Train in the Rain - Technological Landscape
We usually want photos to look as though there's nothing between the camera and the wider landscape. We don't like reflections from glass, blurred scenery, or other reminders that we took the photo from inside a moving carriage atop a highly-engineered route. But these landscapes can only be seen from a train, and we should acknowledge that.This series of photos do that. They also do something else: they rework our understanding of landscape, and the ideals we use in deciding what's beautiful or interesting, and point to a new theory of landscape beauty. Theories of landscape include the Romantic, the Sublime, and the Industrial, each of which insists on a certain purity of vision. Instead of an exclusive purity, this new theory adopts some tenets of Modernism - that the structure should reveal its own workings - while also acknowledging the role of technology in allowing us to see these landscapes. Some landscapes are only visible through technology: from a moving train, in a blurred photo. That landscape cannot be experienced directly. Some views require the intervention of a train and a camera. As our experience of landscape becomes more technologically mediated, we need to acknowledge and account for new ideals of beauty and experience. |
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