LANDSCAPE

When we speak of “landscape,” we rarely mean what is directly before us. The word more often sends the mind elsewhere toward an idealized, distant place shaped by beauty, scale, and promise. Guidebooks, postcards, and canonical photographs have trained us to expect landscape as something elevated and removed. As Roland Barthes observed in his critique of Le Guide Bleu, such representations do not simply describe places; they mystify them. Monumental photographs by figures like Ansel Adams reinforce this distance, asking for reverence rather than presence. To go there oneself requires time, risk, and commitment. Thanks to photography, we are offered another option: to remain where we are, viewing from afar, through a glowing screen or a printed surface. We can experience beauty, wildness, terror, or mystery without fully entering their conditions. 

August Sander, Rhineland Landscapes, 1974
Image Courtesy: Feldschuh Gallery






Robert Adams, Malheur National Forest, south of John Day, Grant County, Oregon, US, 1999.

Image Courtesy: prix.pictet.com/

¨Clear-cutting is a controversial forestry practice in which most or all trees in an area are uniformly cut down. More than 90 per cent of the original forest in the American Northwest has been clear-cut at least once. The large stumps in these pictures are remnants of ancient woods where trees commonly grow to be five hundred or more years old.¨ said Robert Adams.

Source: Prix Pictet

If we zoom out across a longer span of time, this distance begins to look historically produced rather than natural. For much of human history, land was not conceived as an external object but as a lived environment - inhabited, worked, feared, and cared for. Early societies understood themselves as embedded within ecological systems rather than positioned above them. Over time, and especially under modern Western ideologies shaped by religion, state power, colonial expansion, and capitalism, land increasingly became territory: measured, bordered, owned, extracted from. Our relationship to it shifted from participation to management, from kinship to control.

Landscape photography emerges within this altered relationship. It does not merely depict land; it records how land has been seen, claimed, and transformed. Every image carries traces of the visible and the invisible: history, labor, displacement, memory, desire. In this sense, landscape is never neutral. It is shaped by borders and inheritance, scarred by industry, cultivated and fenced, burned, worshipped, abandoned. To photograph land is already to negotiate with power: who occupies it, who is excluded from it, and who is allowed to define what it means.

Thomas Struth, Landscape No 34, Maisacker nach der Ernte, Winterthur (1993)
Image Courtesy: Mutual Art

Yet some photographers resist this inherited distance. Rather than standing apart, they enter the landscape fully, allowing themselves to be affected by it. Their work recalls Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat: a vessel no longer steering but being carried, its wide eyes absorbing everything as it drifts through uncertainty. In such practices, vision becomes immersion. The landscape is no longer a view to be admired but a force that demands emotional, ethical, and political reckoning. To enter it is to accept risk of losing control, of being changed.

This issue gathers works that live within this tension. The landscapes presented here are not static scenes but active sites of memory, conflict, longing, and identity. They document land as it is lived, contested, and imagined, while also revealing each photographer’s personal negotiation with place. These terrains are unfinished. They continue to shift under our feet, insisting that we return to them not as tourists, but as participants. The land looks back. It remembers what we try to forget. It asks something of us.

Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait, 1992
Image Courtesy: sophie-ristelhueber.format.com/

“People will go in, see photographs of landscapes, and when they get closer they’ll see that they’re landscapes with problems”, says Sophie Ristelhueber of the series Fait (Fact), which abandons the documentary for the aesthetic in its approach to questions of land and territory. The aerial photographs disturb our perception of the landscape and blur the line between macrocosm and microcosm as views become map-like. In these images dating from 1991, the artist – always fascinated by the notion of trace – records the scars in the Kuwait desert, the wounds inflicted on the land by the Gulf War.

Source: Centre Pompidou

Perhaps this is why certain landscapes refuse to let us go. They carry echoes of who we were and outlines of who we might become. To encounter them is never just to look, it is to be implicated.

Suffo Moncloa, So Far There Is One Car, 2016

Image Credit:  Photobook titled 17 8 176 8 6 (EVIDENCES) published in 2018
Is there a certain type of landscape that has especially inspired you to photograph?

Do particular landscapes resonate with the emotional or political core of your work?