THE EDGE IN THE MIDDLE:
THE LANDSCAPE STUDIES OF BAS KETELAARS
Tim Ingold
We humans, by nature clumsy and flat-footed, abhor the edge. It blocks our path, trips us up, catches us unawares, even threatens us with oblivion should we come too close. Life is an inherently risky business, but it is at the edge that the risk reaches its peak, placing the greatest demands on our attention. We have to watch out! It is hardly surprising, then, that we seek to ease our passage through life by smoothing things out where we can, and by pushing every edge towards the horizon. Other animals seem not so troubled by edges as we are. Four-footed beasts can readily leap across them, serpents slither over them. For seabirds, the cliff-edge – which spells calamity for a human who comes too close – is ideal for launching into flight, even on the down-current. In the subsurface world of a burrowing creature, such as the mole or the earthworm, there are no edges, only corners. And flying insects are likely too small and lightweight to be troubled by what we might perceive as edges at all.
Place the human eye in a landscape, however, and it will invariably seek a path that circumvents the edges it encounters, giving them as wide a berth as possible. Where there is a road, it instinctively follows. There are nevertheless situations, in dense woods, in thick grassland or on rocky shores, when the eye sees only edges, without even the barest patch of firm, level ground to be discerned. At first glance, such an edgy landscape seems impassable. Where to place your feet? With roots, tufts and stones strewn all around, even getting about becomes a balancing act. To keep one’s balance calls for care and dexterity, and a strong nerve, giving a literal meaning to the mental state of being ‘on edge’. Again, this scarcely troubles the animal. Have you ever seen an animal struggling to keep its balance? How often do they trip and fall? Virtually never. Perhaps this is because animals usually have the good sense to remain in habitats to which they are motorically adapted, rather than venturing into those to which they are not.
Edgy landscapes undo our romantic dreams of being at one with nature. These are not landscapes in which we can afford to relax. Those grassy slopes and greenwoods, with their smooth contours, which look so timeless and serene when viewed from afar, become increasingly discomfiting as we approach. Something about them nevertheless draws us in. Edges become lines, tangled in a mesh that closes in around us and holds us tight, as if spellbound. Yet these landscapes also burst with life, and their edginess testifies to the force of their explosion. A pine sapling, its boughs bristling with needles, bursts from the ground as if a shell had landed there, rocks shatter into brittle shards, rain splatters every surface. In an exploding landscape, edges once banished to the limits of habitation obtrude from its very core. There is a seasonal dimension to this, however. Winter snows smooth over the cracks and ice seals them, until they break open again in the spring. But stripped of leaves, deciduous trees stand gaunt against the snow, their bark wrinkled like an old man’s skin.
Edges, moreover, come and go with the light. We often see them only thanks to the micro-shadows they cast on the surfaces of which they are formed, especially when the illumination strikes these surfaces at a shallow angle. That is why landscapes are so much more edgy at dawn and dusk than in the middle of the day, when the sun is highest in the sky, or on moonless nights when there is no illumination at all. But it is also why edginess is susceptible to variations in weather, ranging from brilliant sunshine to thick mist or dark storm-clouds. It is not that clouds block out the light – were they to do so, every passing cloud would have the same effect as an eclipse of the sun! Rather, their moisture scatters the sun’s rays in every direction. We might be surprised to discover that while surfaces exposed to direct sunlight are dimmed when the sun goes behind a cloud, those surfaces that had been in the shade in fact lighten up. What fades is not the light itself, but the contrast.
It is these contrasts, of course, that make a photograph, literally a light-drawing. In his book The Pencil of Nature – the first volume of photos ever published – William Henry Fox Talbot explains that ‘the picture, divested of the ideas which accompany it, and considered only in its ultimate nature, is but a succession or variety of stronger lights thrown upon one part of the paper, and of deeper shadows on another.’ One of Talbot’s prints is of a haystack, with a ladder leaning up against it (Figure 1). We know it as a stack from the outline of its occluding edges. The uprights and rungs of the ladder, exposed to the summer sun, show up as white lines, while the shadow it casts on the side of the stack is picked out in black. Yet what absorbs the eye is the fine-grained stippling of light and shade, which tells us that the stack is of hay. We know this texture well, from its feel when we run our fingers over it. Run a finger over the photographic plate, however, and it feels nothing.
Figure 1: ‘The Haystack’, by William Henry Fox Talbot, reproduced from The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844, Plate X).
It is the same with the landscape photographs of Bas Ketelaars. Dispense any notion of what the photo is of, and every image is but a composition of light and shadow, pencilled by no human hand, but by nature herself, bursting forth in a weather-world teeming with life. This is natura naturans, a world undergoing perpetual birth, rather than natura naturata, the timeless, ready-formed landscape of the scenic view. We are all too familiar with the textures of this world: the matted grasses, jagged stones, wrinkled tree-bark, twisted roots and needle-bristling boughs. We know what it feels like for hands and feet to tackle the rough edges of the landscape, leaving our eyes to concentrate on smoothing a passage. On the photographic plate, however, these priorities are reversed. Its plane, glossy surface affords seamless passage to the fingers, within the bounds of the rectangular frame. But now the eyes are glued to the intricacies of texture. It is as though, on the photo, touch and vision have swapped places. While the plate is smooth to touch, it puts vision on edge.
Ketelaars began each of his landscape studies, however, not with photography but with drawing. What difference does it make, then, if a hand, and not nature, holds the pencil? Here, every edge, rather than appearing as the outline of a shadow, is rendered in graphite as the trace of a manual gesture. On a photographic plate, the outline is instantaneously snapped along its entire length, as is the shadow-edge in the landscape in the moment the sun emerges from behind a cloud. But the drawn line is not. As a gestural trace, it embodies a certain duration. This is the duration not only of a bodily movement, but also of the attention with which, in drawing, it corresponds. Is this why, though the camera can capture a scene with a verisimilitude unachievable by hand, the drawing often seems truer to our perception? Caught in the eye of the camera, nature freezes. It takes not one but a series of frames to regain the movement of its incipience. But the act of drawing, as it creeps up on nature, partakes of its continual birth.