Mention ‘landscape photography’ these days and many would immediately think of that style of photography that looks to the ‘beautiful’ or to the ‘sublime’ or to the ‘picturesque’ in our countryside. Perhaps we have Edmund Burke’s ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful‘ to blame for that …

Romanticism in landscape photography is nothing new of course. 19th century Romantic photography provided a position which enabled a counter-reaction into Modernism.

Today this romantic form of ‘landscape photography’, is both ubiquitous and at times cloying ¹. The view that the ‘picturesque’ ² is inimical to serious visual explorations of the countryside (what I will call critical landscape) has had its adherents for many years. I think it was Fay Godwin who ranted against the picturesque back in the 1970’s. The problem with the ubiquity of sugar-coated photographs is that it drives critical landscape photography to the sidelines to such an extent that even the very term – ‘landscape’ – seems to have become synonymous with that aspect of photography that draws on the picturesque.

So how far can we stretch the term ‘ landscape’? If it is to encapsulate both the picturesque and the critical is it not in danger of having to work beyond its means?

Perhaps it was ever thus. The genre of landscape has come to embrace much more than photographs of the countryside. The tradition of working the land with a camera to interrogate historical, social, political, ecological and psychological themes has a rich history ³. Although classifications can be helpful, they are also limiting. We might think about Bill Brandt’s landscapes in terms of psychological themes (the ‘grim and grainy brigade’) but in doing so we might overlook his emphasis of transcendental motifs, for example. Hajek-Halke may be best known for his abstractions, but, as with Cartier-Bresson we should not deny his surrealist tendencies. We may recognise a John Davies landscape for its topographical elevated viewpoints looking back at the urban from the rural, but we should also note his ‘fine art photography’ credentials. And so on.

The point is that we cannot pinpoint photographers onto one end of an absolute scale for all time. Each photographer admits of degrees and therefore each needs to be relativised to an area of inquiry. Classifications are there simply to help us to frame questions ⁴.

For my part I continue to look carefully at those photographers who have worked the landscape in all its diversities, as I trudge the paths of the countryside of North Wales in all weathers, sleeping rough, questioning the landscape, both external and internal, with my camera. And when I seem unable to see with the clarity needed, I fall back on my inspirations: In my sitting room I have four Fay Godwin prints on the wall. I have looked at them almost every day for 30 years and they still motivate me. And there is also of course Raymond Moore. Let me sign off with a couple of his pictures:

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The ability to see something special in the humdrum – a very real talent.