10 Views of Landscape
Perspectives
Reuben Jentink from SFU presented HUM class with a consideration of landscape as an abstract topic. Part of the reading leading up to the class was an article titled "The Beholding Eye: 10 versions of the same scene" by DW Meinig.
Meinig lists them:
1 Landscape as nature.- all the works of man are paltry compared to nature
2 Landscape as habitat - creating resources out of nature's materials
3 Landscape as artifact - we see the mark of man in everything
4 Landscape as system. - all we see is an immense and intricate system of systems
5 Landscape as problem - a condition needing correction
6 Landscape as wealth - assigning value to everything in view
7 Landscape as ideology - the symbols of the values, governing ideas, and underlying philosophies of a culture
8 Landscape as history - a complex cumulative record of the work of man and nature at this particular place
9 Landscape as place - an individual piece of the infinite mosaic of the earth.
10 Landscape as aesthetic - a preoccupation with artistic qualities instead of identity and function.
When I was a photographer I was very interested in landscape10. I was interested in light and form. Ansel Adams was a hero. I was interested in whatever caught my eye though, not particularly the wonder of nature. After all, the initial impetus to become a photographer was the amazing formwork I saw when I was a laborer on a hydro dam under construction. For me, photography was a matter of composing a picture within a frame by selecting a point of view. So for me, I might say that 'landscape" means "pictures I take outside". And I've taken dozens of pictures of the same scene; that is within the landscape as aesthetic perspective alone.
I find the very phrase "landscape as" to be unusual here. Generally I would say "a landscape" or "the landscape" or even "this landscape".( I forget the grammatical term here - article?) What the phrase indicates is the particular range of interests of the speaker.
For instance "landscape as nature" carries the implication that the works of mankind are somehow impure. I've lived pretty close to nature and it's not really very pure. Think about it. There are all these animals around pooping and peeing. Everything is covered in bacteria. So it's a phrase that carries an unspoken ideology.
Saying something counterintuitive like "landscape as nature" forces the listener to ponder. The first response is - wtf does that mean and then the brain starts attaching meaning until one seems to work. And with these 10 presented my brain tries to find what they all have in common that makes them "landscape"? I haven't quite found it yet ?
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.