Article ID: CBB000932151

Painting and Photographing Landscapes: Pictorial Conventions and Gestalts (2008)

unapi

Many ecologists of generations after Humboldt, beginning with August Grisebach, accepted the unity of the landscape as a given, no longer in need of corroboration by visual means. Humboldt had vigorously promoted sending landscape artists on scientific voyages upon his return to Europe. During the first half of the nineteenth century, many scientific expeditions into the tropics, most of them carried out under explicit Humboldtian inspiration, counted landscape painters among the participants. Landscape painting, at least initially, enjoyed the status of being among the means of gaining knowledge about the natural world. But when in around 1860, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, and other painters of the Hudson School had put their art under the guidance of ecological scientific principles, their painting was no longer an independent route to knowledge. And by the time painting had been displaced by photography as a means of travel recording, from a scientific point of view, it had been relegated to illustrative functions only. There are as yet no studies of the use of black-and-white photography by the ecologists around 1900, the time when ecology appeared as a self-conscious academic field. The prevailing opinion on photographs at the time was that they did not distinguish between important and unimportant aspects of the vegetation. In general, lists of plants with data on their relative abundance had epistemological priority over photographs and charts.

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Authors & Contributors
Ross Barrett
Olivares Sandoval, Omar
Ann-Janine Morey
Jonge, Hans Laurens de
Elizabeth Towner
Watson, Cecelia Alexandre
Concepts
Science and art
Visual representation; visual communication
Painters and painting
Landscape; landscapes
Photographs
Flowers
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
20th century
17th century
Places
United States
France
England
London (England)
Sweden
Great Britain
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