Active Landscape Photography: Diverse Practices

Diverse Practices, the third book in the Active Landscape Photography series, presents a set of unique photographic examples for site-specific investigations of landscape places. Contributed by authors across academia, practice and photography, each chapter serves as a rigorous discussion about photographic methods for the landscape and their underlying concepts. Chapters also serve as unique case studies about specific projects, places and landscape issues.

Project sites include the Miller Garden, Olana, XX Miller Prize and the Philando Castile Peace Garden. Landscape places discussed include the archeological landscapes of North Peru, watery littoral zones, the remote White Pass in Alaska, Sau Paulo and New York City’s Chinatown. Photographic image-making approaches include the use of lidar, repeat photography, collage, mapping, remote image capture, portraiture, image mining of internet sources, visual impact assessment, cameraless photography, transect walking and interviewing.

These diverse practices demonstrate how photography, when utilized through a set of specific critical methods, becomes a rich process for investigating the landscape. Exploring this concept in relationship to specific contemporary sties and landscape issues reveals the intricacy and subtlety that exists when photography is used actively.

Practitioners, academics, students and researchers will be inspired by the underlying concepts of these examples and come away with a better understanding about how to create their own rigorous photographic practices.

Anne C Godfrey explores the complex relationship between photography and landscape. As an interdisciplinarian, she utilizes contemporary cultural approaches to investigate the intersections of landscape, perception, representation and design. She is an award-winning educator and researcher. Godfrey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.