ABSTRACT
The subject of landscape was once central to England’s visual art. The idea of the picturesque became its typical embodiment. However, the contemporary and post-imperial English countryside can now be viewed as picturesque, or even as ‘English’, only through a sort of rueful irony. This chapter reflects on new ideas concerning landscape, place, space and identity. They are followed by close discussions of work by photographers based in England, but, either from overseas or located outside the mainstream culture by their ethnicity, gender or ideology. These differences are reflected in their post-Industrial and post-Colonial English Landscapes, marginal and counter-cultural spaces, and imageries that reflect a concern with the language of representation and desire, or the body and the natural world; even the retirement landscapes of Spain as extensions of Northern Europe’s “existential space”.
