Painting and Photographing Landscapes: Pictorial Conventions and Gestalts

Landscapes have been painted and photographed, they are studied by geographers and ecologists, and they can be designed by landscape architects. The concept of “landscape” hangs ambiguously between a visual representation and a natural entity. Historically, the primacy was for the visual aspect. When we designate natural scenery as “landscape,” we are in fact using a metaphor. This metaphor is a visual metaphor, since the way we understand what a landscape is, is formed by the pictorial conventions associated with the original landscape-as-picture. This essay takes its point of departure in the juxtaposition of two very different conceptions of natural landscapes: the holistic landscapes of Alexander von Humboldt, and the fragmented landscapes of geographers during the 1920s and ’30s. Both forms are intimately connected with different modes of pictorial representation: paintings, in the case of the Humboldtian landscape; and photography for the fragmented landscape.

There are several ways in which we may think of the relationship between modes of visual representation (wholes or fragments) and the conceptualization of the natural entity called “landscape.” One is that the different techniques of visualization (painting, photography) produce different realities. Suggestions to this extent, not specifically aimed at the (visual) landscape, have been made by Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. The other is that techniques of visualization are the neutral carriers of gestalts, or visual metaphors, which shape our ideas of reality, in this case of the form of the land. A middle ground may be found in the historical—that is, contingent—relationship between techniques or media of pictorial representation and the gestalts with which they are associated. We will return to this in the third section of this essay. First, let us examine the emergence of the holistic and fragmented renderings of landscapes.

The Painted Landscape

The garden of Stourhead in Wiltshire, England, is perhaps the most famous example of the inverse relationship between land and its pictorial representation. According to legend, the garden was designed (around 1760) by replicating in three dimensions a painting by Claude Lorrain, and although this is most probably not literally the case, the owner-designer’s taste was much influenced by the paintings in his possession (among which were some by Claude).¹ During the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, the term “landscape” denoted a work on canvass. By 1760, however, “landscape” was sometimes metaphorically applied to gardens and their surrounding vistas. The Leasowes, an English garden contemporaneous with Stourhead, was said to form “a landskip [sic] fit to the pencil of Salvator Rosa.”²

We have to wait until Alexander von Humboldt, however, for the natural landscape to become established as a separate unity existing in nature independent from its pictorial representation. Humboldt accomplished this by developing the natural landscape out of the painterly landscape.³ In his Ansichten der Natur (1807), which he wrote shortly after having accomplished his voyage through the Americas, and most of all in his Cosmos (1847–52), he praises the intuitive (“dark”) feeling of painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael to develop a feeling for the whole from particulars, such as the typical image of grouping of trees and their intertwined foliage.

From an art-historical perspective, Humboldt was in the vanguard of the typical nineteenth-century realistic appreciation of Dutch seventeenth-century art. He “saw” something in the paintings that probably was not there in the eyes of their creators and contemporary spectators. Although Humboldt was well aware of the fact that Ruisdael’s landscapes were produced in the studio, and that they do not lay claim to topographical accuracy, he appreciated them for conveying a realism in the depiction of landscape elements that extended over and beyond individual elements. In a word, he appreciated Ruisdael (and other painters) for their proto-ecological rendering of natural scenery. For Ruisdael and his viewers, however, a unity of a very different nature was at stake, although the extent to which Dutch landscape and genre paintings should be seen as spiritual allegories is a matter of ongoing debate.

Ruisdael’s method of composition, like that of all his contemporaries, was...