Gitsham’s body of work is landscape oriented, is centred around place, and interprets place from the perspective of Romanticism. We can interpret philosophical romanticism as “a critical response to the Enlightenment interpretation of modernity. It engaged in a normative critique of culture to help enlarge the cultural conditions of intelligibility and possibility in modernity. It pursues this task by placing an emphasis on imagination, highlighting the nature-place relationship and attaching normative primacy to receptivity.
Though , in the process, it significantly altered inherited notions of agency, the everyday, nature, and freedom, many following Hegel, criticize Romanticism for its subjectivism: the emphasis in Romantic art is on the individual mind’s internal motions of perception fused with envisioning and an ironic relationship to the world. This is caricatured as the Romantic artist identifying with his God-like creative powers and thinking of reality as the product of his infinite subjectivity. Hence Romanticism’s bad press in the 20th century. For modernists Romanticism was so nineteenth century and an artistically spent cultural force drained of vitality and meaning that had collapsed into kitsch.
Gitsham’s photography re-frames the objective, rationalised understanding of the world of modernity that we live in to recenter our ideas on the subjective, sensory experience of individuals. This is to regain the meaning, mystery and magic of nature that we have lost in the fragmented and our techno-bureaucratic modern world. There is a significant difference between the scientific facts of a tree and a photograph about how a tree makes someone feel; and then again, how a tree is connected to the ecological system that makes up nature. This approach to landscape brings us into an understanding of our place in the everyday, ecological world.
To romanticize the world, said Friedrich Schlegel, a key member of Jena Romanticism, is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite. This meant looking to our external senses of touch, taste and so on, but also to our internal senses – and connecting our external reality to our internal world.
Landscape and landscape photography have been out of favour or fashion in the Australian art institution since the 1980s. A widely accepted view amongst artist and critics is that landscape is an outmoded cultural paradigm, and is no longer adequate to describe the complexity of relationships that people have with place in Australia. More generally W.J.T. Mitchell in his Landscape and Power (p. 5) argued that landscape, as a genre of representation, is an “exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression,” a medium which has to be left to the large (Google) and small (creators of kitschy landscape paintings), advertising, the media industry, the celebration of spectacular media simulacra and the stream of kitschy and picturesque tourist landscape photographs of the Fleurieu Peninsula. The garbage-images in our visually saturated culture impair and blunt our ability for discrimination, wonder, and admiration.
In the context of the shadow cast by the corruption of the photographic images, which leads to a crisis in the confidence of the photographic image, Gitsham’s Ambient can be interpreted as a return to landscape beyond visual tourism; a return in which landscape is understood as a function, and a representing, of our relationship with place. The landscapes in Ambient are photographic representations of lived country and, not just photos of simple physical locations.
What this implies is that Gitsham is rejecting the narrow conception of landscape that is understood in spectatorial and detached terms; or as associated with a specific period in a historical formation; or with a particular artistic genre such as painting.
Jeff Malpas has convincingly argued that this conception of landscape:
“is inadequate to describe the complexity of landscape as such. The problem of landscape is thus that landscape represents to us, not only our relationship with place, but also the problematic nature of that relationship—a relationship that contains within it involvement and separation, agency and spectacle, self and other. It is in and through landscape, in its many forms, that our relationship with place is articulated and represented, and the problematic character of that relationship made evident. In this respect, the continued engagement with landscape…. is indicative of its continuing significance, even if the mode of that engagement—its style and conventions—has changed, and even if the meaning of “landscape” as a term of artistic practice can no longer be taken for granted.”
Jeff Malpas ed. The Place of Landscape, MIT Press , Cambridge, MA, 2011
Gitsham includes those spaces created by human beings and so he does not identify landscape with the tradition of the natural or wilderness as many Tasmanian landscape photographers do. Gitsham’s world of various pathways, localities and dwelling places suggests an emotional connection to country, which for Gitsham comes from his extensive bird photography and his work as a ranger in the Coorong National Park in South Australia. He knows the Coorong as a place well and so is able to poetically bring it forth which, in turn, allow the various birds to appear in themselves.
The photographs of this human being-in-the-world are an encounter with place through landscape, which primarily means habitation, active involvement and experience. The emphasis is on the experience and not the object per se. Hence the intensely darkened and contrasty palette –dark and moody–that represents both the felt power of the human attachment to place and the emotional impact that a particular landscape or locality may bring with it. So Gitsham frequently returns to photographically exploring the Coorong.
The experience implies a love of place –– ‘topophilia’ –– which, in turn, suggests that the places themselves shape and influence human memories, feelings and thoughts; and that the person’s subjectivity given form in the places and spaces in which human beings dwell. It discloses a belonging-together that underpins our everyday being in the world increasingly shaped or enframed by the technology of the social media networks of Silicon Valley capitalism.
Despite photography (and cinema) being a technological art form par excellence without the auratic presence of traditional non-technological forms of art, there is a critical edge to the expressionist language in some of the poetic making photos in Ambient: they disclose (bring to presence) and draw our attention to the poor ecological health of our natural world. It suggests that a technological art form is capable of a poetic bringing-forth (revealing) as well as the archaic revelatory power of literature traditionally privileged by the English Romantics and Heidegger.
Contrary to modernists, Romanticism then is not something that has been surpassed and overcome. If, following Nietzsche , we can understand Romanticism broadly as an expressive response to the world and to ways of life, individual and shared. This enables us to see that with Romanticism the problems of modernity can be grasped in the form of aesthetic categories so as to find a new stance in our relationship with nature and to see it anew. The attentive receptivity in the expressive language of this photographic art implies, as Walter Benjamin observed in his ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’ that the expressionist form of art becomes the medium of reflection and that reflection is constitutive of this art. As Schegel had earlier argued (in the Athenaeum Fragments in 1798) criticism and art are continuous, reciprocally interacting and reciprocally affected activities.
Ambient‘s aesthetic presentation makes possible a relationship with material things and their relations or network connections in which ordinarily inaccessible aspects are now sensuously revealed; with the effect that material things are thus shown to have the capacity to sensuously present meaning. This raises an interesting question: could photographic prose replace the novel, which had earlier replaced poetry, as the central Romantic art form at the level of everyday life in the 21st century?