p h o t o g r a p h y, p e r c e p t i o n , an d t h e l an d s c a p e

Douglas Nickel

In everyday speech, the word “landscape” denotes an area of open

outdoor space regarded primarily for its visible aspects. It also refers
to a type of picture that depicts such a locality. This seemingly ageless
notion — that particular physical features of the land might be appreci-
ated for their aesthetic appeal, independent of their usefulness — turns out to be a fairly
modern one, however. For most of the history of literature and art in the West, land-
scapes, if they appear at all, have served chiefly as settings for stories about humans and
their divinities, not as something worthy of attention themselves. It was only between the
17th and 19th centuries, when attitudes toward wilderness, the land, and the functions
of art all changed, that the genre of landscape painting as we know it first appeared.
Photography’s arrival in the 1840s corresponded to just the moment when this change
of attitudes was fully realized, a bit of timing that made the photograph’s emulation of
the Romantic landscape seem inexorable and our acceptance of the category seamless.
But in fact there is nothing natural or inevitable about the photographic landscape, and
if we scratch the surface of the history and aesthetics leading up to it, an abundance of
complexities emerges.
There is of course a long history  — dating back to before classical times — that proposed
certain natural places as special or sacred. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Paradise is
configured as a setting where the first humans lived in full sympathy with nature. Here
grew the Tree of Life (which promised immortality) and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil (which, in Genesis, results in the forfeiture of eternal life); here humans and beasts
could peacefully cohabitate in a state of innocence. But Eden is a garden — that is to say, a
sanctuary, a protected place removed from the perils of wild nature. The concept of refuge

15
 fig. 1 Follower of Perugino Saint Jerome in the Wilderness,
ca. 1490/1500, tempera on panel, 23 5/8 × 16 1/2 in., National Gallery
of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection 1939.1.280

and removal is crucial to early attitudes toward the land. From their very antiquity in Meso-
potamia, cities represented civilization; behind their walls city-dwellers sought security
from enemies, dangerous wildlife, and the capriciousness of the elements. The garden
was civilization’s way of idealizing those parts of nature it found benign and agreeable
into an essentially distorted, urban take on the rural. Classical writers exalted agriculture
through poems about the untroubled rustic lives of shepherds and cowherds, placing such
figures (as the Latin poet Virgil did) in the utterly civilized nature of a legendary Arcadia.
The stylized landscape encountered in these poems became the mise-en-scène for the idyll,
a utopian fantasy of a former “golden age” where nature (in the form of shady groves and
pastures dotted with shrines to the gods) stood for a political condition far removed in time
and space from contemporary urban fact. Depictions of these imaginary scenes made their
way into Roman wall paintings as what appear to be populated mythological landscapes,
and Virgil’s Georgics became canonical — required reading for the literate.1 A dream vision of
the pastoral was installed in the Western imagination for the next millennium.
The reality of the countryside was quite different. Until the 18th century the unsettled
intervals between cities and towns in Europe and America harbored all kinds of dangers:
travelers might be thrown from horses, trapped by storms, frozen, attacked by predatory
animals, or set upon by “highwaymen” ready to murder and steal. Swamps, deserted woods,
and impassable rivers and mountains signified threat, not respite. The term “wilderness”
was at this time equivalent to “wasteland”: an inhospitable region outside the law, empty of
comfort, and suitable only for the uncivilized, a zone to be avoided or traversed with great
caution. It was also that terrible place the guilt-ridden went to do penance. Renaissance
paintings of saints in the wilderness typically portray Jerome, John, or Anthony Abbott in
or near a cave, living in isolation amongst beasts and barren trees, situated in a landscape
where a distant city symbolized the society denied him (see fig. 1).
Given that nature-in-the-raw carried generally negative associations, it is no surprise
that pure landscape subjects entered early Western art only rarely. In addition, there lay
another obstacle: the legislation of artistic hierarchies mandated by Europe’s official acad-
emies. The hierarchy of artistic genres — enforced by professional organizations like the
Académie royal de peinture et de sculpture in Paris and the Royal Academy in London — first
arose in the late 16th century, a time when most fine art was commissioned by monarchs,
the Church, and the aristocracy. These cultured patrons valued erudition, moral alle-
gory, and abstract ideas; they embraced a humanism that considered Man the pinnacle
of creation, and found his highest achievement in virtuous thoughts and deeds. Thus, in

