Beginnings
Photographing the landscape is the most enduring activity in the history of the medium. More prints of picturesque ruins and leafy glades have been made, sold, and seen than those of any other genre. From photography's hesitant beginnings in 1835, when Henry Talbot placed his ‘mousetrap’ camera in the grounds of Lacock Abbey to record a group of trees against the skyline, landscape has appealed to photographers everywhere.
The attitude of the Victorians towards the landscape underwent a gradual change during the course of the century, most notably after 1851 when the census recorded for the first time that more people were living in cities and towns than in the countryside. This shift in the demographic balance altered perceptions of both environments. Cities were increasingly regarded as dangerous places to live, for both health and social reasons, while the countryside became identified with notions of freedom, cleanliness, spiritual redemption, and an intact social order. It was the leisured and financially independent members of society, who either lived in or had ready access to the rural landscape, who took to photography when it came to their attention.
In the 1840s and well into the 1850s two processes dominated photography. The daguerreotype was the preferred choice of commercial portraiture, whilst the calotype appealed to amateurs working in the landscape, for whom sharpness and crisp definition were the antithesis of artistic expression. The distinction between the two methods also reflected the social class of the photographer, for daguerreotypists were regarded as being in trade and those who used the calotype belonged to polite society, where education, leisure, and shared ideals allowed amateur practice to flourish. Its members could afford the relatively high cost of cameras, lenses, and chemicals and had the time to use them. For this group, landscape in its purest and simplest form, devoid of buildings and man's apparent intervention, occupied the high spiritual ground where the play of light over natural forms evoked the presence of God. Here, the soft texture of the calotype negative and the warm tones of the salted-paper print invited quiet contemplation. However, the preferred subject for photographers of this early period were landscapes of association. These associations drew upon antiquarian, historical, or sometimes fanciful references, and most frequently related to abbeys, cathedrals, castles, and ruins whose picturesque outlines and ivied walls evoked a distant past. Better still were landscapes with literary associations where the narrative context of popular fiction, especially that of Sir Walter Scott, provided the imaginative prism through which the photograph would be understood. By adopting this approach, photographers were following in the well-established tradition of topographic artists whose accurate delineations of Britain's landscape were a well-recognized and popular genre.
These were the photographers who founded photographic societies throughout Britain during the 1850s with the express intention of advancing understanding and appreciation of the medium through regular meetings and exhibitions. The role of the exhibition in promoting a lingua franca for landscape photography cannot be underestimated, as this type of work predominated. As the exhibition season fell in the winter months, photographers tended to work during the early summer and autumn when the light was at its most delicate and expressive. This annual cycle of summer production and winter exhibition was an implicit feature of landscape photography well into the 20th century. Exhibitions reigned supreme and it was not uncommon for photographers to make duplicate prints and submit them to several venues, both in Britain and abroad, in the hope of gaining wider recognition and prizes.
Landscape photographs shown during the early 1850s were most frequently made using the calotype process or one of its variants. But as the decade progressed the shift to the wet-plate process created a new aesthetic of eloquent tonality and finely rendered detail. The transition was gradual, and best understood through the work of photographers like Roger Fenton, Francis Bedford, and George Washington Wilson, whose training as artists allowed them to move seamlessly between exhibiting and commercial activity. For others the gap proved too wide and their landscape studies are dull and lifeless representations that use light as the means of exposure rather than as the lively agent of description.
Realism to pictorialism
There were strong parallels, on both sides of the English Channel, between landscape photography and painting. Gustave Le Gray's studies of trees in the Forest of Fontainebleau matched the predilection of realist painters for ‘bits’ of nature—trees, hedgerows, or corners of deserted farmyards—for their own sake and removed from any historical or narrative context. The same interest in apparently commonplace detail, now reproducible in all its precision by the wet-plate process, characterized the work of Edward Fox (fl. 1850s-80s), Henry White (1819-1903) and others in the 1850s—and the hyper-detailed early paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As the Athenaeum's photography critic wrote in 1856, ‘Exactitude is the tendency of the age.’ In the 1870s and 1880s, naturalism (or plein-airisme) was practised by both photographers and painters (some of whom used the camera to create preliminary studies). And the neo-romantic landscapes of the fin-de-siècle, with their simplifying, monumentalizing treatment of peasants and the rural scene, had their exact counterparts in the work of continental pictorialists like Hugo Henneberg and the Hofmeister brothers.
