ABSTRACT
Landscape photography has been enjoying a spectacular resurgence in the coffee table/art book press. The taxonomic term ‘landscape’ comes from Western art history and refers to a genre of painterly practice that gathered momentum and prestige only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the aristocratic classical tradition of painting, landscapes were principally fields for noble action - carefully cultivated gardens suited to the gods and heroes who populated them. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, after the ‘Indian problem’ had been brutally solved and the frontier ceased to exist, a veritable Cult of Wild Nature flourished, having undergone several evolutionary phases since the continent’s discovery by white Europeans. The dominant landscape aesthetic in museum/gallery photography was self-consciously established as an offshoot of the American purist/precisionist movement in art during the late 1920s and 1930s.
