Landscapes Beyond Land
The book ‘Landscapes Beyond Land’ explores the concept of landscape through photographing natural scenes in the virtual world. It challenges traditional perceptions of landscape photography whilst encouraging viewers to re-evaluate their understanding and notions of place. Landscapes are photographed that often go unnoticed by players too engrossed in gameplay, and those who are not gamers may never visit.
The work considers landscape through an examination of immersive, humanly crafted environments within virtual worlds that replicate the experience of nature in the physical world, particularly how it is conceived through romantic painting and early 20th century photographic practices. It considers the evolution of landscape photography and the concept of the American sublime in the video game realm which envisages landscape as an idealised concept to be inhabited and extracted by the act of looking. Our understanding of the medium of photography is challenged by using video games as a lens to rethink the narrative of traditional photography, particularly that of the lone man hiking through hostile terrain, waiting months for the perfect moment to capture the ‘essence’ of a landscape with his camera. The lines between fantasy and reality are questioned, producing photographs that look too perfect to exist but too realistic to not.