ABSTRACT
This chapter argues with a rehearsal of the use of the term landscape in cultural geography, pointing out the elaborations, critiques and developments of the central role of vision in the definition of landscape. Landscape is clearly one of the central themes in contemporary cultural geography. The history of the term hardly needs elaborating given the vigorous reworking of the idea of landscape by what was once known as the 'new cultural geography. Humanistic geographers inherited the concern with the issue of landscape but turned their attention away from the 'morphology' of landscape and towards the 'experience' of landscape. The 'gaze' at the centre of dominant conceptions of landscape has been critiqued for being masculinist. The world of practice teases apart landscape in its orthodox form. The artist becomes the possessor and the people in the landscape – the world of practice is denied – are frozen out.