In the meantime, middle-class demand for landscape and topographical views seemed insatiable. It was fired initially by the appeal of the stereoscope with its three-dimensional peep into distant vistas and exotic realms. This fashion was supplanted by the marketing of loose prints (or ‘view scraps’) as photographic souvenirs of travel for mounting into albums. The publication of photographic views of whatever type or subject matter was directly linked to the parallel growth of tourism, which saw increasing numbers escaping the cities and towns in search of picturesque beauty and sublime experience, armed with little more than a Murray's handbook and a pair of stout shoes. Some of the leading photographic publishers, such as Wilson, Frith, Valentine, and the London Stereoscopic Co. were large-scale enterprises that issued tens of thousands of prints annually. They could be bought everywhere, from printsellers, stationers, booksellers, dealers in fancy goods and tourist souvenirs, railway bookstalls, hotels, and even aboard the pleasure steamers that plied the coastal routes.
Nor was this type of operation limited to Britain, as photographers throughout Europe, most notably in France and Italy, tapped into the market. For the Alinari brothers of Florence, and probably for many of their counterparts in other new European states, making and publishing views was not only a commercial enterprise but a patriotic one, assembling and popularizing the elements of a national topography.
View publishing underwent a number of transitions, most associated with the size and presentation of the finished print, but nevertheless it was a business that endured into the 20th century, when the market for photographic postcards took over. Until then, countless millions of albumen prints were published and bought to join the trappings of gentility that furnished every respectable parlour.
In the closing decades of the 19th century, photographers again began to search for photography's aesthetic, and debates about ‘truth’ and realism once more ran through the photographic societies. Among the leading advocates in England were George Davison, Peter Henry Emerson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Alfred Horsley Hinton, whose writings and exhibited work realigned photography with artistic principles. Their prints were elaborate confections that owed more to the intervention of gum, pigments, and handwork than photography itself. By the end of the century the wheel of taste and opinion had turned full circle, from the impressionistic results of paper negatives through the period of wet-collodion objectivity to pictorialism. Paradoxically, it was this group which ‘rediscovered’ the work of the early amateurs, appropriating many of the original processes to their own purposes and ideals. (It was significant that in Hamburg, one of the major centres of continental pictorialism, an exhibition of Julia Margaret Cameron's work was held in 1898.) The notion of rediscovery and appropriation continued to underpin landscape photography throughout the 20th century as generation after generation redefined its relationship to the countryside.
Bibliography
- Brettell, R., et al., Paper and Light: The Calotype in France and Great Britain, 1839-1870 (1984).
- Seiberling, G., Amateurs, Photography and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (1986).
- Kaufhold, E., Bilder des Übergangs: Zur Mediengeschichte von Fotografie und Malerei in Deutschland um 1900 (1986).
- Taylor, R., Photographs Exhibited in Britain 1839-1865 (2002)
Modernism and the landscape
The First World War was a cultural as well as a political, social, and economic watershed. The ‘high’ machine age had arrived, and with it a new non-deferential, democratic era that swept away traditions in favour of progress. Modernism had a profound effect on photography, and progress transformed the landscape. Landscape photographers began to move away from painterly effects created by soft-focus lenses and manipulation of the negative or print. They sought once again to exploit the medium's ability to render fine detail, and to reveal the subtleties of tonal gradation in monochrome prints. For them, this ‘straight’ approach was what made photography unique. Although it had its antecedents in the topographical photography of the 19th century, it was seen as distinctively modern and in tune with the European New Objectivity movement that was to influence West Coast American photographers led by Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams. Landscape and nature were their principal motifs and they eventually formed the Group f.64, which produced exquisitely crafted prints that transformed the subject into a specifically photographic aesthetic experience rather than simply a record of what was in front of the camera.
However, it would be a mistake to believe that pictorialism and its legions of proponents of the pastoral idyll had been simply ousted by this modernist precisionism. Far from it: the style remained popular amongst most landscapists and dominated photographic salons and camera clubs, mainstream collections like that of the Royal Photographic Society, and publications like Amateur Photographer and Photograms of the Year until the 1950s.
Metaphor and transcendentalism
After 1920 many landscape photographers also sought to reflect the expressive potential in details abstracted from the larger view. The metaphorical possibilities of this mode of photographic seeing were heightened by making the resultant print an object of contemplation rather than a mirror held up to nature.
