A few days ago, I wrote a post, Geo-Graphy: Slowed Into Form that was built on extracts from a roundtable discussion of geography. I’ve since been enjoying considering their ideas as they might be applied to landscape photography. In particular, these two little bits:
Jeffrey Kastner: … “the notion of actual space itself as a map of the forces acting within it.”
Eyal Weizman: … the physical terrain/built environment could itself be thought of as a map. This is obviously a property not of the object/landscape but of the way we decode it.
Is there room in the idea of landscape photography for such concepts? … at which point, I discovered that I didn’t really know what the “idea of landscape photograph” encompassed. More precisely, I had no definition for landscape photography or even for landscape art in general.
Landscape art: It’s what you get if you don’t have anything interesting in the foreground and where you can see land that is a long way off — or at least not too close. It’s all the stuff that we take so much for granted that it’s not stuff anymore. It’s just there, in the background.
Well, that really narrows it down . . .
In an essay by John Fowles at the beginning of the book of Fay Godwin’s landscape photographs, Land:
The word landscape first appeared in English at the very end of the sixteenth century. It came from the Dutch landschap, meaning a province or region, and was first Englished as “landskip’: which if only unconsciously, suggests it was a rather trivial notion. The Catholic scholar Thomas Bount hardly imporved on that low estimate in his Glossographia (a book ‘interpreting all such hard words of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue’) of 1656:
Landskip, Parergon, Patsage or By-work, which is an expressing of the Land, by Hills, Woods, Castles, Valleys, Rivers, Cities, & as far as may be shewed in our Horizon. All that which in a picture is not of the body or argument thereof is Landskip, parergon, or bywork.
This long counting of landscape as parergon — subsidiary work, mere accessory — is an odd aspect of European cultural history and sadly revealing of a much older fault in man: his belief that nature is there purely for his use, and so either hostile or of deep indifference to him in its wild or unusable state.
So, “landscape” is stuff we don’t really care about. Then why are we making pictures of it?
From Robert Adams’s essay, Truth in Landscape, found in his collection of essays, Beauty in Photography :
Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities — geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact — an affection for life.
… geography by itself is difficult to value accurately — what we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place.
… we rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know. It is the fitness of a landscape to one’s experience of life’s condition and possibilities that finally makes a scene important or not.
… the main business [of landscape art] is a rediscovery and revaluation of where we find ourselves.
How is any of that specific to or defining of landscape photography? Doesn’t it apply to almost any kind of photo?
Perhaps a dictionary will help. From Wordnet:
landscape:
an expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view
painting depicting an expanse of natural sceneryscenery:
the appearance of a place
Nope. That didn’t help. (What does it exclude?)
I do like this one, though, from the Glossery of The Miniatures Page: A Web-magazine for Miniature Wargamers:
Scenery and terrain are broad, generally interchangeable terms which refer to nearly anything on a wargame table which is not a unit or element of the conflict. That is, everything other than the combatants. Scenery and terrain may be thought of as what was on the mock battlefield before the arrival of the belligerants. Items such as hills, buildings, forests, hedges, fences, and rivers are all examples of scenery and terrain.
I think I have to give up. I’ve noticed that what is a landscape to me is different from what is a landscape to an ant. And what is a landscape to me here, is not a landscape to me once I’m in a spaceship halfway to the moon. My former landscape turns back into “the earth” which is some other kind of photography — which I have also not yet defined. And I’ve run out of time.
-Julie
