Russ, I think you're taking a somewhat limited and old fashioned view of landscape. One of the things landscape seeks to do is to capture a sense on the sublime, and paintings arguably have a leg up there.
But there is more to it. Gursky's Rhine is landscape and gains a great deal of its effect from the fact that it begins with a real thing. As a painting it would be nothing. As digital art based on a photograph, it has something.
In general, photography has that core strength, that there was a real thing in front of the lens. Whenever the power of a piece relies on that, photography wins.
And that can include landscape.
Hi Andrew, Well, I'm taking an old-fashioned view of landscape because at nearly 85 I'm just plain old-fasshioned. But. . .
As far as a sense of the sublime is concerned, I keep coming back to Bierstadt's picture because to me it illustrates the shortcomings of photography as a landscape tool. I've spent the past fifty years in the Rocky Mountains, and I've shot – I don't know – probably thousands of pictures that include mountains. I know from experience that it's possible to shoot a picture of the mountains that'll convince people you were there, since, as you point out, the camera has to be there in order for it to make an image of the mountains, but though people looking at that picture understand that the mountains are real, in the end you can't convey the sense of the sublime that's there in the mountains.
The thing I've never been able to do is convey the way the mountains feel as they relate to the foreground. . . the way the combination of the two can impact your soul. I've attached a picture of Pikes Peak that the Manitou Springs Chamber uses on the cover of their brochure. The mountain rises up properly, but what looks like a sharp ridge in the foreground is actually a fairly gentle feature behind my neighbor's house. I used a long lens to get the kind of reach-for-the-heavens mountain effect that Bierstadt got in his Sierra, and in this picture the foreground distortion doesn't matter because people who look at it haven't a clue about the real thing. It doesn't matter anyway since the mountain, alone, is the subject of the picture. But Bierstadt was able to combine a wonderful pastoral scene with a soul-touching rendition of the mountains. There's no way you could do that with a camera, and yet, in the mountains, I've often seen and felt exactly what comes across from Bierstadt's painting. That's a strength that always escapes the camera's “real thing” rendition.
What do you think of Constable's “Hay Wain?” I'm sure the house was the real thing, and I'm sure the wagon was the real thing, and I'm sure the farmer and the dog and the fields and the trees and the clouds all were real things. But I'm also sure that they didn't come together the way the picture has them, and I'm sure they didn't hold their positions while Constable painted the scene. Yet, I suspect that if you lived in that place that painting might represent reality better than any photograph.
