ABSTRACT
Indeed, to a remarkable extent, landscape gave rise to photography, and landscape as a social practice has ever since vested much of its fate in photographic reproduction. Announced with much fanfare in France and then England in 1839, the invention of photography arose from an interest in landscape, and romanticism was the ideological apparatus that governed its emergence. Prior to the Romantic turn toward landscape, the academic principles governing pictorial representation in England and France were mostly hostile to the emergence of photography. The Diorama brought a spectacular new dynamism to the representation of landscape. It was one of several related visual technologies that practitioners of landscape developed in the Romantic period. In the mid-twentieth century, practitioners such as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter devised approaches to depicting landscape through photography that appealed to the desire to imagine America as a place of untouched beauty.
