The land is the most fundamental of human phenomena—we build on it, harvest it, and orient our lives around it. Landscape photography explores our political, historical, and emotional relationship to this physical space.
Early landscape photography aimed to capture the world as it was, though the artist’s choices immediately began to shape the narrative regarding what was included, excluded, and the intended mood.
Representational Landscape: A straight, documentary approach to photographing the land that seeks to capture its factual, physical reality.
Ansel Adams is known for his 7-year project photographing Yosemite, attempting to communicate the raw awe of nature. He heavily used red filters to darken skies and achieve perfect black-and-white tonal ranges, carefully framing the mountains to exclude tourists, roads, or any human interference.
James F. Ryder acts as a historical foil; his Atlantic & Great Western Railway (1862) is a utilitarian corporate image showing the landscape violently cut open to lay train tracks, celebrating human conquest over nature rather than its untouched purity.
[TODO: Image]: Ansel Adams photographs: “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome”, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico”, and “Frozen Lake and Cliffs, Kaweah Gap.” Likely source: Landscapes Part 1 slides.
The invention of the Kodak Brownie camera shifted the language of photography, democratizing it for the masses. In direct response to cheap snapshot photography, fine art photographers developed a reactionary aesthetic.
Pictorialism: An artistic movement where photographers heavily manipulated their images to resemble impressionistic paintings.
Modernism developed in direct response to the romanticism and emotional manipulation of the Pictorialists.
Modernism: A movement that believed photographs should reflect the mechanistic perfection and brutal realism of the camera itself.
Modernist Abstraction: A technique where focusing on the brutalist, inhuman design of modern urban landscapes from strange angles makes the human experience seem dwarfed, pushing the image toward pure geometric abstraction.
Paul Strand’s Wall Street (1915) shows massive, dark, geometric voids of the J.P. Morgan building dwarfing the tiny, silhouetted human figures walking hurriedly below. It is a sharp, unmanipulated photograph that uses the physical landscape of the city to comment on the crushing nature of modern finance.
[TODO: Image]: Modernist examples: Paul Strand’s “Wall Street” (1915), Edward Steichen’s Flatiron building photos, Walker Evans’ “Signs, New York City”, and Margaret Bourke-White’s “Fort Peck Dam” (first LIFE magazine cover). Likely source: Landscapes Part 2 slides.
Early expeditions often hired photographers not to make art, but to survey land for resources, map potential railway routes, or document geological formations for the government.↩︎
A 19th-century printing process where paper is coated with a mixture of gum arabic, potassium bichromate, and watercolor pigment. It allows the photographer to physically brush away parts of the image during development, resulting in a painterly, smudge-like aesthetic.↩︎
Modernists treated the rectangular border of the photograph as a strict compositional tool, intentionally cutting off subjects or aligning architecture exactly with the corners of the frame.↩︎