Landscape and Photography: An Overview

Early on in my exploration of landscape I was fortunate to come across Denis Cosgrove’s 1998 book Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. His exploration of the move from land for use to land for exchange, and the consequences of those changes, is enlightening. It’s difficult to do justice to this or any other of the books and be brief, so I would recommend a through reading of the relatively few books mentioned below. For now, I thought I'd give a little insight into the main points that inform the making of my pictures.

What Is Landscape?

Landscape itself, of course, is a concept rather than an objective reality of the external world. It seems to be a vague term having several possible definitions including a geographer’s view of a tract of land of identifiable and measurable proportions. Another is of “A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view.” (Cosgrove, 1998). Over time other aspects have been attached, such as urban landscape, and now the term has separate meanings when reference is made to, for example, the political landscape. For us here, though, it is enough to say that when we view or talk about a landscape we are dealing with a subjective view of an objective reality. It is in that sense culturally defined. Landscape in painting is something to be composed in such a way as to elicit an affective response, and photographers appear to have followed this lead.

Land: Participant or Observer

Cosgrove suggests that we have one of two relationships with land: insider/participant or outsider/observer. Participants make use of the land, perhaps through their work. It has meaning to do with their ordinary daily lives and its visual form is of relatively little significance compared with other aspects of their lives. Observers approach as outsiders, and have a different view of the same surroundings, and a different use. Visual impact may be important, and the term landscape appropriate.

With land having an exchange value, it can be employed as capital. Its value is divorced from its potential as productive land, and depends more on factors such as location. So building land in the middle of a city will have more value than a bigger area of agricultural land. Land will also be subject to the same processes of capitalism as other commodities – for example it will become concentrated in fewer hands as increasing wealth is required to maintain competition with large landowners able to employ increasingly industrial processes to extract profit. These processes are accompanied by an increasing alienation from the land of people who more and more live in the city and merely visit permitted areas of land in pursuit of leisure activities.

Our relationship with land

When people lived on and from the land which had value in its use, the relationship was that of the insider. Since land became commodity and its value was in exchange many humans, most of whom now live in cities, have had an alienated relationship, that of the outsider. This raises important issues for many people, and considerable effort is made to counter what are seen by some as the negative aspects of this relationship with the land. Some organisations are emphasising the need for people to reconnect with the land. This, it is argued will help us identify with the source and nature of our food. Meanwhile nature and heritage organisations are gaining ground both in terms of their size and their influence. Improved facilities include visitor centres and way marked trails. However, a number of organisations have raised concerns about the countryside becoming a giant theme park. Whether current trends result in overcoming an alienated relationship remains to be seen.

Landscape Photography

For now it is our contention that photographers, in common with most others, approach their subject (i.e. object), as outsiders, in an alienated relationship. It is this that has to be overcome, and some success can be found in spending time engaging with the photographers surroundings. Many photographers claim upon their eventual production of a successful picture, usually after failed efforts, that they have “captured” the “spirit of place.” It is equally possible that this is an unnecessary mystification, and that in fact they have begun to overcome their alienation.