820
1860s, such as Roger Fenton, George Washington
Wilson, Francis Bedford, and William England, fol-
lowed in the footsteps of the theorists and painters of
the picturesque. Fenton even photographed the very
same locations that Gilpin had depicted earlier in his
watercolours. Other photographers referred explicitly to
the concept of the picturesque in their writings. In the
British Journal of Photography (1864), George Wash-
ington Wilson described the picturesque as “a simple
viewpoint that the traveler or amateur would easily
fi nd for themselves; a convergence point toward which
the eye is drawn imperceptibly by a gradation of tones
and a dark foreground; a harmony of all the parts, in a
closed composition which does not arouse unsatisfi ed
curiosity.” In his Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869),
a true bestseller among photographers in England and
abroad, Henry Peach Robinson quoted extensively from
eighteenth-century writers on the picturesque. He also
noted that the power of the art of photography was lim-
ited. “The sublime cannot be reached by it,” Robinson
wrote, but “picturesqueness had never had so perfect an
interpreter” as photography.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, however,
the picturesque was often freely interpreted as denoting
any landscape endowed with scenic charm. The general
and vague notion of what constitutes the picturesque
became an inherent part of the Victorian imagination.
It also became an imperative for every successful land-
scape photographer, whose task included searching and
framing strategically the right sort of locations, and
articulating their physical subtleties through proper
exposure of the negative. Furthermore, photography de-
mocratized the picturesque, which originally entailed an
exclusive capacity of the gentry, who understood both art
and touring. Now, the middle classes used photography
to enjoy nature. This cult of the picturesque resulted in
thousands of photographs of humble landscapes and
pastoral scenes that mostly ignored the brutality of
urban modernization, labor, and industry. Figures and
landscapes were integrated into a harmonious unity
evoking a well-balanced social order. The predilection
for the countryside and the peaceful village—objects
already resonant with English values—transformed the
notion of the picturesque into an ideological concept that
contributed to the construction of a national identity.
Consequently, the frame of the picturesque turned
out to be useful in the photographic survey of the colo-
nies. Exotic landscapes were tamed and domesticated
according to established terms of reference refl ected in
the photograph’s composition and treatment of subject.
Samuel Bourne’s pictures, for instance, of the unwieldy
and very often “un-picturesque” topography encoun-
tered on his treks in the Himalayas were unmistakably
infl uenced by his earlier search for picturesque scenery
in Wales, Scotland, and the Lake District. In many of his
pictures taken in Northern India in the 1860s, spaces are
contained within enclosures, encirclements, or bounda-
ries. The world arranges itself for the viewer. The strug-
gle with nature gave way for contemplation based on
balanced proportions, carefully selected viewpoints, the
use of watery refl ections, and the harmonious integration
of foregrounds and backgrounds—all borrowed from
the tradition of the picturesque. Nonetheless, as many
pictures by other European photographers working in
exotic locations, Bourne’s photographs are character-
ized by an interesting tension caused by his frustrations
over trying to frame the vast spectacle of terrain within
his camera’s fi eld of view and still maintain a balanced
composition and containment of suitable picturesque
features.
Bourne’s vistas of breathtaking landscapes from the
peripheries of the British empire also demonstrate that,
at the time of the mid-nineteenth century proliferation
of photography, the conventions of the picturesque had
merged with those of the sublime. The characteristics
that Edmund Burke had attributed to the sublime—ob-
scurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, and so
on—were clearly evoked in the grandeur of the exotic
landscapes in Asia and the Americas that were beyond
exact description. At the same time, however, painters
and photographers evoked the sublime by means of a
repertoire of established compositional formulae. Land-
scape photography, in a way, helped to domesticate the
sublime and to subject it to pictorial conventions—a
logic that constitutes the strategy of the picturesque.
The tension between the rough subject matter of
the wilderness and the cultivated framings of the gaze
was also a challenge to American photographers such
as William Henry Jackson, Eadweard Muybridge,
Andrew J. Russell, Carleton Watkins, and Timothy
O’Sullivan, among others. Many of them worked in
the context of government topographical expeditions
and geological surveys, which helped to open the vast
territories of the West to phenomena such as railroad
construction, logging, mining, farming, urbanization,
and even tourism. Whereas the 1859 stereographs of
the Catskill Mountains and Niagara Falls by William
England still could answer to picturesque conventions,
the survey photographers working after the Civil War
entered completely new kinds of lands. In contrast with
the celebration of the newly found harmony between
man and nature celebrated in European landscape pho-
tography, American photographers faced a frightening
wilderness that, from an artistic point of view, could
only be interpreted as a chaotic environment unfi t for
lyrical depictions. The spectacular natural scenery of
the Americas lacked the picturesque balance of hills,
lakes, and trees. Nonetheless, it was diffi cult for the
painters and photographers of the American wilderness
to accept nature in a naked, non-referential condition
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