| Critically situating my thesis within the discourse of photographic history, I maintain that landscape photography presents an ideological way of seeing, based on cultural and social values, and that its location in the museum directly influences the interpretation of the work. My study includes an analysis of two exhibitions of landscape photography that took very different approaches. The first, New Topographies: Photographs of a 'Man-Altered' Landscape (1975), helped to naturalize the interpretation of landscape photography as stylistically neutral and aesthetically modernist. The more recent exhibition, Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate (2005-ongoing), presents landscape photographs as social critique. Lastly, I look to the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky to demonstrate, through analysis of his images and surrounding discourse, that landscape photography is made up of a complex layering of culturally-derived meanings that are too easily simplified by the presentation of images as solely aesthetic or documentary. |
