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Bureau of Operational Landscapes

@operational.land

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Exploring overlooked spaces through (landscape) photography, tours, and site-based encounters to help you read the land beyond its official story.

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The Temporary Seeing Section is Mission Two of the Bureau of Operational Landscapes, based in Trenčín, Slovakia. Through collective looking, site visits, and public encounters, it explores how we see and inhabit the city’s overlooked terrains. The project includes the Temporary Seeing Platform (a mobile viewing tower), a series of public walks and workshops, and the broadcasting of local voices and stories in the city’s main square. A temporary newsletter documented these actions in the field. taken in Trenčín, Slovakia by @operational.land

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a year ago

The Bureau of Operational Landscapes investigates the overlooked spaces that shape our world—ports, extraction zones, or agro-industrial sites. Starting with landscape photography, the Bureau creates overlooks, tours, and site-specific encounters to engage with operational landscapes. Our mission is to help you read the land and intervene into the official narrative, creating a closer relationship to the infrastructures that impact our environment and daily lives. taken in EARTH by @operational.land

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2 years ago

About Park Maasvlakte

Welcome to Park Maasvlakte, the Bureau of Operational Landscapes’ first mission that reimagines the Port of Rotterdam. Here, parking lots and industrial cast-offs become unconventional overlooks, transforming this operational landscape into a space of unexpected narratives.

The Bureau’s interpretive interventions are more than just information; they're invitations to look beyond “biggest, fastest, most efficient.” In Park Maasvlakte, the official story is complicated by telling a few unofficial ones. taken in Maasvlakte 2 by @operational.land

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2 years ago

Came across the Italian photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni, someone who at first could be considered as a documenter of Land Art in the 60s and 70s, photographing the works of artists like Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, Nancy Holt, Christo and Jean-Claude, but I don’t think “document” is adequate. Instead, perhaps translation, as his photographs translated spatial and temporal experience into an image capable of circulation. In fact, what I’ve been thinking about in my own work and the works I’m interested in lately, is considering photography as infrastructure, a thing that connects a remote site to a cultural system. by @operational.land

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a month ago

I just love these photos by John Margolies, a kind of unofficial design archive of the American roadside. I found them in the Library of Congress, more than 11,000 photographs of hot dog weiners, ducks, donuts, headless scuba divers, odd buildings, vernacular signage and all kinds of wonderful roadside ephemera.

Just like Venturi and Scott Brown did in Las Vegas, Margolies’s eccentric photos shows that the landscape can be read through its minor structures.

Today I’m sure that most of these structures are gone; these photographs are anticipation of a future where such a vernacular landscape would become erased by franchising, highway development, and traffic patterns, eliminating the strange and weird and personal in favour of the flat and boring.

Sometimes, photography at its most simplest, its most straightforward, can be the most enduring — and endearing.

Somebody should publish this. by @operational.land

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a month ago

Lately I’ve been interested in Dennis Oppenheim’s use of photography in his landscape works. In some way you could call them relational, in that his photographs are always a part of a larger system, of site, of action, map, measurement, and documentation. Perhaps they could even be considered “operational,” (apropos given this is the Bureau of OPERATIONAL Landscapes) because he uses photographs as a way to organize the relationship between an idea, the specific territory he’s working in, the actions, and potential circulation. Normally, a photographer concentrates on the completed work. Oppenheim takes a different approach, where the photo is just a node in a larger system.

Anyway! We can learn a lot about the other potential histories of photography when we look beyond any classical definitions of what and how photography might be practiced.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. by @operational.land

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a month ago

Was thinking about ‘Land Art,’ specifically Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field, and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative. Both are monumental works, both in the arid American West (New Mexico, Nevada, respectively), and both conceived of in explicit resistance to photographic representation and mediation. I looked into visiting Lightning Field. Costs $300 for one night, in one of the most remote parts of the US, plus other access restrictions, and restrictions on visual mediation. De Maria and Heizer have both said their work is about duration so bodily experience, to be in the desert, amidst the varying climate, the time, season, etc, are all actors in the artwork. They are as much about experience, with the particular conditions of their site vital to their understanding.

Interestingly, both of these works have been photographed, and extensively, yet each resist the photograph. Lightning Field is about atmosphere and the Great Basin desert; Double Negative is scale, phenomenological scale — what does it mean to stand in a fifty-foot crevasse. So a photograph, understandably, collapses all that into a single image, which is really opposite of these works.

