Edenic rurality featuring orange groves, strawberry
fields, palms and roses set against distant blue
mountains under a golden sky, obscures continu-
ous and frequently brutal conflicts over land and
water, and between landowners and migrant agri-
cultural workers (Barron et al., 2000: 65–101;
Mitchell, 1996). The latter, housed in trailer
camps, watered with less care than the crops they
cultivate, burned by the sunlight and chemicals
that produce horticultural ‘perfection’, are as
invisible in conventional images of California’s
garden landscape as they are from the state’s
freeways (Figure 12.6). Landscape’s capacity to
hide under a smooth, aesthetic surface the labour
that produces and maintains it, is a direct out-
come of its pictorial qualities and its identifica-
tion with physical ‘nature’, placing the historical
and contingent beyond critical reflection.Landscape and ethnicityLike class, differentiation of people by means of
ascribed ‘natural’ or biological differences finds
both expression and reinforcement in landscape.
‘Race’ is a mode of social differentiation based
on visible differences between human bodies. An
obvious and relatively innocuous example of itsincorporation into landscape is the ‘Chinatown’
to be found in most metropolitan centres, marked
by a standard repertoire of architectural and
graphic symbols, often replacing much less inno-
cent past forms of spatial marking and exclusion
(Anderson, 1995; Lai, 1997). The concept of
‘race’, or more commonly today ‘ethnicity’,
attributes significance to visible distinctions in
skin colour, physiognomy and body form. A
striking collection of photographs taken in 1980s
England by the English artist Ingrid Pollard
focused attention on the normalizing connections
between landscape and ethnicity. As a black
woman, Pollard intended her images to capture
both a native attachment to English nature and a
sense of being ‘out of place’, excluded from rural
landscape. Implicitly and often explicitly,
English culture places black people in cities,
making them appear ‘wrong’ in the English land-
scape. Her photographs take their impact from
challenging such visual expectations (Kinsman,
1995) (Figure 12.7).
Associations between landscape and ethnicity
run much deeper than the visible presence of
‘outsiders’ within a landscape scene. Landscape
conservation, design and appearance have drawn
consistently on ecological theory and language
to determine the appropriateness of landscape260 LANDSCAPEFigure 12.7 “...Searching for sea-halls; waves lap my wellington boots, carrying lost souls of brothers and
sisters released over the ship side...” Pastoral, interludes (Ingrid Pollard, Autograph,The Association of Black
Photographers Ltd)3029-ch12.qxd 03-10-02 5:49 PM Page 260