• Europe
   
  In Europe, particularly in France and Great Britain where the early inventions in cameras and processes took place, had traditions of landscape painting, drawing and engraving that extended back over centuries. Some pioneering photographers, such as André Giroux and Gustave Le Gray, were talented artists and their vision was influenced by their training and the composition rules of contemporary artworks. Many of these photographers travelled widely.
   
  Great Britain: William Henry Fox Talbot, Francis Bedford, Roger Fenton, Francis Frith, John Thomson, Henry White, George Washington Wilson, James Valentine
   
    
               
    
  
   
  France: André Giroux, Gustave Le Gray, Louis-Rémy Robert, Camille Silvy
   
    
             
    
  
   
  Elsewhere: Knud Knudsen, Hermann Krone
   
    
     
    
  
   
  
• Classical Worlds
   
  Italy and Greece had locations beloved by the educated and leisured classes on the Grand Tour who sought refinement by visiting the ancient cities and archaeological excavations. Within months of the announcement of the daguerreotype process in 1839 photographers set out to take images of these sites and sell them to an appreciative populace.
   
  Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Francis Bedford, Reverend Calvert Jones, Robert MacPherson, Philippos Margaritis, Eugene Piot, Giorgio Sommer, William J. Stillman
   
    
                    
    
  
   
  
• Middle East
   
  With its dual connection to Biblical sites and exotic Egyptian monuments the Middle East offered the mysteries of orientalism blended with the places sacred to Judeo-Christian beliefs.
   
  Francis Bedford, Felix Bonfils, Maxime Du Camp, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Francis Frith, John Beasly Greene, Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, Gustave Le Gray, Auguste Salzmann, Pascal Sebah, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Félix Teynard, Zangaki Brothers
   
    
                             
    
  
   
  
• Asia
   
  During the nineteenth century enormous changes took place in Asia as local rulers came under colonial influences. The best known photographers of India, China and Japan were a combination of European military officers, missionaries and travelers who recorded the campaigns, landscapes and later the people and customs of the nations they traversed or administrated.
   
  European: Felice Beato, Samuel Bourne, John Burke, Adolfo Farsari, John Murray, Father Leone Nani, Federico Peliti, John Thomson, Linnaeus Tripe
   
    
                      
    
  
   
  Local: Lala Deen Dayal, Lai Afong
   
    
        
    
  
   
  
• North America
   
  Photographers who had gained experience during the American Civil War (1861-1865) accompanied the military expeditions, survey parties, railroad teams and wagon trains across the continent. They were resourced by the Federal government, railroad companies and wealthy industrialists and this meant that the material has survived well in public and private collections.
   
  Alexander Gardner, John K. Hillers, William Henry Jackson, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Andrew Joseph Russell, Carleton Eugene Watkins, Charles Leander Weed
   
    
                        
    
  
   
  
• Africa
   
  In researching material for this website a great many sources have been examined and although there is material for North Africa there is little available on nineteenth century landscape photographers in other regions. If you have any helpful information please contact me at alan@luminous-lint.com so that we can remedy this omission.
   
  
• South and Central America
   
  I am seeking to include high quality nineteenth century landscape photographers who worked in South and Central America if you have any relevant information I can be contacted on alan@luminous-lint.com.
   
  Alberto Agostini, Martin Chambi, Claude-Joseph Désiré Charnay, Julio Cordero Castillo, Marc Ferrez, Roberto M. Gerstmann, Luis Gismondi, Jose Pierola
   
    
       
    
  
   
  
• Australia, New Zealand, Micronesia and Polynesia
   
  Each of these areas had their own photographers in the Nineteenth century.
   
  Australia: Charles Baylis, Alexander Brodie, Nicholas Caire, Antoine Fouchery, William Hetzer, Charles Kerry, Henry King, Beaufoy Merlin, Henry Paine
   
    
        
    
  
   
  New Zealand: Daniel Beere, Samuel Carnell, William Harding, Reginald Horsley who photographed for Valentine & Co of England and William Tyree.
   