A towering figure of this era was Alfred Stieglitz, who as a gallery owner in New York played a major role in introducing modernism to the USA, and as a photographer, like his friends Paul Strand and Edward Steichen, discarded the manipulations of the Photo-Secessionists. Using straightforward techniques, he photographed clouds, trees, and grasses to evoke experiences and feelings in a manner comparable to music. It was a more subjective and meditative approach to photographing the landscape, and though these so-called Equivalents only captured the imagination of a few photographers and museum curators at the time, Stieglitz's influence was long lasting and profound, and later passed on by Minor White and Paul Caponigro in particular. Their contributions can be associated with the rise of Western interest in oriental religions, philosophies, and meditation movements in the 1960s. British-based photographers influenced by this philosophical and subjective approach included Raymond Moore, Thomas J. Cooper, and John Blakemore.
Ansel Adams refined the appeal of the landscape genre through his monographs and technical handbooks. But it was the combined associations, in his awesome images of the American West and other wilderness regions, of nature mysticism and conservationism that made it a mass-market commodity. Adams was one of the first photographers ultimately to be able to live from sales of his prints. By the 1970s the finely crafted landscape print had become a collectable art object and the best examples were eagerly acquired by museums, exhibited in newly created photographic galleries, and sold through established auction houses at prices that photographers could only have dreamed of a few years earlier. The Ansel Adams ‘industry’ played a major role in popularizing landscape photography and the buying of photographs for domestic as well as public display.
For some, however, there was an innate conservatism in the fully tonal ‘fine’-print approach. European photographers such as Bill Brandt, Hugo van Wadenoyen, and Otto Steinert preferred their landscape photographs to have more dramatic contrast between tones and a greater degree of formalism in their composition.
New Topographics
As photography's cultural prominence increased in the last quarter of the 20th century, more and more practitioners began to question the accepted parameters of the landscape genre. They did not wish to evoke the monumental, the mysterious, or the metaphoric in their photographs, preferring a less obviously expressive mode. Labelled the ‘New Topographics’ movement (from a 1975 exhibition at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House), its advocates in the USA and Europe presented undramatic views that tended to concentrate on content rather than form or mood. Mankind's effect on the land was more relevant to them than evocations of pastoral bliss or the wonders and mysteries of nature. Notwithstanding echoes of the survey photography of the 19th century, the photographs were more than mere records. They offered a subtle critique of insensitive building and land use that did not overtly direct the viewer to a specific point of view. The polemic was ‘cool’ and understated, like their tonally muted prints.
Colour
The technical advances in colour photography after the Second World War had a massive impact on landscape photography. The majority of photographers, particularly amateurs, wanted accurate, colourful representations of what they saw in nature and the countryside; 35 mm colour reversal film became universally available and the world, as mediated through sitting-room slide shows and publications like National Geographic, became exuberantly polychromatic. Colour printing was initially much more problematic, but the improved dye-incorporation method for films and papers eventually made colour almost as user friendly as black-and-white. The beginning of the 21st century has seen digital technology and ink-jet printing almost eliminate the conventional colour darkroom whilst offering colourists new creative opportunities.
Art and politics
Although these advances converted many landscape photographers to colour, there were other impulses too. These had more to do with shifts in contemporary culture and politics, and the emergence of the colour photographic print as the preferred medium of the fine artist. Contemporary landscape photographers now make work largely for an art gallery audience. They also undertake well-researched thematic projects which are ideologically or geographically specific rather than producing a mélange of their ‘greatest hits’. Grants and sponsorship have brought exhibitions and publications of landscape work to a wide public. The range of outlets for the dissemination of work has offered photographers engaged with environmental issues and the politics of the countryside platforms for their ideas and beliefs.
Opportunities to comment critically on the effects of industrialization, ownership and access, commodification of heritage, and even concerns relating to race, class, and gender have been taken up by photographers who live in a post-industrial, postmodern world that would have seemed unimaginable in 1920. Photographers like Robert Adams, Keith Arnatt, John Davies, Fay Godwin, John Kippin, Karen Knorr, Ingrid Pollard, Richard Misrach, and Jem Southam, for example, reflect the diversity of ideologies and styles—from descriptive documentary forms, ironic juxtapositions, and revealing narratives to the application of culturally and politically resonant text to images—that have become the photographic currency of today.
— Paul Hill
Bibliography
- Haworth-Booth, M., The Land: Twentieth-Century Landscape Photographs (1975).
- Di Grappa, C. (ed.), Landscape: Theory (1980).
- Jussim, E., and Lindquist-Cock, E., Landscape as Photograph (1985).
- Waite, C., The Making of Landscape Photographs (1993).
- Taylor, J., A Dream of England (1994).
- Andrews, M., Landscape and Western Art (1999).
- Fehily, C., Newton, K., and Wells, C., Shifting Horizons (2000).
- Hammond, A., Ansel Adams: Divine Performance (2002)
