Landscape Art

 There is a tension that exists in landscape photography.  Landscape art (of which photography is a sub genre) was born in Western Europe at the time when societies became urbanised, the need to depict landscapes seems to stem from our separation from nature.  Heidegger believes that the rational, enlightened western man views the world as if it were a picture – to be scrutinised, analysed and understood.  Conquered by him intellectually. But in placing himself at the centre of the world, everything he views becomes a study of anthropology in other words of himself.  We don’t see the world as it is but as we believe it to be.  In the eighteenth century artists would carry a Claude glass (the equivalent of wandering around with a smart phone today)  through which they would view landscapes as a means of deciding whether the view was sufficiently picturesque to warrant painting.  Those landscapes that met with their approval would be commemorated in paint, those that failed to live up to the standards demanded of contemporary aesthetic judgement were ignored.  

 

Indeed, landscape and place are human constructs.  Many writers, such as Yi Fu Tuan have argued space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.  It is our personal experience of a space that turns it into place.  Tim Cresswell quotes quotes political geographer John Agnew who characterises ‘sense of place’ as “the subjective and emotional attachment people have to place”.    For Edward Relph, “through particular encounters and experiences perceptual space is richly differentiated into places, or centres of special personal significance”.

 

 Our idea of place is an interaction of the human experience with the non  human space, as Doreen Massey writes “what is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating, a here and now (itself, drawing on the history and geography of thens and theres); and a negotiation, which must take place within, and between both human and non-human”.

 

If it is the experience of the individual that defines a place then landscapes are cultural creations, as Simon Schama writes:  “Landscapes are culture before they are nature, constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock”.   

 

 Landscapes are often shaped by man  as   Liz Wells writes “Landscape is a social product: particular landscapes tell us something about cultural histories and attitudes.  Landscape results from human intervention to shape or transform natural phenomena, of which we are simultaneously  a part”    but landscpae can also shape our sense of cultural identity as Edward Relph writes “Landscape is not merely an aesthetic background to life, rather it is the setting that both expresses and conditions cultural attitudes and activities, and significant modifications to landscape are not possible without major changes in social attitudes”.

 

In fact art  and in particular landscape photography has been used to link particular landscapes to national identities, as Jens Jager writes “the advocates of landscape photography drew upon the idea that the land formed the national character and that to remind people of it as vividly as possible would preserve the national character”

 

We can see that our idea of landscapes and place are less to do with the natural environment but how we perceive our place in it.  As  Jacob Wamberg writes “Landscape is where the subject posits itself in relation to nature”

 

For Heidegger the dispassionate, rational Cartesian view of the world meant that “ the more extensively and effectually the world stands at man’s disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., more importunately, does the subjectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology” . 

 

It is man who places himself at the centre of the universe, as Daniel Rubinstein writes “Almost 500 years since Copernicus declared that the Sun rather than the Earth is the centre of the universe, we are still welded to the world view that sees us, the human species, as the Sun that is holding together all that there is in the world” and this sets us apart from the natural world around us.  To quote Liz Wells, “The Cartesian model places the spectator outside of that viewed, thereby reflecting the rationalist philosophic models wherein a central distinction is made between subject (human) and object under scrutiny (nature)”

 

It seems therefore rather ironic that landscape art arises at the point where man’s separation from nature becomes a physical separation rather than just a philosophical separation, at least in Western Europe.    

 

Jean Luc Nancy argues in his essay the Uncanny Landscape that landscape art emerges from the transformation of our relationship with the land brought about by industrialisation.    He writes  “it is thus we encounter the question of landscape, that is, of the representation of the country  and the peasant, but perhaps also of estrangement and uncanniness”.  As the Gods flee we try to compensate for their absence by depicting nature in art, the picturesque style remembering a time when they were present.

 

In many ways we use landscape art to depict an idealised form of nature that conforms to our own cultural preconception and sense of identity.  We create landscapes in art (and physically) that adhere to an idealised, romanticised notion of natural beauty.  One of example of this is the English landscape parks which “brought in the picturesque, the beauty of the apparently unplanned, unordered (but in reality very precisely designed) landscape......The English garden, however, was as artificial an artefact as the French baroque garden”  (van der Woud).  

 

It is only more recently that landscape photographers have acknowledged the tension that exists between landscape art and nature. In her article Landscape as Photograph and Photograph as Landscape: The New Topographies, Shelley Armitage concludes by saying that the photography of the New Topographics acknowledge this tension – gone is the reverence for the sublime nature, photographers like Baltz and Adams show man’s coexistence with nature as a stare (a confrontation between human manipulation and nature).  Here photographer and nature are not entangled but distanced, detached.

 

 

And yet the purpose of this research paper is to study ways in which the materiality of the photographic print contributes to its entanglement with a sense of place.  As Karen Barad states we are all entangled with each other.  “Existence is not an individual affair, Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.”  We cannot separate the destiny of our environment from ourselves and the fate of one is entwined with the fate of the other.  But how can the very image that highlights our separation from the landscape convey a sense of place beyond the indexicality of the image.