ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two approaches to photographing the landscape: the picturesque and the sublime. These terms do not relate to different kinds of spaces or objects – the same elements can be used to signify either picturesque or sublime, but to their organization. The picturesque emerged as a literary and artistic aesthetic during the second half of the eighteenth century. The paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin and the Reverend William Gilpin’s drawings all played an influential part in defining the movement. Where the picturesque featured trees and rivers, a scene one might walk into, the sublime invited the viewer to gape in awe at the vista, looking into a vast valley. What is consistent across the discourse of the sublime is that it entails both an experience of loss and the compensation for this loss. The chapter considers the work of Mohini Chandra and Christopher Stewart, Sally Mann, Justin James King and Thomas Albdorf.
