Scapes: Land, City, Hell (2023)

Landscape Stopped Being a View and Became a Report

Landscape photography inherited its manners from painting: a foreground to enter, a middle distance to travel, a horizon to rest on. That grammar assumed the land was there to be looked at. The twenty-nine works in this edition, made between 2016 and 2022 by twenty-nine photographers, largely refuse the assumption. They treat terrain as the product of decisions — zoning, extraction, drainage, abandonment — and the picture becomes less a view than a report on what has been done.

The Picturesque Was a Set of Rules

The pastoral landscape is not a natural way of seeing but an eighteenth-century invention with published guidelines. William Gilpin's tours told travellers where to stand; the Claude glass, a tinted convex mirror, let tourists preview a scene in the tonality of a seventeenth-century painting before deciding whether it merited admiration. Those rules survive intact in contemporary practice — the rule of thirds, the foreground rock, the golden-hour bias, the removal of pylons — and recognising them as rules rather than perceptions is the first step in deciding whether to keep them.

The City Is a Landscape With Owners

Cityscape photography sits awkwardly in the genre because urban terrain has titles, boundaries and someone to bill for its maintenance. The New Topographics exhibition of 1975 made the point bluntly by presenting tract housing, parking structures and industrial parks in flat, undramatic light: the man-altered landscape was still landscape, and refusing to beautify it was the argument. Work in that lineage tends toward frontality, even illumination and a suppressed sky, because drama would suggest the photographer had an opinion about the weather rather than about the land use.

Hell Is a Genre, Not a Place

The third term in this exhibition's title names something older than either of the others. The sublime, as Burke described it, is the pleasure taken in scale and threat from a position of safety, and catastrophe imagery has drawn on it since long before photography existed. What has changed is the credibility of the image: a burning hillside or a flooded street no longer reads as allegory, and the sublime has consequently become difficult to enjoy. Photographers working with anticipated catastrophe are therefore working against their own genre's most reliable pleasure.

Scale and the Absent Human

Landscape photography seldom contains people, yet it is entirely about them. Agency is signalled indirectly: a fence line, a straight edge where straight edges do not occur in nature, a monoculture, a road, a stump. The most economical pictures use a single such marker and let it contaminate the whole frame. The alternative is to include a figure purely for scale, which solves a legibility problem and creates a narrative one, because a person in a landscape immediately becomes a protagonist.

Why the Theme Recurs

Land changes faster than the conventions used to photograph it, so a landscape brief issued a few years apart produces different pictures from an unchanged prompt. TCG Gallery is an independent online photography gallery, and each juried exhibition remains part of a permanent public archive after its run ends, so these catalogs accumulate into a longer record than any single project. Photographers can enter the current photography open calls directly.