16 | Douglas Nickel 17 | Photography, Perception, and the Landscape

 fig. 2 Jacob van Ruisdael Wheat Fields, ca. 1670, oil on canvas,
39 3/8 × 51 1/4 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of
Benjamin Altman, 1913 14.40.623

literature, the epic was ranked above the lyric, with drama and comic poetry falling below,
and in painting, history (including religious themes, mythology, and great secular events)
surmounted portraits, scenes of everyday life, and finally landscapes and still lifes, in
descending order of edifying human content. History paintings were typically larger, more
complex (featuring multiple figures interacting) and showed off the artist’s talent for inven-
tion; they were often public works, destined for display in churches or civic buildings. The
academies held that a talent for copying the exact appearance of things was less important
than the ability to give life to a complex thought.
Yet in regions where a different class of patrons prevailed, the hierarchy could be
ignored or even overturned. In the Protestant North, for instance, Calvinism essentially
ended the market for religious painting by the 17th century. Successful Dutch burghers
preferred the “lower” genres of painting because their smaller scale and less pretentious
themes better suited their modest homes and because their practical nature inclined them
to the real and familiar over the imaginary and ancient. Further, the Netherlands was a
country nearly free of dangerous wilderness, but it waged a constant battle to keep the
ocean from overwhelming the land. For this reason, the Dutch Republic looked upon its
countryside as precious, a vital part of its economy and identity, and hence a good subject
for a painting hung above the mantel. It was the Dutch who first coined the term “landscape”
(lantscap) in the late 16th century to describe a type of picture that featured naturalistic-
looking scenery (see fig. 2), and, with their Flemish neighbors, it was they who sponsored
the first real flowering of what we today recognize as landscape art.
As other countries moved fitfully to more democratic forms of government, and
patronage shifted, academic officialdom began to lose its grip on the hierarchy of figur-
ative art. New wealth from industry in 18th-century England and France corresponded
with an increasingly open market for paintings — now more often made on speculation
than commission — and unprecedented accommodation to popular taste. The Englishman
Thomas Gainsborough plied a trade painting fashionable portraits of the landed gentry
and the smart set of London in the middle of the century, but more flexible genre conven-
tions could abide a work like Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews, ca. 1750, a hybrid Grand Manner
portrait where half of the composition is given over to scenery (fig. 3). The couple was
married two years before the work was conceived, and their union brought together the
two adjoining estates that figure as a background. Over time, Gainsborough gravitated to
painting naturalistic rural subjects without any portrait alibi, though these scenes always
derived as much from the artist’s imagination as from observation. Such works helped

18 | Douglas Nickel 19 | Photography, Perception, and the Landscape

 fig. 3 Thomas Gainsborough Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, ca. 1750,
oil on canvas, 27 1/2 × 47 in., National Gallery of Art, London,
bought with contributions from The Pilgrim Trust, The Art Fund,
Associated Television Ltd, and Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Spooner, 1960
NG6301

