Built Worlds: Photography, landscape and different natures

Built Worlds: Photography, landscape and different natures is a curated portfolio and essay project commissioned by The Photographer’s Gallery, London, published as part of the Viewpoints series. The essay references theories of photography, landscape and art to discuss the selected portfolio works, proposing that landscape photographs can equally be sources of knowledge, critical engagement and aesthetic pleasure. The selection of work includes a range of recent examples of landscape photography as a diverse field of practice comprised of still and moving image. Interdisciplinary approaches are involved within and between different works, sharing a common element in the use of lens-based technologies and light sensitive materials in encounters with non-human and humanly built worlds, or what might be termed “different natures”.

The project surveys how photography emerged as nature receded from direct experience and places of habitation and work transformed. Consequently, natures, understood as related to landscape are defined variously as wildernesses or pre-human places; human habitations and agriculture; the aesthetic landscape created for visual pleasure; landscapes created for ecological purposes. The project considers these definitions as culturally produced and not absolute, concluding that natures are multiple and situated within a spectrum of changing ideas of place in which landscape photographs play a vital role.