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and many of their impressive views are characterized
by formulas derived from, but not coextensive with, the
picturesque and sublime modes of landscape depiction.
Comparable with the landscape painting by artists such
as Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford
Robinson Gifford, and Thomas Moran, the American
survey photographers adopted and reformulated picto-
rial landscape conventions and merged them with a
heretofore unmatched technical virtuosity. Joel Snyder
demonstrated that critical literature of the period com-
mended photographers for having achieved pictures
faithful to nature that “coincidentally” shared specifi c
compositional and pictorial features with landscapes
wrought in other media such as painting and drawing.
In other words, photographers were congratulated not
for their use of landscape conventions but for their co-
incidental or mechanical corroboration of them.
Nonetheless, American landscape photography does
not show the pastoral harmony so typical of the English
interpretation of the picturesque. When pictures allude to
a landscape claimed and occupied by man, not classical
culture but modern industrialization enters the frame.
Carleton Watkins’ mining and railroad photographs in
particular, for instance, attempted to portray a visual har-
mony between the land and the new tokens of industrial
progress such as tracks of a new rail line.
In contrast with the European picturesque, how-
ever, man and civilisation are usually absent in the
pictures of the American surveyors. In the spectacular
large-format views of the American landscape from
the 1860s and 1870s, man is often confronted with a
terrifying emptiness and vastness reminiscent of the
sublime in the way Edmund Burke had written about
it in the eighteenth century. Moreover, compared with
most examples of European landscape photography,
the pictures of the American West are characterized by
a more dispassionate and “placeless” look due to high
vantage points, uninterrupted lines of vision, and mar-
ginal foregrounds. Miniscule fi gures frequently give a
sense of scale and measure to the landscape but instead
of mediating between the viewer and the depicted scene,
they are dwarfed by the daunting natural marvels. Men
are reduced to indices of the precarious and frightening
relationship between man and nature. Unmistakably
refering to the then popular theory of Catastrophism, a
geological theory which held that the world was shaped
by periodic and large-scale disasters, these landscape
photographs supported a transcendentalist vision of na-
ture. The American landscape was not only interpreted
as an impressive physical reality but it also included an
underlying sense of the spiritual. Nature was presented
as a stage of a symbolical presence. In some pictures,
chiaroscuro creates a natural drama. Specifi c viewpoints
and lighting exaggerate the sudden and violent forces re-
quired to create certain geological formations. In others,
a kind of overwhelming silence results in an unusually
modern, austere imagery. This is especially the case in
many photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan, who pre-
ferred landscapes that seem to resist defi nition, such as
immeasurable and inaccessible deserts. His photographs
show landscapes so devoid of human reference, so lack-
ing in the signs of history and culture, that plastic values
were the only one at hand. O’Sullivan’s landscapes, in
consequence, can be considered the point of departure
for both the modernist landscape photography of Ansel
Adams and the late-twentieth-century predilection for
natural and urban wastelands and non-descript areas.
O’Sullivan’s landscapes deny the possibility of comfort-
able habitation and an agreeable relation between man
and the bleak and godforsaken landscape.
Strikingly, this specifi c evocation of the American
frontier lasted only a few decades. The initial fl our-
ishing of American landscape photography passed
with the closing of the frontier, to which photography
contributed in contradictory ways. On the one hand,
American western landscape photographs had opened
the West by presenting it as potential real estate and as
a site for eastern investment and development. On the
other, the photographs of the natural wonders struck a
romantic chord among the public and positively infl u-
enced legislation to create the fi rst National Parks in the
early 1870s. By the 1880s, photography and travel had
become easier and the closing of the frontier at the end
of the century was confi rmed by the more impression-
ist approaches, which also characterized the European
landscape photography of the fi n de siècle. In the 1890s,
Henry Hamilton Bennett, for instance, depicted the Wis-
consin landscape as an ideal place for leisure whereas
in the early landscapes of American pictorialists, every
suggestion of harshness and diffi culty was suppressed.
The bitter cold, the cruel heat, and the infi nite spaces
made way for a nature that had become a part of the
known habitat and the conventions of art.
Artistic conventions and cultural references also
continued to play an important part in the landscape
photography of many European countries. Although the
picturesque quickly became a component of a kind of
“Englishness,” the concept was also instructive for the
landscape photography practised in other regions. Many
photographers with pictorial sensibilities, for instance,
directed their cameras at the Italian landscape, which
played such an important role in European culture in
general. With its ruinous remnants of antiquity, the
Italian landscape remained a reference point for artists
throughout the nineteenth century. In addition, it had
been a major source of inspiration for the aesthetics of
the picturesque. Its enjoyment and depiction became
obligatory components of the Grand Tour. Right from
its inception, photography superseded the eighteenth-
century vedutismo, the paintings of panoramic views