In the last 50–70 years, fine art landscape photography shifted as artists recognized the limitations of straight, modernist photography. They sought more complex, conceptual ways to describe the landscape, leading to highly structured and referential works.
Some contemporary photographers treat the landscape as a scientific archive, creating grids of related structures.
Typology: An artwork or series of artworks illustrating a strict classification system or set of types.11. The term is borrowed from archaeology and biology, where specimens are rigidly sorted by physical characteristics to understand evolutionary or structural changes over time.
The Bechers, a German husband-and-wife duo, spent decades driving around Europe in a van. They created massive grid collages of similar industrial architectural structures (water towers, blast furnaces, grain silos). To ensure the structures could be objectively compared, they photographed them exclusively on overcast days (to eliminate shadows) from the exact same perspective and distance.
[TODO: Image]: Hilla and Bernd Becher’s “Industrial Facades”, “Blast Furnaces”, and water tower grids. Likely source: Landscapes Part 2.2 slides.
Certain conceptual artists physically incorporate the landscape into the photographic medium itself.
Process Intervention: A technique where the artist uses elements of the physical landscape to actively degrade or construct the final photographic print.
Abelardo Morell blacks out the windows of a room, leaving a small hole to turn the room into a giant camera obscura. He projects the outside landscape (like the Golden Gate Bridge) onto the interior walls or bedsheets, then photographs the projection, creating a textured overlay.
Mathew Brandt goes a step further by physically degrading his C-prints22. A chromogenic print (C-print) is the standard darkroom process for printing analog color photographs. The paper contains multiple layers of silver salts and color dyes that are highly susceptible to chemical and physical degradation. using materials from the landscape itself. He submerges photos of a lake into water collected from that exact lake, causing the emulsion to bubble and decay. For photos of a demolished high school, he mixed dust from the actual demolition site into the chemical emulsion.
[TODO: Image]: Abelardo Morell’s “Rooftop View of Manhattan Looking East”. Mathew Brandt’s “Gibbon Lake”, “Demolition of LA High School”, and “GAP” (Hollywood sign gaps rendered in bubble wrap and hair dye). Likely source: Landscapes Part 2.2 slides.
Contemporary artists heavily explore how consumerism, globalization, and the internet have altered our perception of physical space.
Digital and Capitalist Landscapes: Artworks that highlight how human experience has been degraded or mediated by corporate spaces and digital interfaces.
Andreas Gursky creates massive (often 10-foot-wide), hyper-real landscapes. By digitally stitching together multiple large-format frames, he creates impossibly vast, perfectly sharp interiors of 99-cent stores or endless Amazon fulfillment centers. The sheer scale and uniform detail overwhelm the viewer, mirroring the endless cycle of global consumerism.
[TODO: Image]: Andreas Gursky’s “99 cent”, “Gucci”, and “Toys R Us”. Likely source: Landscapes Part 2.2 slides.
Doug Rickard never left his home; he used Google Street View to travel through disenfranchised American cities. By photographing his computer screen with a tripod, he captured a detached, pixelated, apocalyptic vision of America entirely mediated by Google’s surveillance cameras.
Penelope Umbrico created massive gallery installations by searching the word “Sunset” on Flickr and downloading thousands of results. By compiling them into a massive grid, she pointed out how the most intimate, romantic experiences in nature have been reduced to repetitive, licensed visual clichés.
[TODO: Image]: Tracey Moffat’s “Suburban No 3 Bullied Here”. Doug Rickard’s “From A New American Picture”. Penelope Umbrico’s “Sunset Portraits from 27,700,711 Sunset Pictures on Flickr”. Fong Qi Wei’s “Changi Beach Sunrise”. Likely source: Landscapes Part 2.2 slides.
The term is borrowed from archaeology and biology, where specimens are rigidly sorted by physical characteristics to understand evolutionary or structural changes over time.↩︎
A chromogenic print (C-print) is the standard darkroom process for printing analog color photographs. The paper contains multiple layers of silver salts and color dyes that are highly susceptible to chemical and physical degradation.↩︎
The automated extraction of data or imagery from websites. Artists use this to aggregate thousands of public images to make a point about collective visual culture.↩︎