Rexer: Landscape

Landscape photography is an important piece in history, preserving not only how a place once looked but how it has changed. In the case of the camera becoming a tool of military use in Argentina, it can be used to obscure history and omit people of things that exist, obscuring the true landscape. It can show the effects people have on the land, and how it is both enjoyed and destroyed. It brings up a need we didn’t know we had; the desire to journey to new locations and experience the beauty for ourselves. Rexer mentions Struth’s work, “Even more than Shore’s, Struth’s Yosemite brings us closer to a tourist’s view, an unconscious place, registered in the mind through other people’s pictures before it is ever experienced” (83). Landscape photography can awaken this need to travel and witness these places with our own being. It also provides a type of experience through which people are able to associate a name to a place, and have knowledge of somewhere they may never be able to see through the window of a photographer’s image. While an artists work can capture a landscape beautifully, it is not able to truly capture its beauty.