Like the Romantic painters of the 19th century, who used lush landscapes to represent deeper philosophical notions, landscape photographers are often portraying far more than beautiful terrain.
Photographers have captured the land to evoke metaphor, capture the sublime, toy with tradition, reveal conflict, and warn us about our impact on the natural world. They have long grappled with our relationship to the Earth. Ansel Adams, arguably the most famous landscape photographer of the 20th century, used the splendor of his beloved High Sierra to plead for our care of nature. And contemporary photographers have furthered the medium, exploring new concepts and formats that often deal with both beauty and critical contemporary issues. Here, we highlight 20 contemporary photographers exploring the deeper meanings of landscape photography, organized thematically.
Landscapes Of Conflict
While photojournalists show areas of conflict through unflinching views of war, fine-art photographers capture the tension inherent in such terrain: the beauty of the land and its unsettling history.
American photographers Richard Misrach and Vietnamese-American photographer An-My Lê both capture sweeping landscapes that relate subtle narratives of human conflict.
Misrach’s airy, colored compositions of deserts in the American West show hints of human presence that evoke the stories of migrants: tire tracks, water jugs, and stretches of border wall.
Lê’s own personal experience fleeing Vietnam as a child in 1975 in an American military transport plane colors her work. Her black-and-white series Viêt Nam (1994–98) pictures the modern landscapes of her native country, steeped in her memories of the war, while Events Ashores (2014) follows the American military in non-combat situations with dreamlike hues. My life has been completely affected by American foreign policy, Lê told. They were the perpetrators, but they were also the saviors.
Irish photographer and filmmaker Richard Mosse employs lush color in an often unsettling way. Using infrared film for his Infra series (2010–11), which focuses on the war between the Congolese army and rebels, Mosse transforms the green and brown foliage of the land into vivid pinks and reds. With armed men and women in military fatigues against the candy-colored trees, Mosse’s images suggest an otherworldly landscape beleaguered by human strife.
American artist Trevor Paglen, too, balances unease and beauty. Paglen creates painterly compositions that look like star trails, gradient skies, and hilltop retreats, but in reality, they’re black sites, offshore prisons, drones, and satellites shot with astro-telescopic lenses. Has government surveillance ever looked so ethereal?
The Sublim
Few places in the world are left untouched by humankind, so photographers who seek the sublime must consider how our presence affects the magic of the land. American photographer David Benjamin Sherry works in the tradition of Adams, showing the allure of the American West’s national parks in large-format film as an appeal to conserve them. However, while Adams was a black-and-white purist, Sherry uses intensely saturated monochromatic hues of yellow ochre, turquoise, and indigo to challenge the traditions of landscape photography.
American photographer Vanessa Marsh oscillates between glittering black-and-white night skies and hazy cotton-candy sunlight in two of her bodies of work. The former, Everywhere All At Once (2012–present), uses a combination of photography, drawing, and darkroom techniques to show the vast expanse of the universe above, concealed in part by the silhouettes of earthly things, like palm trees and power lines. A lot of the works speak to a sense of isolation, how that isolation relates to the landscape, and how I find myself in that landscape—physically, metaphorically, spiritually, she has said. For The Sun Beneath the Sky (2018–present), Marsh creates imaginary landscapes using cut paper and multiple exposures.
Shooting from above, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky reduces the world to richly colored textures, like the ripples of rice terraces in China’s Yunnan Province and the stained glass–like salt pans in the American West. He organizes his scenes by subject: oil, quarries, water, and mines, as well as the Anthropocene. The last category, he has written, shows the indelible marks left by humankind on the geological face of our planet.
For more than three decades, Andreas Gursky has focused on both the grandeur of the natural world and man-made settings, including a technicolored 99-cent store and a sprawling Amazon warehouse. In the 1990s, Gursky became famous for his massive, hyper-detailed works created through digital manipulation. In his images, every tree, window, or product is in focus, creating a sense of awe through scale.
Tranquility
As a time-based practice, photography offers artists the ability to isolate a still moment from movement or chaos in the natural world. Japanese-born, New York–based photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for his examinations of time. Also an architect, he’s inspired by the 20th-century Surrealists and Dadaists. He takes long exposures of seascapes until sea and sky are both gently blurred fields of grey, and seizes moments of calm from the frenzy of electricity.