But! Both artists have worked extensively with photographers (namely Gianfranco Gorgoni, maybe more on him later). This made me think that their refusal wasn’t absolute (could it ever be?), but control and framing, about how the work might be circulated, remediated.

So to my point! If these works are only ever visited by a handful of viewed per year, but culturally known through a photograph, then what is the work? Are these photos now a part of the work despite the artists intentions? Robert Smithson worked to resolve this with Spiral Jetty, with the photos, film, writing, and the jetty itself as a constellation of related but non-equivalent objects.

Blah blah! Just interesting. by @operational.land

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5 months ago

Sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark, although I wonder if that moniker could be applied to an artist so strangely divergent? Anyway, thinking about his use of photography, how he used the medium as a means of capturing light, space, depth, disorientation. He understood a single photograph could never achieve this, so he made collages like these, multiple frames shot from different angles and positions, assembled into composites where the seams become visible, just like in his most notable works like Splitting or Conical Intersect. The constructed-ness of the image mirrors the constructed-ness of the architecture he pulls apart. I think what’s interesting is that his site-interventions are not documented in photographs, but he understood photography as a spatial argument, showing how space resists a singular vantage point.

Last 5 photos from Splitting and Conical Intersection.

I’d love to take a chainsaw to a house, FYI. by @operational.land

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5 months ago

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown driving — their preferred method to learn from Las Vegas…

Denise Scott Brown was an excellent photographer; for her, photography and the act of photographing was a method of architectural and spatial knowledge, rhetorical works rather than autonomous ones. She said that for her, photography oscillated between evidence for an argument and photography as a way of seeing.

She also said that it was because of photography that made Las Vegas worth looking at, because it brought out the ugly and ordinary rather than the heroic and original.

Maybe a next post i’ll share more of her photos as she really was an interesting photographer, one who wasn’t captured by the mystical and a slave to aura, able to consider photography as an instrument, and, because of that, could inquire into the political and economic logics that architects weren’t so concerned with. To me, DSB used photography as a means to examine who built certain environments for whom, and why that matters.

🫡 by @operational.land

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6 months ago

I found a photo of the crew from Robert Venturi / Denise Scott Brown / Steven Izenour’s book Learning From Las Vegas setting up the cameras to make their Vegas Strip panorama (see other post).

What’s interesting is how they understood the logic of the environment, and thus figured out a way for it to be documented; that is, instead of imposing an external optic they created an organic, or even vernacular, form of visualisation (not representation) to match the subject’s conditions of reception (speed, duration, movement, a big giant steel car, etc). by @operational.land

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6 months ago

Panorama of the Las Vegas Strip by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour from their book Learning From Las Vegas, 1972.

Together with their students, they drove up and down the Strip with a 16mm camera or still camera as a method to read the landscape at 35 mph.

They proposed that the Strip exceeded any conventional architectural representation (plans, sections, etc) and thus required something else: movement based optics. For them, the Strip can only be understood through sequence and duration. The single viewpoint in this landscape is dead, a useless artifact of a different time.

The obvious precedent is Ed Ruscha’s All the Buildings on the Sunset Strip, but while VSB were proposing an inventory, images as evidence of vernacular form. Ed, on the hand, has always said Sunset Strip was just information, neutral images and interest-free. His argument was that there was no argument!

(And, did you know, that ever since 1966, Ruscha has returned again and again to photograph the Strip; he’s accumulated more than ONE MILLION photos of the same street, returning every few years. Hot damn. So, maybe, there’s more to this than Ruscha might imply?) by @operational.land

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6 months ago

Amazing photo of earth (Hello, World, they call it) by the Artemis II astronauts. It’s the first photo of the planet since Apollo 17 last photographed earth in 1972 (theirs is called Blue Marble).

According to the metadata of the Artemis II photo, it was shot on a ten-year old Nikon D5 DSLR on April 3 at 00:27 GMT; f4, 22mm, 1/4 second, ISO 51,200 (!!!). The Blue Marble was shot on a 70mm Hasselblad 500EL camera with focal length set to 80mm. I read that the aperture was set to f11 but that seems too narrow and shutter was 1/250 on Kodak Ektachrome.

The last two images is earth in the 1950s, nascent days of satellite and space junk; the second is from 2020s.

By the way, there are 12 Hasselblad bodies still on the moon. taken in OUTER SPACE by @operational.land

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