Photography – landscape as rhetoric

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Land Matters – Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity

By Liz Wells

We no longer believe, if indeed we ever did, that pictures of ‘landscapes’ are fit only for benign consumption, flavoured perhaps by fantasies of ownership or escape. Since the 1970s, at least, the genre has been the subject of searching and fruitful interrogation by both postmodernist and feminist scholars and practitioners. Also, the environmental movement has awakened interest in the degree to which ‘landscapes’ are (mis)managed, actively constructed, and contested.

Such is the terrain of Liz Wells’ Land Matters, an exploration of the ways in which landscape photography can be understood as an expression of, not simply a series of personal or formal predilections, but of competing interests. These may be ideological, social, gendered, economic, cultural, and so on. As she makes clear from the start, there is no such thing as a disinterested photograph:

photography is rhetorical and photographers use a range of tactics in order to add emphasis to their observations. Photographs may seem more-or-less critical in condoning or questioning histories of place and notions associated with landscape, but…[they are]never neutral as the deployment of aesthetic and photographic codes reflects decisions taken by the photographer.

Wells, sensibly enough, does not attempt a survey of either the history or current state of landscape photography. (Both endeavours would surely be so wide-ranging as to require a level of generalization perilously superficial.) Rather, her interest is in work that she can describe as, in one way or another, critical or interventionist. That is, work that challenges, or forces a re-evaluation of, prevailing ways of representing landscape, whether pastoral, modernist, Romantic or touristic, for example.

This requires, of course, that Wells establish an historical background and context for her account. Her opening chapter outlines the ways in which landscape – emerging as a pictorial genre at the end of the 15th century, yet stabilizing only in the 17th and 18th centuries – is always made, not given: ‘the landscape image bears the imprint of its cultural pedigree. It is a selected and cultural text…’

Thereafter Wells addresses particular instances of interventions in what might be termed ‘traditional’ landscape photography, as it has developed in North America, Britain and Ireland, and the Baltic states. Of these locations, North America looms largest in Land Matters. Focusing on the East Coast, the works of John Pfahl, John Huddleston, Janet Pritchard and Sally Mann are amongst those Wells includes in a discussion of aesthetic responses to the history of settlement, including the Civil War. Moving West, she discusses work by Richard Misrach, Joel Sternfeld, Mark Klett, Ansel Adams, and Terry Evans, for instance, as part of an exploration of the relationships that have mediated historical conceptions of representation, wilderness and the sublime.

To an extent, Wells sacrifices chronological tidiness for the sake of thematic consistency; on occasion, readers will have to be fleet of foot to keep up. But it is more than worth it, not least because, as Wells notes:

Photography is [thus]powerful in contributing to specifying spaces as particular sorts of places. It constructs a point of view, a way of seeing which is underpinned by the authority of the literal. Through re-deploying this constructed sense of authenticity photography can be equally powerful as a means of interrogating environment through experimentation and critical exposures.

Land Matters – Landscape  Photography, Culture and Identity  by Liz Wells is published by I.B Tauris. 352pp., fully illustrated in colour and mono, £51.50 hardback/18.99 paperback. ISBN 978-1845118648