National Geographic News
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Landscape photography is no longer limited to sunsets, mountains, and scenic vistas. Once largely the domain of nature photographers such as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, the craft now includes urban and industrial settings along with other scenes that reflect humans' interaction with the natural world.
Ferdinand Protzman presents a broader interpretation of one of photography's most popular genres in Landscape: Photographs of Time and Place. In this new book by National Geographic, the award-winning cultural writer and critic describes landscape photography as the intersection of time, place, and people.
Landscape documents landscape photography from its earliest days to its contemporary form. Protzman considers the changing perceptions of what landscapes are and how humans relate to them as well as changes in technology and techniques.
National Geographic News recently spoke with Protzman about his book.
What do you hope people take away from this book?
I think if people look at the pictures and read the essays and come away thinking about landscape in a different way, thinking about it not in the narrow, classical, modernist, sterile, Ansel Adams, black-and-white postcard sense, but in a far broader and much more dynamic sense, I would be happy. My idea was to try to stimulate and provoke discussion about what is a landscape photograph … and our relationship to landscape and how these things, these notions of the place we find ourselves in, have changed over time and continue to change.
How has landscape photography changed over the years?
There have been a number of changes. The physical landscape that we photograph has changed pretty dramatically. The notion of pristine wilderness is gone. What wilderness remains in the world is preserved and carefully managed by governments and even there there are issues such as, do we clear the brush to prevent forest fires because this might affect civilization that is now bordering on our little patch of pristine wilderness.
The great change in landscape photography is that it's become steadily more personal, more conceptual, and in many instances, more minimal. I think these were all elements that were present in early photography. This personal sense has stayed with it, but the conceptual and minimal elements faded out for a while.
Starting in the 1960s I think there was a bit of a liberation movement in landscape photography—an expansion of the parameters of what could be a landscape, how we can view it, and how we can photograph it.
Fine artists working with photography began looking at the external world and began saying, "I'm not interested in sunsets or mountain ranges or beautiful vistas. I'm interested in the way the sea and the sky meet out on the open ocean." An example of that would be the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, who has an entire body of photographs that are really nothing more than sea and sky, heaven meeting earth with a horizontal line going through it. In one sense, these are minimal tonal fields because his photographs are black and white. In another sense, they're exactly what meets our eye.
