The Universal Foreground: Ordinary Landscapes and Boring Photographs
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qx43v
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Boredom Studies: Frameworks and Perspectives
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781138927469
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book chapter is part of Shinkle’s broader research agenda of challenging widely held assertions and assumptions around the 1975 New Topographics photography exhibition. Key among these are the claims that the exhibition single-handedly brought about a paradigm shift in the photographic representation of landscape, and that similar bodies of work produced in other countries during the same period are necessarily derived from the work in this exhibition. This chapter challenges this established assumption by arguing that the New Topographics exhibition was not a ‘beginning’, but that it existed in the context of a set of cognate themes being explored by photographers and writers in linked fields, from the early c20th onwards, in both North America and Europe.
Shinkle’s intervention is based on extensive pictorial research and analysis of back issues of the Architectural Review from the 1930s onwards – with a focus on the notorious 1955 ‘Outrage’ issue – as well as the photographs in the New Topographics exhibition.
In this chapter, Shinkle develops earlier claims made in a widely-cited 2003 essay on the aesthetics of the banal in contemporary photography. Her chapter expands on the claim that boredom, as a visual idiom, a theme, and a mode of reception is present not just in the work in the New Topographics exhibition, but in photographic work by numerous contributors to the UK-based journal the Architectural Review throughout the 1950s. These ideas, also developed in her other publications related to this chapter (such as ‘The City Inhabits Me’, published in the Journal of Architecture) have broader implications in linked fields such as architecture and urban studies. Shinkle’s claim that boredom is used as a structural and affective device by both groups of photographers is a nascent critique of the transformation of the landscape by global capital flows.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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