ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the broad history of the landscape genre and provides space to contemporary practitioners who position themselves within the art world, using photography as their critical practice. It argues that the struggle that photographers had in order to be considered part of that world and to have their work exhibited in galleries and museums. This battle was decisively settled in the photographers' favour in 1940, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York established a department of photography. The movement labelled Pictorialism, which arose in the 1880s and lasted until about 1910, was both a reaction against the 'tame delineation' of topographical recording and a bid to have photography taken seriously as a form of art. The career of Samuel Bourne, a Staffordshire-born photographer who spent six successful years in India, illustrates both the commercial development of scenic photography and the way this fitted into the colonial enterprise.
