Tales from the City of Gold

By Jason Larkin Kehrer, 2013 96 pp./$50.00 (hb) The square frame has never been very hospitable to landscape photographers. That rigid geometry, with its insistence on equal sides and right angles, renders the image neutral and static; yet humans are more receptive to images that move the eye into and around a pictured space, scanning a horizon or tilting up and down a vertical prominence. In contemporary printer V parlance, neither "landscape" nor "portrait" orientation characterizes the square. A maker must contend with the frame as a picture plane, since the content is rendered immobile--firmly balanced, literally "squared up"--except when astute graphics create vectors or natural behavior mobilizes the subject matter (wind blows grasses, a river flows, snow slides, etc.). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the best examples, natural landscape finds an uneasy truce with cultural traces or with polemic currents flowing in from wellsprings outside of the frame. Think of Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Sally Gall, Stuart Rome, Emmet Gowin, Lee Friedlander--as subject matter becomes more didactic or quotidian, the subject matter approaches that terrain known as social landscape. The square comfortably veers away from natural toward built environments, suburbs, and shopping malls (see Robert Adams) and, finally, toward the portrait, a genre intrinsically suited to the square; faces and bodies, and attendant decor and choreography, animate the frame and suppress its Euclidean obduracy. Image banks and bookshelves teem with squared human forms and cultured interiors. Alongside its centrality in portraiture, the contemporary square frame functions elementally in another forum--the virtual space of lnstagram, which has inherited a mission from Polaroid to capture and disseminate instant impressions rendered in that nonhierarchical format. lnstagram, of course, goes to hyperbolic extremes; a Polaroid, freshly popped from an SX-70 or Sun 600 camera, might circulate among a half-dozen friends both during and after its photochemical development. By contrast, the lnstagrammed image may have been seen by thousands and approved by scores of globally dispersed people in the same amount of time it took that Polaroid to fully flower. The latter isn't necessarily better, and is harder to pin (with thumbtacks) onto a (real cork) bulletin board, or to separate from its backing and transfer onto nubbly watercolor paper, but it is more "Like"-able and nearly incalculably cheaper per exposure. And manipulating the digital image is much tidier. A documentary project deriving largely from landscape is not, then, a project initiated lightly or in step with conventional wisdom. In Tales from the City of Gold, UK-based Jason Larkin argues persuasively against those limitations and for the square frame as a recorder of land-dominated issues. Do not look at these photographs as you would at an Instagram post skittering across your palm into virtual oblivion. Do not seek the easy pleasures of landscape appreciation; what Larkin accomplishes in this work requires nuanced attention. …