Japanese Landscapes
My criteria evolved as I viewed the collection, but I decided on three things: no people, excellent (generally) colour tinting, and no fuji-san. Or so I attempted to find...
Working out of myself, the dogs in the cage are interesting because the long, tall poles remind me of my aunt's backyard where to keep the dogs that can leap nine feet in, the wire fence is over nine feet tall.
In any case, I wanted to see what a bunch of landscapes unfocused on people might reveal in terms of similarity. There's a very expansive sense of place to these images, and the colour tinting seems to be of a higher quality on these particular prints then one others. The colours blend into each other like sunsets and sunrises, emphasizing a natural beauty assumed lost through black and white photography. The use of colour tinting is important in these images, because it allows in post-production for the emphasis of 'artistic details' though to be important, and in no way must these colours reflect a real life. Yet clearly such an attempt at real life facsimile has been made, considering the careful way the first image has been treated. The images are certainly composed, but the framing takes care to emphasis natural beauty and the genre-esque style that was mentioned in the online readings. The composition of these images are not surprising when you view similar English landscapes. They are framed only to be aesthetically pleasing images, not to do or say much other then 'this is a lovely place, isn't it. I saw it.' Mountains and water dominated these landscapes as I viewed them--including the 'famous autumn--and these are only a few. But this broad, sweeping things--even the eruption of a volcano--are eminently serene, nature holding quiet sway with people and buildings small or non-existent. Then the dogs, trapped up inside a man made cage, clearly some part of some purpose but the people completely absent. The figures are dwarfed in favour of the structure. The same in the landscapes--though here people are absent, buildings and man-made structures are also small, in a sort of romantic (as in the Lit movement)-esque aesthetic. These aesthetic lenses have been placed over the landscapes to render meditative, calm images supposed to reflect the breadth, depth, and mystery of the land as they were seen by the photographer and colorist.
I also think pictures of nature are spiffy, and so I'm personally drawn to them. Make of that what you will?
