The monumental and breathtaking grand vistas seen in technologically advanced sublime landscape photography aiming to objectively warn about the fragile state of the earth, raise the question of...Show moreThe monumental and breathtaking grand vistas seen in technologically advanced sublime landscape photography aiming to objectively warn about the fragile state of the earth, raise the question of whether landscape photography could offer a less heroic, yet ethically engaging counter language that facilitates a responsive involvement with our environment. The research introduces the concept of a non-representative “minor landscape photography” as a change-seeking approach to camera technology that regains the ideological erasure of subjective technological vision. In that sense, minor landscape photography rejects the humanist ideology of objective vision that conceptually excludes the observer from the field of vision. Assisted by an elaborate case study with photographers that are critically involved with landscape representation the research investigates three counter perspectives to “unsee” the authoritative, all-seeing eye of disembodied vision. In a performative process of embodied unseeing, the perspectives operate on reduced visibility with photographs that consciously act as mediating surfaces between the observer and the world. Ultimately, in favour of a non-oppositional, multi-perspectival and transformative liaison with contemporary technology and its subject matter, the research emphasises the ethical promise of minor landscape photography to inform a “world that is yet to be.” In times of environmental concern, the ultimate rejection of technology’s repressive magic and its static “view from nowhere” invite camera technology to assist in the formation of a liberating, life-informing and eco-conscious landscape photography that empowers accountable “views from somewhere” to evolve.Show less
