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One of the aims of the present article is to concentrate on the notion of pictorial representation and different traditions of its interpretation. Defining pictorial representation requires that the notion should be associated with other similar or related ways of representation -depiction, description and expression, but also that representation as such should be specified in the given context.
Reading Landscape: Mid-Century Modernism and the Landscape Idea
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domain, disconnected from a natural world increasingly categorized and classified through the lens of science. In many ways, the original poetics of landscape ceased to exist under the rationalizing weight of late 19 century thinking. At the same time, a persistent oppositional romanticism that willfully challenged the progressive agendas of modernization and urbanization, claimed landscape as a retrogressive historical tableau, thereby destroying its progressive associations, its potential for originality. By the mid-20 century, Americans saw the results of a conceptual separation of culture and nature physically manifest in a post-war landscape characterized by either uncontrolled growth or the often ill-conceived urban transformations of planners, architects and landscape architects. The socio-political, economic and cultural forces that accepted and acted on this false dichotomy helped to make an American landscape
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Landscapes have been painted and photographed, they are studied by geographers and ecologists, and they can be designed by landscape architects. The concept of "landscape" hangs ambiguously between a visual representation and a natural entity. Historically, the primacy was for the visual aspect. When we designate natural scenery as "landscape," we are in fact using a metaphor. This metaphor is a visual metaphor, since the way we understand what a landscape is, is formed by the pictorial conventions associated with the original landscape-as-picture. This essay takes its point of departure in the juxtaposition of two very different conceptions of natural landscapes: the holistic landscapes of Alexander von Humboldt, and the fragmented landscapes of geographers during the 1920s and '30s. Both forms are intimately connected with different modes of pictorial representation: paintings, in the case of the Humboldtian landscape; and photography for the fragmented landscape.