plant the Dutch idea on British soil. By the end of the century, landscape subjects had come precarious boulders, and wild storms tend toward the latter. The essay is noteworthy for
to typify English painting, while in Germany a budding taste for Romantic themes allowed stressing that our responses to subjects in pictures are not the same as our responses
Casper David Friedrich to invent contemplative, allegorical landscapes distinctly inspired to those same subjects in the real world: a lightning storm or the black of night might
by real places and a close observation of nature. well terrify us if confronted firsthand, but when represented in a painting or a poem, they
The widespread embrace of landscape imagery at the beginning of the 19th century produce a distinct kind of pleasure. By shifting the framework of landscape aesthetics from
set the stage for the photographic landscape. But neither could have taken the form they the rational to the psychological — and, specifically, to our most primitive emotions — Burke
did without specific circumstances in and outside of art. First, wilderness had to acquire helped catalyze the Romantic view that was soon to follow.
its modern, transcendental associations. As the cities of Europe (and, soon enough, the Landscape theory provided a rationale for the centrality of the genre at what then turned
United States) dilated in size in the 1800s, so too did their problems. Poor sanitation and out to be the dawn of photography. The Rev. William Gilpin, another British writer, extended
overcrowding resulted in deadly epidemics of cholera and typhus; crime, worker riots, Burke’s analysis of aesthetic response to include a third category — the “picturesque.” He
and pollution cast the countryside in an ever more favorable light, as a pleasurable and characterized the picturesque as “expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty which is agree-
salubrious alternative to the metropolis. In the late Augustan period, innovative techniques able in a picture” (hence the name), noting how subjects that were rough, ruinous, and
for paving roads and amenities like inns and regular stagecoach service made tourist intricate in their variety and texture presented observers with this peculiar beauty without
travel popular; in England, the Napoleonic Wars of the Continent encouraged more local falling into either of Burke’s two categories.3 Gilpin was an avid tourist, and his theory was
exploration of places like Northern Wales and the Lake District. The physical domestica- spelled out in the pages of the several travel guides to provincial England he published
tion of nature was accompanied by an intellectual one, as science (then called “natural before 1810, illustrated with his own sketches. The purpose of “picturesque travel” was to
philosophy”) sought to codify mechanical, observable laws for the way nature worked. If seek out prospects in the country that were especially pleasing, spots where the elements
nature could be explained, it could be mastered and manipulated to human ends. Photog- came together to look like a landscape painting. To facilitate the best viewing experience,
raphy’s invention was one proof of this mastery: the sun’s rays and the properties of such travel guides recommended the use of a small, dark mirror, or “Claude glass,” as an
certain natural compounds could be forced to make optical pictures, letting “nature copy aid. Upon encountering a potentially picturesque vista, users would hold the mirror before
that which nature made,” as it was put at the time.2 The wilderness that was once seen them and, with their back turned to the desired scenery, discover in the mirror a reflected
as hostile now became a place of spiritual renewal and connection with God the Creator, image of it, reduced, enframed, and softened in tonality by the tinted glass.4 The picturesque
author of the book of nature that science endeavored to interpret. thus amounted to a significant redefinition of landscape, for it prescribed mentally removing
A new scientific strain is also found in art theory of the late 18th century. The Irish scenery from its surroundings and transforming it into an aesthetic object, into an image.
philosopher Edmund Burke inaugurated landscape theory with his 1757 essay “A Philo- Nature was not an array of objects so much as a visual field, there to be looked at, awaiting
sophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.” Burke the proper visual appropriation and recording that would bring meaning to its chaos. But not
asserted that what we consider “the beautiful” is characterized by symmetry, smoothness, all scenery was created equal. While in general the picturesque was something to be found,
small size, and delicacy. By contrast, the sublime is that which is vast, irregular, obscure, in those instances where the topography failed to present sufficient balance, variety, and
or menacing. Burke was primarily interested in accounting for our emotional responses to texture, it could be physically rearranged with the removal of trees and other obstructions.
phenomena — the beautiful, he argued, derived its appeal from its association with the femi- Gilpin famously recommended in his Observation on the River Wye that the medieval ruins of
nine, which (for many males at least) originates in sexual attraction. The sublime was that Tintern Abbey might be made more picturesque with the application of a mallet.5
which activates fear, flight, and survival responses. In the field, rolling hills, puffy clouds, The picturesque took the ends of the classical, imaginary landscape — aesthetic delight
and calm bodies of water will trigger the former response; large mountains, blasted trees, — and found them in actual landscape, by proposing the mind be put into a particularly

20 | Douglas Nickel 21 | Photography, Perception, and the Landscape

fig. 4 William Henry Fox Talbot Lock Katrine, plate 12 from the
book Sun Pictures in Scotland, 1845, salted paper print, plate:
6 ¾ × 8 1/8 in., courtesy of George Eastman House, International
Museum of Photography and Film

receptive condition for framing and seeing things, a condition of willful scrutiny that went
looking for what it knew and wanted.6 What was invented might be termed “landscape
perception”: the graphic reduction of empirical observation to a set of salient formal
elements that make a picture. The compositions and subjects of landscape depiction at
the end of the 18th century were highly conventionalized, formulaic even, based on recipes
inherited from the previous century worked out by Claude Lorraine (after whose effects
the Claude glass was named) and Salvatore Rosa. But as techniques like plein air sketching
were increasingly deployed in their service, the creative potential of these more empirical,
less conventional studies was recognized. The second half of the 19th century developed
its landscape painting and photography upon a unitary principal — the simultaneity of land-
scape perception and representation.7 One need only recall the sketch-like arrangements
and shimmering light and color effects in Monet’s poppy fields or Signac’s harbors to see
this simultaneity at work. It is not clouds, flowers, or water so much as the artist’s imme-
diate observation of these things that is the subject of the painting.
We might say, then, that photography was born into a pre-existing, albeit incipient,
notion of the photographic, one based on conceiving of the world as already containing
an infinite number of latent pictorial compositions awaiting discovery by the eye. After
photography was introduced, some users did the obvious thing and searched the world
for the very same compositions they knew from Western art. William Henry Fox Talbot,
the English inventor, was well versed in picturesque theory, so it comes as no surprise
that he would seek out picturesque scenes and subjects for his 1845 publication of orig-
inal photographs titled Sun Pictures in Scotland (see fig. 4).8 The first generation of French
photographers likewise avidly pursued Romantic and picturesque motifs — ruins, the trees
at Fountainebleau, rustic scenes around Sèvre — which happened to be the haunts of illus-
trators, printmakers, and the contemporary Barbizon School of landscape painters as
well. The picturesque landscape photograph was to endure in perpetuity: Seneca Ray
Stoddard, working in upstate New York in the 1880s, crafted landscapes as conventional
and painterly as any of the local Hudson River School painters who preceded him in the
territory (see fig. 5), and even today Barbara Bosworth can cleverly re-imagine Frederic
Church’s grandiose Niagara from 1857 (see fig. 6).
But much of the topographic photography that followed the first generation hardly
qualifies as “landscape” in these conventional terms. The art historian Rosalind Krauss has
argued that the Western exploration photographs of William Bell and Timothy O’Sullivan
(see fig. 7), for instance, made on geological surveys in the 1870s, were never intended to

