a single common meaning beyond a simple description of the contents of the photograph is indeed unreachable because, “There is no language of photography, no single signifying system… upon which all photographs depend.” This contrasts with classical painting. Many works by grand masters from the Renaissance onwards depicted scenes from the Bible or other mythologies. Figures and places depicted in these masterpieces had a range of accepted meanings, so the cognoscenti (i.e. the rich patrons and those involved in the production of such art) could read them. It’s important to note that the paintings were not equivalent to prose but nearer to stanzas of poetry, with all the fuzziness of meaning that suggests. Nevertheless there was an accepted codified system of signs. Such a painting contained a limited range of signs with broadly accepted meanings but in a photograph the signs are not so constrained. To return to my earlier question, we are definitely not left just with the surface gloss in a photograph, but rather with a very complex set of signs to decode.

In any single photograph we will read a lot of different signs, often from totally different sign systems. In a portrait photograph, for instance, we might read signs relating to the style of photography, body language (including facial expression), clothing, age, era, location, social status, race and so on. Some of the processes by which we read these signs are conscious but many are not. The photographer cannot know how the viewer might respond to any one of these signs, let alone the entirety of signs within the image. By careful composition, the photographer might be able to limit the choice but there will always be the possibility that something of personal significance to the viewer subtly changes or even entirely subverts the intended message.

So where does this get us when we’re thinking about making photographs? Landscape photography in the traditional view has essentially been a documentary practice in the sense of recording an image rather than constructing one but, as we have seen in the last issue of On Landscape, this is changing for many practitioners who use montage widely or even exclusively. The possibility exists for these photographers to construct a message from a series of icons. I feel that because the breadth of interpretation is so wide photographers might be tempted to pick icons with the narrowest possible interpretation. The danger arises of the message being clunky. Instead of it being subtle and seamless, like finely crafted prose or (more desirably) poetry, it might look like a group of disparate words. For the traditionalists, the search for symbolic meaning is necessarily constrained by what the landscape has to offer in any particular location. I feel that it is better to react instinctively rather than to try and consciously include signs. Whatever we do at a conscious level there is bound to be a huge amount of signification that we are only subconsciously aware of. Trying to control the signification completely is fruitless task, likely to result in a stilted conversation with our viewers. Where the notion of signs really helps is when we’re trying to understand why an image moves us, whether it be another photographer’s or one of our own. I feel certain that the accumulation of this understanding over a long period will help us to craft our images more skilfully.