The Violence of Medium and the Tyranny of Landscape
According to Mitchell, landscape is not an artistic genre; it is a medium with the ability to mask or naturalize the violence etched into the land by the conqueror’s gaze or actions. The emergence of photography, soon to play a dominant role in the perception of landscape, precipitates a reversal at the end of the nineteenth century: landscape is henceforth transformed from an instrument of violence into an object that, in and of itself, is tyrannical. The goal of this paper is therefore to analyze the operational function of photography and its vehicles in an attempt to establish whether the combination of photography with vehicle actually altered the perception of landscape, and if so, how and with what repercussions?