ABSTRACT
For reasons of artistic merit or decision making, people have always striven to capture the essence of both natural and built environments that surround them. Wall paintings created by the ancient Egyptians capture long lost gardens in pictorial form, such as the garden of Sebekhotep found on a tomb wall in Thebes (Carroll 2003: 17). These early images mix together plan, elevation and bird’s eye viewpoints, making it hard for the modern eye to interpret (Gothein 1966). However, the acceptance and consistent usage of perspective in the Renaissance period contributed to more accurate depictions of landscapes, leading to the creation of images that resemble the real world rather closely. Audiences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were amazed by the creation of Eidophusikons, ‘moving’ pictures created by eighteenth-century English painter Philip James de Loutherbourg, dioramas or largescale panoramic paintings. These can be seen as the equivalent of IMAX cinemas of today. Related to these developments is a more abstract form of landscape visualization; cartography, which also has a long and rich pedigree (Ehrenberg 2005). Historically, capturing landscapes in images was driven by artistic, political or martial
needs, but it is also possible to impart how landscape may come to look through these methods. Important early examples of this are the ‘Red Books’ of landscape architect Humphry Repton (1752-1818), who created water colours of existing landscapes and his future vision of changes, utilizing a system of painted overlays on flapped hinges (Repton 1980). These provided his clients with an easy to use ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison of a proposed change to their estates. As photographic technology developed and became affordable at the turn of the twentieth
century, it became possible to capture existing landscapes far more rapidly than via drawing or painting. As a technical refinement the photomontage technique allowed new landscape features to be overlaid on to existing photography through manual etching or drawing on the photograph.
