An anthology of landscape photography essays written by Liz Wells, an established professor in photographic culture who also edited two popular academic books The Photography Reader and Photography: A Critical Introduction. This anthology, like previous, provides an academic and extensive analysis of its subject both historically and contemporary. The first essay Landscape: Time, Space, Place, Aesthetics is an introductory argument that landscape is a physical space given meaning through human ideological processes. Landscape as art, through a historical narrative, is discussed in relation to landscape as a construct, the values of which are reiterated through representational aesthetics in art. Another essay of interest is Pastoral Heritage: Britain viewed through a critical lens which argues that all land, even the coastal seas, in Britain is managed and landscaped through multi-layered socio-cultural legacies of which are amplified through the scarcity of the island land conveying monetary cultural attitudes and power and therefore celebrating it. The essays interpretation of the British landscape as a constructed land informs and justifies my works contextual narrative of managed and non-managed space.
Wells enforcing landscape as a social construct:
Representation of land as landscape, whether in romantic or in more topographic modes, reflects and reinforces contemporary political, social and environmental attitudes.” (Wells, 2011, p. 1)
Landscape is a social product; particular landscapes tell us something about cultural histories and attitudes. Landscape results from human intervention to shape or transform natural phenomena, of which we are simultaneously a part. A basic useful definition of landscape thus would be vistas encompassing both nature and the changes that humans have effected on the natural world. (Wells, 2011, pp. 1–2)
On the notion of ‘space’ and ‘place’ Wells notes that history turns one into the other:
History turns space into place. This simple statement masks a complexity of ideological processes associated with the relation of humankind and our environment. (Wells, 2011, p. 19)
Wells states that landscape images are representations but also responses to space:
Landscape pictures thus centrally contribute to the representation of space as place and, crucially, imply responses to particular places. (Wells, 2011, p. 25)