environmental concerns of a largely urbanized
population for rural spaces known chiefly
through recreational visits, sometimes coinciding
and sometimes colliding with exclusionary
property interests (Lorimer, 2000). ‘Scientific’
attempts to measure such values foundered on
the realization that to speak of ‘the same scene’
itself presupposed an ability to produce a disin-
terested and objective visual image against
which different perceptions of witnesses could
be measured. Responses of sampled observers
were measured to: viewing from a vantage-point,
following an itinerary, examining photograph,
map or film footage of a place or area. This
generated useful information, for example about
differences between residents and visitors,
variously aged, gendered or ethnically ascribed
people, and about apparently recurring recogni-
tion of significant physical features such as
barriers, landmarks or pathways (Gold, 1980;
Lynch, 1970). But surrogates for landscape were
complex images, and measuring behavioural
responses to ‘real’ landscapes presupposed the
existence of shared assumptions about what
made a ‘landscape’ in the first place, ignoring
complex cultural and political associations
between landscape and social relations. The
briefest consideration of the difference in com-
mon usage of landscape between American and
British English makes the point. For most
Americans landscape is wild nature where the
evidence of human presence is minimized, and
preferably non-existent (Jackson, 1984: 9–56). In
British English, landscape is very distinctly
humanized, its garden-like qualities forming a
significant criterion for aesthetic judgement
(Daniels, 1993: 146–242). Such differences are
the outcome of very different social relations
with the land, expressed in property rights andland ownership, class formation, and histories of
settlement and resource exploitation (Cosgrove,
1998). But American and British landscapes do
share a common status as seen objects, evaluated
in large measure by conventions established in
relation to pictorial images.
The term ‘ways of seeing’, coined by the art
critic John Berger in 1969, neatly captured an
idea long recognized among art historians that, in
so far as it is meaningful, seeing is a learned abil-
ity (Berger, 1972). While there is no denying that
sight is a physiological function, not present in
all people and varying around 20/20 vision even
among the sighted, the use of this function is
learned. The child’s attention is constantly
directed in the process of establishing visual con-
nections and giving names to specific groups of
seen objects while ignoring others. These groups
vary both culturally and according to more
biologically related differences such as gender
and age. The most elementary drawing lesson
forces this recognition by reminding us of the
limitations of learned sight, when one is asked, for
example to trace the defining line of a seen object
rather than drawing what ‘you think you see’. Use
of the sense of sight is shaped as much by images
seen in the past, by individual experiences,
memories and intentions, as by the physical
forms and material spaces before our eyes.
While it is obvious that much of learned seeing is
personal, much too is social, governed by con-
ventions about what may be seen, by whom,
when and in what context, about the associations
and meanings attributed to a given scene, and
about its formal and compositional properties.
An example will clarify these cultural aspects
of seeing. An early-sixeenth-century oil painting
by the Venetian painter Giorgione depicts a
nubile young woman lying naked in a ‘landscape’252 LANDSCAPEFigure 12.2 Giorgione, ‘Sleeping Venus’, c. 1508 (Dresden Gemäldegaterie)3029-ch12.qxd 03-10-02 5:49 PM Page 252