ABSTRACT
This chapter shows new strategies of apprehending the emerging urban environment as landscape through the shifting interplay of photographs and video. It examines several contemporary art and media projects and show correspondences with representational innovations in landscape architecture and design. Hence photography and video make for special complications in conceiving the image as both 'duplicate of a thing' and 'artistic operation'. On the threshold of the so-called digital revolution, the aim of Stafford's discussion was to get her readership to recognize the potential of computer-assisted visualizations for the renewal of an Enlightenment 'diaphaneity', meaning a more fluid cognitive interplay of images in representation. Jacobs's recognition of a recent tendency among photographers to foster a dialectic akin to Smithson's learned reconceptualization of the picturesque is directly related to recent representational strategies and theoretical attempts to properly distinguish the 'fragmented and hybrid' features of the emerging urban landscape.