22 | Douglas Nickel 23 | Photography, Perception, and the Landscape

 14 7/8 × 18 7/8 in.,

fig. 5 Seneca Ray Stoddard The Adirondacks, Upper Ausable

Lake from Borens Bay, 1887, albumen print, 14 7/8 × 18 7/8 in., RISD
Museum: Gift of Professor Barton St. Armand 1988.077

fig. 6 Barbara Bosworth Niagara Falls, 1986, gelatin silver

print, 8 x 10 in., Private collection

24 | Douglas Nickel 25 | Photography, Perception, and the Landscape

fig. 7 Timothy O’Sullivan Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle,
1873, from the album Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th
Meridian, albumen prints, mount: 16 × 20 in., courtesy John Hay
Library, Brown University

hang on walls, like art, but were instead conceived to go in albums and photography in the 20th century and after can be usefully clarified by this notion of projec-
the filing cabinets of government archives. She contends that treating tion. Ansel Adams, for instance, insisted upon the purely “photographic” character of his
such photographs as an anticipation of the formal concerns of modern approach, developing an ethos out of what had been the dominant 19th-century entrepre-
art represents a distortion of history, that as essentially scientific docu- neurial idiom. Like that of others in his f/64 cohort, Adams’s work in the 1930s and ’40s was
ments, topographical photographs like O’Sullivan’s have no place in strikingly modernist. He stressed the primacy of “visualization”: the photographer’s ability
the art museum. They were, as the period identified them, “views,” not to see the intended picture first (and at one and the same time) in the world and in their
“landscapes.”9 Other scholars, most notably Joel Snyder, have asked “mind’s eye,” then in the camera, and finally in the darkroom. In this scheme, the photo-
whether the practical imperatives of survey work necessarily mean graph is created mentally before it is realized physically; the photograph here becomes an
that an O’Sullivan photograph cannot exhibit its own stylistic features exercise of the photographer’s skill at commuting mental pictures into real ones, a process
and formal coherence. A documentary function should not presume the that honors talent and learned expertise (i.e., properties of the photographer) over chance
absence of artistic deliberation; indeed, in Snyder’s account, enterprising and automatic recording (properties of the apparatus). Per picturesque theory, this entailed
photographers in the 19th century crafted a patently mechanical, intentionally non-painterly nothing if not the projection of pictorial expectations upon the world.
approach to their camera work —optically precise, printed on glossy albumen papers —with Yet, in the larger sense, we might ask what notion of landscape Adams overlaid upon
the aim of carving out their own aesthetically distinct sector within the overall market for his world. He spent his teens and early twenties in Yosemite, sent there by concerned
images. What gives most 19th-century photographs their recognizably “photographic” parents as a kind of therapy for his hyperactive disposition and his inattention at school.
appearance is neither a call to function as neutral documents nor the photographer’s igno- Throughout his life, Adams embraced the notion that nature could provide the harried,
rance of artistic conventions, but an ambient desire to make the photograph look like a urbanized citizen of the modern age with a place of spiritual refuge, and that the most
product of technology — a look that stood for industrial progress within a milieu that valued beautiful natural places should be identified and preserved in the public interest for this
the machine-made over the hand-made. In O’Sullivan’s case, his principal task was to very purpose. This was the legacy of Emerson and Thoreau, articulated by John Muir and
provide images that would satisfy the needs of the survey leaders who hired him. Snyder enshrined in the National Parks Bill of 1890. The same conservationist values informed
argues that O’Sullivan’s radical views were calculated to depict the Western territories as Adams’s landscape photography and his activities on behalf of the environment: a National
hostile, foreign-looking terra incognita, where humans (if present) stand out as isolated Park and an Adams photograph establish a border around a particularly inviting piece of
from their surroundings.10 The spare, anti-picturesque solutions he delivered accorded terrain, ostensibly banishing from it what is human, allowing us to escape (at least tempo-
perfectly with interests of professionals making the case that these empty territories be rarily) the intrusions of culture. Here, as Emerson urged, we might find some connection
studied, secured, and settled. to a cosmos greater than ourselves; for the reverent Adams, art and wilderness each
An understanding of landscape theory therefore suggests that not every photograph had the potential to make the individual whole again. Insofar as a National Park is like a
of land is a landscape, and not every landscape necessarily features the land. The stan- garden — a protected, managed, functional container for cultivating a certain conception of
dard definition points to places — places in the world, or places seen in pictures — which nature — Adams’s idea returned the viewer to Eden.
take on the quality of a thing. But “landscape” is probably better understood as that set of But when the premise of the projection is challenged — as it was in the late 1960s and
expectations and beliefs — about both the environment and the conventions of its represen- 1970s — an entirely different kind of landscape is the result. Around this time, followers of
tation — that we project upon the world. These conventions and expectations are subject to the ecology movement broke with conservationism, reasoning that the natural environ-
historical change and are culturally specific; Talbot’s were a traditional set of landscape ment entails both wilderness areas and the vacant lot next door. Pollution, pesticide runoff,
expectations projected upon his subjects, but O’Sullivan’s were radically reconfigured, to the destruction of species, global warming, and rampant development affect every part of
the point where they are hardly recognizable by the earlier standard. American landscape the environment, so every part needs stewardship and protection — not just the spectacular

