Documenting the natural world: A history of landscape photography
Nature and photography are inextricably linked. It’s thanks to the natural world that cameras stopped being seen as objects used purely for recording information and started to be recognised as tools for creating works of art. And it’s thanks to photography that large swathes of the natural world have been protected. Landscape photography took a technical vocation and elevated it to an artform.
Early examples of landscape photography generally mimicked landscape painting in terms of their composition and subject matter. This is not entirely surprising when you consider how new photography was compared to painting. What’s more, photographs at this point took an extremely long time to produce. The very first photograph, taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, had an exposure time of 8 hours! So it made sense for photographers to focus on subjects where time wasn’t going to be an issue, like landscapes.
How the West was won (early landscape photography)
Fortunately, budding photographers weren’t short of inspiration. The exploration of the USA during the 19th century opened opened up a wonderful array of landscapes that helped pave the way for landscape photography as art. The American West, in particular, became a huge source of inspiration and provided us with some of the most important photographs in history. Several of the most influential of the early landscape photographers started out in photography because their lives just happened to lead them to the American West. The Yellowstone region of California played a key role in the development of landscape photography and continued to inspire photographers over the centuries. And it’s partly thanks to two talented photographers that generations of people have been able to enjoy Yellowstone National Park.
William Henry Jackson was one of the earliest pioneers of photography and, while he used photography primarily as a means of documenting the geography of the Yellowstone region, his work was crucial in the creation of Yellowstone National Park. Jackson began his creative career as a painter but in 1866 he left his old life behind, got a train to Omaha in Nebraska and started a photography business. In 1870 Jackson was invited to join a government survey of the Yellowstone River and Rocky Mountains, and was also the official photographer for the Hayden Geographical Survey the following year. Jackson’s photos, together with the rest of the survey’s findings, were instrumental in convincing Congress to create America’s first ever national park - Yellowstone National Park.
Summit of Jupiter Terraces, William Henry Jackson (1871)
Another photographer whose images were fundamental to the formation of Yellowstone National Park is Carleton Watkins who moved to California in 1851 in search of gold. Although Watkins didn’t make his fortune from the gold rush, he did discover a passion for photography and went on to become one of the most famous of the early landscape photographers. This was partly down to his large-scale images of Yosemite, which were some of the earliest photos of this wildly beautiful region to be seen in the east of America.
Piwyac, the Vernal Fall, Yosemite, Carleton Watkins (1861). Albumen silver print
Watkins was hired by the California State Geological Survey as their official photographer. The survey was one of the most ambitious ever undertaken and the team returned with huge amounts of new information about California. As with William Henry Jackson, the images produced by Watkins eventually helped convince Congress to sign legislation protecting the Yosemite region by creating Yosemite National Park. Two years later, in 1867, Watkins opened his own gallery in San Francisco - the Yosemite Art Gallery. Unfortunately the gallery was not a success and Watkins declared himself bankrupt in 1874. And just as Stanford University were on the verge of purchasing his collection in 1906, the great earthquake and subsequent fire that hit San Francisco destroyed his studio completely, wiping out his life’s work. Waktins eventually died in an asylum. A sad and ignominious ending for such an influential photographer.
Straight photography
The transition to photographing landscapes for purely aesthetic reasons was helped by Peter Henry Emerson towards the end of the nineteenth century. Emerson was a controversial figure, frequently clashing with the photographic establishment due to his strong opinions around the meaning and purpose of photography. He believed that photography should be classed as fine art, not simply something that reproduced an image for technical or scientific reasons. His soft focus, misty images of the Norfolk Broads are reminiscent of the Impressionist paintings of the same era.
Winter Pond, Henry Peter Emerson (1888)
Emerson championed a theory called “naturalistic photography”, helped along by the publication of his highly influential book in 1889 titled “Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art”. Naturalistic photography is a school of thought that advocates capturing nature exactly as it is, without any retouching or other form of post-production. Emerson argued that photography should emulate nature rather than alter it. The title page of his book included the quote from John Keats, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, immediately making clear his belief that there was no need to tamper with what the eye - or the lens - could see. “Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art” has been described as having the impact of a “bombshell dropped at a tea party”. However, Emerson eventually recanted his opinions in a publication called “The Death of Naturalistic Photography” and retired from photography altogether.
