LANDSCAPES

I struggle with calling a photographic image a landscape. In the real world, we generally use the word landscape to describe all we can see. The definition of the word landscape on lexicon.com, the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, is “all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.”

Obviously, photographs do not include “all” the visible features of a landscape. A photograph provides a limited view of the landscape compared to ours. The best description of this difference I have found compares a landscape photograph to looking out a window from inside a room. What you can see of the landscape is defined by the window. Like a window, the photographer uses the camera’s perspective, what they see through the viewfinder, to determine a very particular part of the landscape they want to include or exclude. What you see is what the photographer wants you to see, a “window” of their vision.