Why do we see a landscape there?

"Why do we see a landscape there?"
Rei Masuda (Curator of Photography, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)

1. What Is the landscape?

What We See of the World ≠ Landscape

A view of the world before us does not automatically constitute a “landscape.” Consider, for example, the medical concept of “orientation.” In an emergency setting, a patient may be asked their name, the current date or time, and where they are, to assess their awareness. A patient may be conscious yet not fully oriented if they cannot identify themselves, the time, or their location. This illustrates that human beings inhabit a world of meaning. The equation “what we see of the world = landscape” becomes possible because we adopt a framework through which we interpret the world around us—in other words, a worldview or a particular picture of the world. Such frameworks, however, vary across cultures and historical periods.

The Modern Conception of Landscape

The folklorist Kunio Yanagita pointed out that views from train windows helped shape the conception of landscape in Japan. For the inhabitants of a rural community, for example, their surroundings are filled with names and meanings connected to local life, climate, and history. They are deeply embedded in that world of meaning. By contrast, the view from a train window exists independently of the passenger’s personal relationship to it. Rather than a collection of famous sights or historic places, it can appear as a “nameless landscape”: a view simply to be looked at. This is what we might call landscape in the modern sense. If this modern conception requires us to distance ourselves from what we observe, separate the viewing subject from the viewed object, and isolate a view within a frame, then these acts have much in common with looking at the world through photography—that is, through a camera. The accumulated experience of making and viewing photographs may therefore have played a significant role in the formation of the modern conception of landscape. Yet simply pointing a camera at the outside world and releasing the shutter is not enough to constitute landscape photography—at least when the photograph is intended to be shown to others as an act of expression or representation. How, then, does landscape photography come into being?

2. Landscape and Photography

Three Approaches to Landscape Photography

Viewed historically, photographers’ approaches to landscape might be broadly divided into three categories.

1. Capturing the beauty of a scene in an image and translating it into the beauty of a photograph.

Ansel Adams’s photographs of the natural landscapes of the American West exemplify this approach. Through technically accomplished black-and-white photographs, he presents natural scenery of extraordinary beauty, pursuing an ever more refined expression of that beauty.

2. Treating landscape as an object of analysis and investigation—as a text from which something can be read.

Examples include the work of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz associated with *New Topographics*. Their photographs bring out clues to the cultural and social contexts of familiar, unremarkable surroundings, offering new insights and perspectives.

3. Using landscape as a vessel for the photographer’s inner thoughts and emotions.

Alfred Stieglitz’s works known as *Equivalents* exemplify this approach. By presenting the movement of clouds, trees, and other elements as metaphors for inner feelings, such photographs draw on the interaction between the world before the camera and the photographer’s inner life. In practice, most accomplished landscape photographs combine all three elements. Each work takes shape through the particular emphasis placed on one or another of them.

The Transformation of Landscape Photography

If the equation “what we see of the world = landscape” depends on a shared worldview or picture of the world, then landscape itself must change as that shared understanding changes over time. Landscape photography, too, will undergo transformation. Might the following works be manifestations of such changes?