Another proponent of realistic photography is also perhaps the most famous landscape photographer of them all - Ansel Adams. Once again, Yosemite and the American West are the main sources of inspiration but this time they weren’t being photographed as part of a scientific expedition. For Adams, the attraction was simply the sheer beauty of the region. Although he was a keen conservationist and eventually used his images as a way of protecting the environment, Adams created simply for the sake of creating.
Tenaya Creek, Dogwood, Rain, Ansel Adams (1948) Silver Gelatin print
Yosemite National Park can probably be credited for getting Adams into photography in the first place. He visited with his family as a young man and was blown away by its loveliness: “the splendor of Yosemite burst upon us and it was glorious...a new era began for me.” He initially experimented with techniques such as etching and soft focus - techniques popularised by photographers of the pictorial school as an attempt to recreate the look of paintings - but abandoned them for a more realistic approach. Like Emerson, Adams shunned the effects used by many of the early photographers and preferred a cleaner, sharp focused style.
The clarity of Adams’ photos was achieved thanks to his invention of the Zone System. This was a method used to calculate the optimal exposure and development time. The Zone System divides a scene into 10 zones on a tonal scale, with each tone being assigned a zone. There is a difference of one stop between each zone. This system also utilises something else that Adams was famous for - visualisation. Visualisation is a technique whereby the photographer takes in the scene, imagines how they want their finished picture to look and then takes the necessary steps to achieve this.
Adams was so passionate about producing pin sharp, realistic images that he co-founded an organisation known as Group f/64. The group comprised photographers who aimed to move away from the “creative license” of the pictorial movement and towards a more detailed, purist style of photography. The name “f/64” relates to the aperture setting on a large-format camera that gives a particularly good depth of field, creating a photo that’s sharp in every area. Their manifesto gives their style of photography the title of “pure photography” (also known as straight photography) and states that “pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form” (unlike Pictorialism). They also take the ideas originally put forward by Emerson and move them to the next level - “the members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium.” In other words, they advocated a style of photography that tried to recreate what the human eye could see while elevating their craft to an artform at the same time.
When he was a young man, Adams joined the Sierra Club, an environmental organisation dedicated to protecting the earth’s wildernesses and he worked as a caretaker at their Yosemite visitor facility. Not only did this mean that Adams could spend time photographing the surrounding sights; it shows that he took an interest in environmental causes from an early age. Later in life he used his photographs as a way of raising awareness of the need to preserve the natural world, particularly when the Sierra Club was trying to create a new national park in the Kings River region of the Sierra Nevadas. Although Adams would still insist that “beauty comes first”, it’s hard to deny his impact on conservationism.
Humanist photography
The conflicts that took place across Europe and Asia during the first half of the 20th century gave birth to a new style of photography - humanism. Humanist photography was not just an art form; it was a whole a way of thinking. Paris became the centre for humanist philosophy, a city reeling from the effects of the first two world wars. Intellectuals, artists and writers based themselves there and aimed to return to the values of dignity, equality and tolerance set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN in 1948. Humanist photography concerned itself with everyday life and documented the normal things within society. It was a celebration of the freedoms people had in a post-war world and it found the beauty the lies within the ordinary. Humanist photographers hoped that their images would help to stimulate compassion and understanding.
Although humanist photographers tended to focus on people and often fall into the categories of photojournalism or street photography, Mario Giacomelli also photographed the landscapes of his native Italy. Giacomelli started his photography career in the 1950s and his style is characterised by bold contrasts and almost abstract compositions, particularly his landscapes. He created his distinctive high contrast look by using electronic flash, over-developing his film and heavy printing, influenced by his training in printing and graphic design.
Paesaggio 283, Mario Giacomelli (1968)
Giacomelli documented life in his home town of Senigallia - part of an impoverished region in southern Italy - and his striking aerial landscapes of the surrounding countryside are a marked departure from the style of Ansel Adams and the earlier American photographers. He was influenced by his compatriot, Giuseppe Cavalli, who moved to Senigallia in the early 1950s. Like Peter Henry Emerson and others, Cavalli was keen to promote photography as art and, with this in mind, formed a photography club called Misa in 1953. Giacomelli joined and eventually became the club treasurer. It’s easy to see a strongly creative streak in his landscape images and he has admitted that he sometimes manipulated the scene to make it more aesthetically pleasing. His daring techniques made him one of the most original photographers of the 20th century.