For the latter body of work, Sugimoto used a generator to send up to 400,000 volts through his large-format film negatives onto a metal table to expose explosions of lighting onto the emulsion. Though taken indoors, the branches of white resemble trees or braided rivers, rendering powerful currents into moments of contemplation.
Recalling Sugimoto’s seascapes, Korean-born, New York–based photographer Jungjin Lee also relies on soft greys to inspire tranquility. In her work, the trees, skies, and land bleeding into one another are redolent of East Asian ink paintings. To achieve this effect, Lee hand-coats mulberry paper with light-sensitive emulsion to turn it into a photographic surface, then exposes scenes of winding roads, calm waters, and shadowy deserts onto the textured sheets.
Lee, who assisted famed photographer Robert Frank, has a deep love for the American Southwest’s arid lands. She captures the desert’s details in blacks and greys, as well as colorful monochromatic hues.
Emerging Seattle-based photographer Cody Cobb also finds solace in American deserts. Cobb meanders through the West for weeks at a time, contemplating stillness and isolation in his scenes, which emphasize striking colors and the geometry of the land. Cobb’s images can seem like portals to otherworldly landscapes—a concept that Italian artist Giovanni Ozzola takes a little more literally.
Ozzola is singularly fascinated by interior scenes that feature light-drenched windows or doorways to the outside world. The uncanny images are sometimes printed to scale, so that one can stand in front of the images and peer into the illusion of space.
Abstraction
When photographers bend the traditional rules of landscape photography, they can distort our perception of the world or guide us to greater understanding. For decades, Dutch artist Jan Dibbets has spliced images together to shift land and sky and sea. With Land 0° – 135° (2009), he does so literally—the series of 10 color images show a progressive rotation, so that the land eventually tips and becomes sky.
German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has photographed nearly every type of subject—from youth culture to domestic still lifes—but he often returns to the sea and the sky. In his series Vertical Landscapes (1995–present), he has effaced the boundaries between them, as well as those of day and night, and clouds and air. In 2016, he printed the series on posters to protest Brexit, showing that boundaries of horizon lines, which we perceive to be real, do not actually exist.
Landscape paintings and photographs, which involve the sky, and to some extent the sea, are always close to abstraction, he told. They are a framing of the unframable, of an infinite expanse, infinite until it hits the horizon.
Through rephotographing or reprinting images, photographers can play with the surface of the picture itself. Japanese artist Daisuke Yokota shoots a range of subjects, including landscapes, on a point-and-shoot camera, then photographs the images multiple times to purposely degrade the image. He’s used other techniques, like treating the film with acid or boiling water, to similarly influence the original image.
American photographer Penelope Umbrico who once arranged grids of tens of thousands of hyper-colorful found images of sunsets from Flickr—has also rephotographed images, but not her own. In Range (2012–present), she appropriates mountain scenes of the masters of photography andintroduces fake light leaks akin to camera-app filters like Instagram. Light leaks and chemical burn filters are especially absurd in the context of both analog photography and smart-phone camera technology: master photographers would never accept such mistakes in their work, she has written. Instead of working with light as a mercurial and revered medium, apps use algorithms to produce effects in an automatic and limitless way.
Human Influence
As the human population swells, relentless development ensues, and the climate crisis worsens, our impact on the land is more visible than ever. Photographers chronicling the natural world are preserving memories of it as it increasingly disappears.
British photographer Nick Brandt asks: What happens when animals die out? For his body of work Inherit the Dust (2016), Brandt erected and photographed monumental, life-sized images of lions and elephants in developed areas to show how their habitats have been transformed.
His latest project, This Empty World (2018), shows staged scenes of animals in even more claustrophobic urban conditions. Brandt built partial sets, captured animals as they passed through, then completed the sets and cast people to fill the scenes. His collaged images show humans and animals living in disharmony.
Conversely, Brazilian documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado seeks out the idyllic, untouched nature that still remains. His eight-year ode to nature, Genesis (2013), shows the grandeur of flora, fauna, and indigenous people in black-and-white film, organized geographically. Though Salgado has said he is not an activist, his photos remind us of what’s at stake. We are living in an important moment for our planet, he has said. The photographs are a way of sharing this historical moment.
In the United States, the New Topographics movement began in 1975 with a seminal exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York, showing landscapes altered by mankind. Robert Adams, a major figure of the movement, published multiple books in the 1970s and ’80s on the spread of suburbs and industrialization in Colorado, including The New West (1974) and Summer Nights (1985). In his series, Adams focused on both human development and the quietude of nature. The goal, he once said, is to face facts but to find a basis for hope.
