Landscape Photography

Landscape as an independent artistic genre developed within the fringes of religious and portrait painting. Only from the 16th century onwards did it emerge as an separate art form when the Renaissance stimulated an interest in the natural world for its own sake. The world ‘landscape’ actually derives from the Dutch ‘landschap’ originally meaning ‘tract of land.’ The connection is logical as it was the painters of the Low Countries who pioneered the genre. Accomplished landscape work can be seen in the backgrounds of numerous religious paintings from the Renaissance but the Dutch and Flemish brought it centre stage making it the sole subject of the painting.

An artist who has influenced my work Pieter Bruegel the Elder in ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ (c. 1558) tackled what was at the time considered the highest of artistic genres, a classical scene with a didactic message and subverts it. The painting depicts an extraordinary landscape view in which the ‘high art’ incident is reduced to a tiny detail. It is easy to miss the fall of Icarus, such is the overwhelming power of a landscape full of scenes of everyday life - a farmer ploughing his field, a traveller looking the other way, a sailing ship heading ignorantly towards the horizon. The power of this painting rests upon its deliberately objective appraisal of the whole scene in which heroic folly is subsumed into the mass of everyday experience. That even-handed focus is a central part of the attraction of landscape photography since here the objectivity is provided not just by the photographer but by the nature of the craft.

For the camera offered a means of quickly capturing a quantity and range of information that was laborious work for the painter.

When in 1846 Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative which created photography as a popular art, chose to give a title to his thoughts on photography he called it ‘The Pencil of Nature.’ This was the first book featuring text and photography and in its forward he wrote “The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.” In a sense Fox Talbot declares that in photography nature makes the artwork, a claim to objectivity which was to become central to the genre’s appeal. The landscape photographer unlike the landscape painter could prove the magnificence of landscape rather than just describe it.

Landscape photography became a popular subject for rural landscape photographers who took Fox Talbot’s invention into the wilderness in order to record it. Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer whose lasting fame would rest on proving by means of a camera that horses kept a foot on the ground when they galloped, was primarily interested in objectively documenting landscape. His expeditions into Yosemite using mule trains to get all the enormously heavyweight gear into the wilderness prefigured those of Ansel Adams the most famous landscape photographer of the American West. Adam’s technical virtuosity proved that if a photograph could be exposed and printed perfectly enough the vast wealth of almost inadvertent detail it transposed gave landscape photography a sublimity comparable with that of landscape painting.

These themes - of objectivity, of technical virtuosity and of a pursuit of the sublime - have been central to my own work as a professional landscape photography. One of the chief characteristics of photography - its even-handed transcription of salient and extraneous information alike - is made a virtue of by the genre. A photograph that covers a vast swathe of nature records everything in equal measure and part of the pleasure is finding details perhaps originally unnoticed that are locked away in the image.

My landscape prints for advertising and fine art contain layers of information, details that can only be perceived at the size of a print which remain tucked away for future discovery.