Abstract photography
While Ansel Adams and the other photographers of the American West stuck to the very realistic look of straight photography, another photographic movement was developing over the course of the 20th century: abstract photography. The desire for photography to have the same status as painting inspired photographers to push creative boundaries, especially as abstract expressionism was taking off as a recognised art form. The pictorial movement of the late 19th/early 20th centuries laid the groundwork for abstract photography. Both schools shared a common goal - for photography to be classed as a fine art - and they manipulated their images to create unusual and striking results.
Alfred Stieglitz is considered to be the godfather of pictorialism and coined the term “photo-secession” - a break from the restrictions of traditional photography in the bid to create “art”. Like abstract art this type of photography was subjective, either because of edits made in post-production or because of how the subject was framed. Thanks to his work around pictorialism and photo-secessionism, Stieglitz is credited with producing some of the earliest examples of abstract photography. His photo series, “Equivalents”, is believed to be the first set of photographs where the subject is deliberately left open to interpretation and, as such, can be considered as abstract. “Equivalents”, taken between 1925 and 1934, is a collection of photos of clouds, generally without anything else in the shot. Many of the photos are high-contrast with the sky appearing almost pitch black compared to the lighter clouds. The lack of reference points in the images helps to give them an abstract quality. According to photography historian Sarah Greenough, by doing this Stieglitz was “destabilising your relationship with nature in order to have you think less about nature, not to deny that it's a photograph of a cloud, but to think more about the feeling that the cloud formation evokes."
Equivalent, Alfred Stieglitz (1926) Silver Gelatin print
This idea of an image being able to stir emotions within the viewer is an important pillar of abstract art. The name of Stieglitz’s piece, “Equivalents”, is a direct reference to the theory of equivalence, the belief that colours, shapes and lines reflect the inner “vibrations of the soul” (according to the abstract artist Kandinsky). The pure abstraction of the clouds corresponds to human emotions and ideas. Similarly, Harry Callahan’s bold photo series called “Grasses” takes the concept of Stieglitz’s clouds and applies it to terra firma. These eight photos of American grasslands are highly abstract - tightly cropped and showing only grass with no other points of reference. The images are chaotic and full of movement, with the potential to conjure up a myriad of feelings in the viewer.
Abstract landscape photography has continued well into the present day, with two of the most notable contemporary abstract photographers being Chris Friel and Michael Kenna. Chris Friel started his creative career as a painter and his smudgy, soft focus landscapes seem to straddle both painterly and photographic styles. He achieves his look by using a hand held camera, exposing the photograph for 3-5 seconds and including deliberate movement - the end result being images that draw you in with their gentle beauty. Looking through his gallery, it’s plain to see that Stieglitz and Callahan’s work seems to have influenced Friel to some extent, particularly his “Night” and “Silver” series’.
Cercle, Chris Friel
Fellow Englishman, Michael Kenna, is also known for his abstract landscape photography. He works almost entirely in black and white, using medium format cameras like Hasselblad with exposures of up to 10 or 12 hours in some cases. Kenna tends to seek out unusual landscapes in atmospheric light, usually at dusk or night time, and develops square format images which he believes help the viewer to interact better with the subject. Similarly, Kenna’s predisposition for black and white photography is because “having less information allows your imagination to work more to create more options” - a mindset straight from the abstract school of thought. Despite this, Kenna’s photos seem to sit somewhere in between the richly detailed, straight photographic world of Ansel Adams and the highly conceptual world of Stieglitz and his ilk. A happy compromise for the modern age.
After decades of photographers pushing for the same status as painters, it’s safe to say that most people do now consider photography to be an art form. Landscape photos hang on walls all over the globe - a rich mix of styles and subject matter. The beauty of the world inspired the earliest photographers and others over time, leading to the development of fine art photography. However, landscape photography also serves to remind us that there’s a wonderful world out there and that it’s something we should all value.