  Micronesia: Charles Kerry, The Burton Brothers from New Zealand consisting of Alfred Henry Burton (1834-1914) and Walter John Burton (1836-1880).

I A Winter's Sunrise II The Lone Lagoon III The Fetters of Winter IV A Waterside Inn V A Winter Pastoral VI Marsh Weeds VII Gnarled Thorn-Trees VIII The Misty River

IX Bleak Winter X The Waking River XI The Bridge XII The Snow Garden XIII A Corner of the Farm-Yard XIV Rime Crystals XV The Lonely Fisher XVI The Last Gate

Peter Henry  Emerson Marsh Leaves    Title | Lightbox | Checklist

• The 1873 albumen silver print by Timothy H. O'Sullivan is about clarity and showing all possible detail, he was accompanying a scientific survey team in the American West and although the choice of camera position and time of day could be selected for artistic purpose the primary aim is to record as accurately as possible what was seen.
   
  
• If the photograph by Timothy H. O'Sullivan was taken for scientific effect the bromoil print by the French photographer Emile Joachim Constant Puyo was taken for an artistic purpose. It shows a landscape with a solitary woman in misty hues on the banks of the Seine. The choice of the bromoil process, so beloved by pictorialists, softens the focus so the overall effect is one of a nineteenth century salon oil painting.
   
  
• By the 1920s the accepted practice of rendering the landscape as a painting was being challenged as modernism was superseding impressionism and becoming the dominant trend in the arts. With the clarity of the 1942 gelatin silver print by Ansel Adams the mood of the shot is captured in a way that Timothy H. O'Sullivan did not strive for but Ansel Adams also gets all the detail. This is not about resembling a painting but creating awe by showing the grandeur of nature.
   
  
• Towards the end of the twentieth century there are photographers who strive for the tonalities of Ansel Adams but the fine art market has moved on and now we have what I term "The New Pictorialism" with high quality printing of long exposure shots that are delving deeper into the emotions of a location. No person walks in the dream landscapes of these worlds. Michael Kenna is a master of this style.
   
  

• This approach is in keeping with the 1865 albumen print of Mirror Lake and Reflections, Yosemite Valley, Mariposa County, California by Charles Leander Weed. He was the first person to take photographs of the Yosemite Valley and at a time when there was little human activity so it really was virgin territory.
   
  
• Many of the early topographical views of the American West were taken by survey teams and railroad photographers. Their photographs highlighted the boundless opportunities of the untouched territories to the audience in the eastern cities and encouraged them to travel west. At the same time the photographs showed the stockholders and owners of the railroads the progress that was being made. The incredibly detailed albumen print of Carleton Eugene Watkins, taken between 1866-1868, shows one of the trestles on the Canadian Pacific Railroad - here the landscape is being tamed and conquered.
   
  
• The vision of photographers such as Jim Dine, Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams in the western USA in the 1960s and 1970s was a break with the nature as grandeur that could be tamed tradition. In the seventies their approach was termed the New Topographics and the name was well chosen. They rejected the wilderness and showed the industrial parks, suburbs and mundane construction that were paving the land. They showed a brutalized world that had been black topped into parking lots, turned into gas stations and become an endless series of strip malls and road junctions. In the 1970 gelatin silver print by Robert Adams there is an attraction in the patterns of uncontrolled suburbs but it is the antithesis of the untouched valleys of Charles Leander Weed from a hundred years earlier.
   
  
• As color photography became accepted as an art form documentary photographers and photojournalists like Ernst Haas adopted it and now it is widely accepted by contemporary landscape photographers such as Christopher Burkett, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Stephen Shore and Shinzo Maeda. The photograph by Eliot Porter is a return to the nostalgia for the untouched wilderness and the need to preserve it.

The Camera
The Negative
The Print

• The idealism of raw nature (Pioneer spirit)
   
  
• The taming of nature by man (Acceptance and control)
   
  
• The pretty as a painting approach to landscape (Crafting photographs to appear to be paintings)
   
  
• The realization that the taming of nature has detrimental effects (Environmental issues)
   
  
• The nostalgic quest for a pristine and more spiritual world (The New Pictorialism)

alan@luminous-lint.com