Keynote at 'Responding to a Landscape', Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham (Symposium)

The symposium ‘Responding to a Landscape’ (24th November 2017, 9.30am-5.30pm), Midlands Art Center, was planned in conjunction with the exhibition by artist Matthew Murray ‘Saddleworth; Responding to a Landscape’, which premiered at mac, Birmingham. In this exhibition of framed gallery photographs, made with both large format and digital photography, Murray was interested in depicting the landscape based on what he felt rather than what he saw. The landscape work was a personal story and odyssey and the result of a five year creative and sensitive journey that captured the beauty of Saddleworth Moor’s moorland landscape.
The one day symposium comprised contributions from acclaimed and outstanding photographers, artists, writers and photography historians about their work and relationship with the landscape. It explored, debated and reviewed the evolving relationship between artists and photographers and the landscape. There were a number of perspectives, from acclaimed practitioners for which landscape is a recurring subject, a social and environmental concern, a research and archive practice and an essential departure. What does landscape and our natural world look like and mean to photographers and artists today?
The practitioners spoke about how they have approached landscape and their unique relationship with it. Landscape photography has a long and significant history and today, approaches have perhaps never been so broad and practitioner’s motivations and aesthetic concerns been so varied. Some document, others work with more abstract concerns; some work collaboratively, others in isolation. Some working on environmental concerns and others on more personal stories.
The Symposium heared from the perspective of the photographer, curator and academic. They are motivated by landscape for many different reasons. The symposium heard from and celebrated those that create self-initiated projects and commissioned bodies of work and a wide range of photographic practices that are at the cutting edge of photography now were bought to light.
Billingham gave a keynote and showed a selection of his landscape photographs made 2000 – 2017 including work from ‘Landscapes 2001 – 2003; Constable; Panoramic as well as many others not exhibited or published before. He said it was the first time he had reviewed all his landscape photography as a whole and the illustrated keynote revealed and traced themes, approaches, methodologies and the influence of historical landscape painting, especially British 'Place' art, running throughout his various bodies of photographic landscape work. Jem Southam also gave a keynote.
Besides Andrew Murray, Richard Billingham and Jem Southam, other speakers were Chrystel Lebas, Camilla Brown, Simon Constantine, John Hillman, Craig Ashley and Mark Wright. The project was supported by GRAIN Projects, Arts Council England, Gallery Vassie, Mac Birmingham, Pirate Design and University Gloucestershire