American photographer Terry Evans has shared a similar ethos while capturing the American Midwest from above. Her aerial views show human presence through water towers, weapons ranges, and cattle feedlots becoming part of the textures of the terrain. How else can we know where we fit in relationship to everything else in the world, she has said, but by seeing it with attention, concentrated sustained attention?
What Is Time Lapse? Deep Dive Into The Process
A time-lapse video is created by taking photos at regular intervals to record changes that would be too slow for the human eye to see.
A series of still images are captured over a period of hours, days, weeks or even months and then sped up into minutes or seconds in order to show how quickly things change.
Time lapses are primarily used for capturing natural phenomena that would otherwise be too slow to observe with the naked eye, like clouds moving across the sky or flowers blooming over several weeks.
The first known use was in 1872 when Étienne-Jules Marey invented it as one way to study motion without interrupting it with his camera apparatus. It’s now widely used in filmmaking.
A time-lapse is a sequence of images taken at regular intervals, typically with a high frame rate. It can produce an effect that would be impossible to achieve in reality.
For example, if you record one image per second over the course of five minutes, then play them back at 30 frames per second onscreen (60 times faster), it will look as though things are moving much more quickly than they actually are. This technique is often used for showing the change. For instance, how construction projects or plant growth progresses through time.
We’ll explore what exactly constitutes a time-lapse and how these videos can be made using your phone’s camera app and some free editing software like iMovie or Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
Time-lapse is the process of filming over a long period of time and then viewing those frames quickly in succession. Imagine a camera that takes pictures of the world in intervals, and then these images are put together to create a time-lapsed video.
This technique has been used in documentaries, commercials, and movies for years. Whether you’re following the day’s events or building up anticipation for something exciting that’s about to happen, this effect can always be useful!
What is it good for? Here are some examples:
1. Showing progress over hours or days (like how quickly dirt piles up).
2. Capturing an event from start to finish (from setting up the chairs to cleaning up at the end).
3. Mapping out your journey with frequent snapshots along the way.
How Time Lapse Video Works
Time-lapse video is a technique that records the passage of time.
The video captures images of an event at a regular interval and plays them back in rapid succession, usually 24 or 30 frames per second, to create the illusion of fast-moving footage. It can be used for anything from recording construction projects to documenting the growth cycle of plants.
Time-lapse video is a technique that uses the same principle as slow-motion videos.
It captures images at set intervals and then plays them back to create the illusion of time passing quickly.
Have you ever watched a time-lapse video and wondered how it was made? It’s not as complicated as you might think. A time-lapse is an extremely fast (usually sped up) sequence of images that creates the illusion of movement over a long duration. They can be created with still photographs or video footage which are edited together to create the effect.
What Is Time-Lapse Photography Used For?
Time-lapse photography is used for a variety of purposes, but most commonly it’s utilized to show the passage of time in a fast-forwarded format.
This can be achieved by taking photos at timed intervals and then playing them back together as one video or series of still images.
It’s often used in documentaries and movies that need to depict rapid change over long periods of time like seasons changing on Earth, or the growth cycle of plants.
Time-lapse photography is a video recording technique that takes still images at set intervals and plays them back as a continuous sequence.
It can be used to create time-lapse movies of processes such as the movement of clouds or flowers blooming, changes in landscape and scenery, traffic flows, and animal migration patterns.
It’s used primarily for scientific research, commercial advertising videos on television programs like HGTV and Discovery Channel.
It is also utilized by filmmakers for scenes requiring extended durations of time with little significant activity occurring during the shot (such as night slowly turning into the day).
The term time-lapse stems from this possibility for displaying motion over an extended period of time. Have you ever seen a video of a flower blooming over the course of 24 hours? Or an entire day in just 10 seconds?
These are some examples of time-lapse photography:
Time-lapse is when the camera takes pictures at regular intervals and then combines them into one video that shows something happen quickly.
This can be used for anything from filming construction, to documenting an event like New Year’s Eve celebration or as part of your home security system. Time-lapse photography is a technique in which the frequency at which film frames are captured (the frame rate) is much lower than that used to view the sequence.
When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. It has been around since 1878 when Eadweard Muybridge developed a zoopraxiscope with 12 sequential images that flipped 10 times per second.
Today, it’s still used for many purposes including nature documentaries, construction footage, and even movies like Transformers!