26 | Douglas Nickel 27 | Photography, Perception, and the Landscape

fig. 8 Lewis Baltz Model Home, Shadow Mountain, 1977, from
the portfolio Nevada, gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 in., RISD Museum:
Gift from the collection of Joe Deal and Betsy Ruppa
2010.82.35.8

spots. Many of the photographers brought together for the New Topographics
exhibition of 1975 gravitated more or less independently to a kind of landscape
image indicative of this newer attitude, though they did so without overt polemical
motives. Perspectives showing roadside litter, industrial parks, highway culture,
and recently constructed tract homes (see fig. 8) now inverted the Adams principle
of exclusion, turning straight toward human alteration to suggest an end-stage to notes
the paradise that was America. Moreover, the exhibition noted a stylistic strategy 1. See Nils Büttner, Landscape Painting: A History (New York:
Abbeville, 2000), 23–31.
common to the group, wherein imagery was seemingly stripped of expressivity in
2. The phrase is that of J. H. Fitzgibbon, a professional
order to assume the appearance of being without style, a “topographic” rendering photographer from St. Louis, Missouri, advertising his
rather than landscape scenery. The work of 19th-century survey photography was services in 1852. Quoted in Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not:
Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton
again invoked, not only because of these artists’ emphasis on locations in the
Architectural Press, 2004), 36.
American West, but particularly through their anti-Romantic redefinition of what 3. William Gilpin, Essay on Prints (London: Cadell and Davies,

a landscape photograph could be. A view of a generic building in an industrial park 1802), 17.
4. The camera obscura—precursor to the photographic
hardly shows land at all, let alone a vista; an image of the corner of Second Street
camera—offered a similar translation of three-dimensional
and South Main would seem to portray real estate more than scenery. There is reality to two-dimensional image.

no denying that this recalibration of aesthetic expectations toward the social 5 . William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye and several
parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to Picturesque
has come to predominate recent practice; however, we must now acknowledge Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770 (London:
that what gets classified as “landscape” will not follow a set of rules or conven- R. Blamire, 1782), 47.
6. In his essay “Nature,” Emerson writes: “The charming
tions about subject matter or approach, but must continually evolve, because
landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made
the projections we make continually incorporate, modify, and reject previous up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field,
rules and conventions to produce new ones. The process by which we recast our Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none
of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the
perceptions of the world as representations guarantees that the complexity of
horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate
landscape will endure as long as people do. all the parts, that is, the poet.” Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Nature (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836), 11.
7. See W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Mitchell, ed.,
Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 12.
8. In March 1841, Talbot wrote to his friend Sir John Herschel,
“I must now really transport my apparatus to some locality
where picturesque objects are to be met with, such as a
Cathedral, or a seaport Town, for my own neighbourhood
is not particularly suited to the Artist.” Quoted in Elizabeth
Knazook, “A Picturesque Photographic Tour Through
Scotland.” Librarian and Staff Publications, Paper 6 (2009),
http: //digitalcommons.ryerson.ca / library_pubs /6.
9. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces:
Landscape / View,” Art Journal, vol. 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982):
311–19.
10. Joel Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” in Mitchell, 175–201.

28 | Douglas Nickel 29 | Photography, Perception, and the Landscape