Week 5 - Reading Notes

‘In the Landscape’ in Bate, David (2010) Photography: The Key Concepts Berg: Oxford, New York.

Knowledge and Vision
What is shown in a landscape picture? Whatever is seen is always coded through the picture. Since the goal of landscape painting (where landscape originated) was always more than just showing a scene, what emerged as a dilemma, as much for photographers as painters, was the type of vision implied in the image.
The invention of photography created a new problem for painting: the issue of 'truth' and 'fidelity' in vision. The mechanism of the photographic process was thought to reveal a nature laid bare and ugly in its lack of aesthetic beauty.
This idea immediately points to the categories that painters and art critics were concerned with in landscape: notions of pleasure, sight and an aesthetic view of nature. These idea dominated their attitudes towards photography as well and provided an allegorical figure for the views of a cultural elite towards the industrial revolution - in which photography was obviously implicated.


History of Landscape
- Photography had a major impact on the aesthetic ideals of paintings. Early photographers interested in art pursued pictorial value derived from the genres of painting. Nature was shaped according to how it was already seen in pictures. Early landscape photography used the same principles used in painting in order to create works of art. This was a time when painters such as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain's work on landscape painting would combine the 'best' parts of the landscapes into a single, unified 'virtual' landscape.

Their scenes were drawn from nature but collated into singular idealised landscape

compositions. These imaginary spaces were anchored mostly to the depiction of biblical scenes, but their evocative imagery, playing with time, space, weather, sunlight within their paintings can be seen to influence film and photography today. For instance like the example Berg gives in the reading where he compares work from this era to have influence over certain scenes used in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In the latter part of the century however, artists such as John Constable and William Turner

have started romanticising the environment, using it as a principal subject in paintings. 

18th Century
Landscape painting in the eighteenth century continued to develop in response to the general social and political climate angered by the ancient regimes in England, France and the rest of Europe. New attitudes to the natural environment emerged, and in England distinctive new topological traditions appeared, reflecting the practice of landscape gardening - the reordering of nature to suit aristocratic patrons. Scenic paintings were still not regarded as ends in themselves. Rather they portrayed the divine harmony of nature, and a calm confidence in the current climate of prosperity. The inclusion of humans being idealised as part of the landscape is now incorporated into many works of art and photography at the time.

20th-21st Century
Nowadays, Landscape is taking shape in the symbolic form of space for the projection of physical thoughts on culture, identification and civilisation under the name of natures, as much as a treatise on any actual nature or question of the environment itself. It can now be seen to take the form of many substances - it can mean bricks and mortar, leaves and fields, the desert, vehicles in the streets, overcast or sunny skies, suburban and concrete architecture, seascapes, eroded buildings, panoramic views. It's a highly differentiated discourse on representing space.
However, in order to understand the art of landscape we need to have an understanding of the distinction between the picturesque, or the beauty and the sublime.