ABSTRACT
The 1975 New Topographies exhibition marked a profound shift in the practice of landscape photography. Contemporary landscape photography, increasingly participates in generating, transforming, and disseminating perceptions of technologically-produced environmental risk, posing possible environmental catastrophe as a globally shared social and political reality. In contemporary landscape photography, the reduced world of the near future is an environment in which all traces of the human are pushed out to make way for spaces and systems which follow the logic of the 'total system' of late capital. And an environment that offers no hope of human agency is one from which all that is human has been categorically purged. So-called 'biophilia' hypotheses propose that 'certain properties of the physical environments of early humans probably had major influences on risk probabilities and survival chances'. In The Symbolism of Habitat, Jay Appleton borrows the phenomenological notion of 'affordance' to describe the opportunities for engagement offered by particular environments.
