Landscape, Images and Photography. From the Picturesque to the Performative Approach

While Plato famously dismissed art as twice removed from true being (a copy of a copy), the history of reflections on the relationship between nature and art went in the opposite direction. Indeed, with the emergence of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, the appreciation for nature has been merely understood as a mirror of art, the closer to a painting, the more beautiful: this is particularly striking in the concept of the picturesque, as “picture-like” (Carlson 2009, p. 4), i.e. the aesthetic appreciation of places that resemble paintings or photos. This conception has been radically criticized as conceiving of nature as secondary to art, calling instead for an aesthetic approach to nature as such. However, the relationship between nature and images is still debated from different perspectives. My paper will challenge the idea that nature may be conceived by completely excluding the mediation of images, without this implying going back to the primacy of images over nature. Indeed, what is problematic of the picturesque is not so much that our experience of nature is mediated by pictures, but rather that this relationship is one-sided, favouring pictures over nature. Recalling one of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s tenets, we need to go beyond the original-copy paradigm, in the direction of a biunivocal relation between the two. This helps to question any attempt at approaching nature in an unmediated and naïve way. Just as in general we cannot make blank slates of ourselves by removing all our pre-understandings, likewise we cannot get rid of all images and experience nature immediately. Along these lines, I will follow the strand of studies of Landscape Aesthetics, that conceives landscape as a process, a practice between nature and humans. To elucidate this biunivocal relationship between landscape and images, I will focus on photography, which plays a liminal role in the consideration of nature. It can appear as the realm of the picturesque (let’s think of the everyday uses of Instagram filters) while also having the potential to prompt critical engagement with nature. My proposal is that the latter option demands that, following a lead proposed by Richard Shusterman, we reassess the status of photography from the figurative (only focusing on photos, on the picture, as an “object”) to the performative (taking the whole process of photography into account as an “activity”). The performative reassessment of pictures is particularly in line with the reading of landscape as “more-than-representational”, while stressing however that performance is not opposed to images, but the latter can instead be conceived of in a performative way, thus overcoming a merely objectivistic approach. My contribution will be organised as follows: 1) Analysis of the picturesque and connection between landscape and picture; 2) Gadamerian analysis of the copy-original relationship; 3) The role of photography and rethinking photography in a performative way; 4) Application of the performative reading of photography to more-than-representational landscape.