Originally posted by Ron Boggs I think the original post may have been looking for some of those gray areas like much of the European landscape photography that emphasizes the land/flora/fauna/lakes etc and just happens to have a cottage or two involved but not as focal points. It may include rock fencelines, power lines, orchard or treelines planted many years earlier. I think most agree that work like Brit, Charlie Waite does is clearly landscape photography regardless of human elements in much of his work. The publisher of his 1992 book The Making of Landcape Photographs: A practical guide to the art and techniques. didn't seem to mind that the book is littered with human influence in the landscape images.
Of that same general philosophy--that human elements don't eliminate an image from being defined as landscape photography--American, John Shaw includes the interesting farm/field landscapes of the Washington state Palouse region in his book, Landscape Photography. Interestingly, the front cover of Allen Rokach and Anne Millman's book Landscapes uses a human planted line of trees to offset a tulip farm. That book was published by Amphoto, one of the most prolific photography presses in the world. Surely their definition of "landscape" is a bit more broad than we have been discussing in this thread.
Excellent response that sets off a couple of thoughts.
There is in fact a quite distinct difference between European and American thoughts about "landscape", in reality, in painting, and in photography. My Ph.D. is in Classics and while I don't know much about ancient art, I do know that the Greeks and Romans not surprisingly made lots of pictures of outdoors scenes that LOOK pretty landscape-y to us, but which usually include a temple or something else like that, often with a human being or a god or at least a naiad or dryad thrown in for good measure. The ancients were not interested in mountains qua mountains, indeed, if you had suggested to them that they should be they would have thought you crazy - the way a farmer might laugh if you suggested he should admire his goats. Wild landscape (if I can use the term) was relatively rare even 2000+ years ago in Europe, and where it did occur, it was generally feared and not regarded as something beautiful in its own right. And that continues to be the attitude of most Europeans toward "wild landscape" right into the twentieth century. European landscape painters don't really get going until about the 18th century, and even then, they tend to paint tame landscapes.
What changed attitudes toward landscape was first the discovery of the New World, and then in particular the discovery of the American West. As we know now, the first great paintings of the West to make their way back east or to Europe were laughed at because people thought the colors were too weird to be believed. Then later they discovered they were wrong and the painters were right: the mountains and canyons and other landscapes of the American West
are strange. But the strangeness took a while to register. It took naturalists like John Muir a long time to persuade other Americans - who were still fairly European in their mindsets - that wild landscape, a.k.a. "wilderness", was a thing of beauty that should be left alone and appreciated in its own right.
These discoveries - especially the West - had an impact on European ideas about art that was on a par with - but almost the opposite of - the impact that the rediscovery of the ancients had on the Renaissance. The Renaissance rediscovered what it means to be human; the late 19th century artists of the West rediscovered what it means to be wild and indifferent to humans.
Anyway, it ain't the presence of a stray person that turns a landscape into a non-landscape. If the human (or animal or house or sailboat) appears to be in the foreground and the landscape appears to be background, then we can at least say that it's not a "pure" landscape.
But it's important to keep in mind that generic purity is almost non-existent in any of the arts. And it's hard to pigeon-hole almost any interesting work of art. Parts of a Beethoven symphony seem to be songs; Shakespeare's plays are full of lyric poems and oratory and epigram; 18th century English paintings of the aristocracy often combine elements of landscape and portraiture; and so on. Thinking about genres is a lot like thinking about primary colors. A painting from Picasso's blue period is blue and it's interesting to notice that. But it isn't ALL blue.
Here's a painting I know in the Dallas Museum called
West Texas Landscape. It has the word "landscape" in its title, so the artist (Harry Carnohan) apparently thought it was a landscape. And evidence of human habitation is front and center. But no humans. Stick a person in the middle ground - somebody small - and it would make a difference, but the painting might still be a landscape. Stick two people in the painting, especially in the foreground, and it becomes a painting "about" the people, rather than a painting about the austerity of West Texas.
Will
Will