Sometimes, it takes a while for things to sink in. I’ve been vaguely aware of the “other kind” of landscape photography for a while, and of the whole “New Topographics” thing. I didn’t get it. On superficial browsing, all I could see where apparently involving photos of bland subjects, often totally violating the Rules I read about in glossy magazines and on self-proclaimed Fine Art websites. They were a million miles away from the sweet, sugary hit of Velvia-fuelled landscape photography, but little did I realise they were a million miles in the right direction.

A turning point was my discovery of the work of Stuart Klipper, a photographer who is perhaps not quite within the same school, but who has a lot of intersection points.  I recognised in his work something which I was trying to get to myself, albeit mainly unconsciously. Another key moment was reading the collected essays of Frank Gohlke, and finding not the dry academic I expected, but an erudite, entertaining, inspiring and very human voice. It seemed a bit absurd to read about photography I wasn’t looking at, so I went ahead and ordered the anthology of his work, “Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke” . And for good measure, I also bought Stephen Shore‘s “Uncommon Places”, which I’ve been scared to approach for ages, although I greatly enjoyed his book, “The Nature of Photographs”.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to write about either book. Endless essays and theses have been written about both photographers. I have neither the art education nor the breadth of expression necessary to add to these. But I will say that I am enormously impressed by both sets of work. They are quite distinct, although roughly ploughing the same furrows. I think it would help anybody who fails to understand what a photographic style is to study these books. If you allow it to, the photography reaches very deeply. Precisely because the subjects generally lack any kind of “wow” effect, the only thing going on is the photographer’s expression of an exploration of visual space. I think it is as pointless to try to connect to some other form of expression: another case of dancing about architecture. A photograph can communicate without any support or form of explanation, much as music, or poetry, or other art forms can in their own domain. And both of these photographers communicate beautifully.

Of course there is a lingering suspicion that this is academic, University Professor stuff, with a pinch of Emperor’s clothing, and quite possibly really actually is just dull photos of boring places. Well, perhaps generically there is some truth in that, bit in these two books I’m finding a great deal more honesty and genuine inspiration than in the gobbledygook of the weekend warrior self-nominated Fine Art Landscape Photographers with their Mystic Visions, Golden Light and Artist’s Statements, their Buy my Prints, Take My Workshops and all the rest of the Canikon-fuelled bollocks. And I haven’t got the faintest idea what camera Stephen Shore or Frank Gohlke use.

Personally this is helping me to get a grasp on the look that I aspire to, futile as it may be, somewhere on the knife edge between the “topographics feel” and mainstream landscape. The emotionally detached, neutral, challengingly bland tone of the Dusseldorf school is a step too far for me. I can understand or even appreciate it intellectually, but I’m not an intellectual photographer. Then again, maybe it’s just another step I need to take. But apart from all that, these two books are an absolute must for anybody really wanting to take off the water wings and explore the wider world of photography. Oh, and they’re both absolute bargains.

A couple of announcements on the gear side of photography have sparked my interest in recent days. First, the emergence of the preview of Apple’s “Photos” application. This is supposed to replace both iPhoto and Aperture, although exactly what Apple means by “replace” might not quite match up with the expectations of long-term users of either application. The synchronisation between devices is something that’s been missing since the 3rd party Pixelsync was murdered by Apple, but otherwise there’s little to be optimistic about. On the Aperture side it looks fairly grim. Photos is showing some sign of innovation on the manipulation front, but the effort seems to have gone into a narrow range of tools. Aperture’s in-depth colour controls don’t seem to have been taken over, for example. That’s not good, as Aperture was lagging a bit behind competitors such as Lightroom and CaptureOne in that area anyway (although perhaps far less so that internet chatter would have you think). But on the organisation / editing side, it’s a total wipeout. There seems to be basically no tools at all. You get Apple’s hardwired idea of how your photos should be organised (“Moments”, “Collections”, etc) and that’s basically it. And as for metadata, well, someday perhaps. Maybe a third party plugin will support it. And that’s the basic issue - Apple wants us to wait, and wait, and wait, and then (maybe) rely on some 1-man band App Store plugin developer to provide Aperture feature parity.  Well, no thanks. This is not the sort of house of cards I want to entrust a lifelong endeavour to. Aperture was - and is - fabulous, but it clearly doesn’t fit into Apple’s corporate vision, and indeed probably never did. I suspect it was largely sustained, as a square peg in a round hole, by Steve Jobs’ foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of Adobe. Aperture was a throwback to Apple’s last-century culture. It has no place in the world of the iThing factory. Photos, on the other hand, is iThing to the core, which is probably excellent news for selfie addicts casual photographers and Apple shareholders.

The other news is from Olympus. The latest OM-D camera, the (deep breath) OM-D EM-5 Mark II, might tempt me where the OM-D series so far has not. The big deal for me is not the 64Mpix sensor-shift high resolution mode, although that is interesting, but rather the long awaited (by me at least) return of the swivel mounted rear screen, which was such a key feature of the E-3 & E-5 DSLRs. The EM5.2 also seems to carry over the rugged build of these two.  Olympus is pretty much the only company to have ignored the line that swivel screens are too fragile to include on weather sealed, pro-build quality cameras. I certainly never found any issues with their implementation on the E-3 & E-5, despite those cameras being roughly handled in a fine selection of aggressive environments. Unfortunately the E-5.2 does not have the phase detect auto-focus which provides full compatibility with Four Thirds lenses. I suppose we’ll have to wait for the EM1.2 for everything to fit together. But this time around, I might, possibly, be tempted. I’m due to visit the Icelandic highlands in the summer, and at present I don’t own a camera which would put up with much of the weather encountered in those regions.