In Deborah Bright’s 1985 essay Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men she discusses how landscape photography plays a large part in creating cultural ideologies, whether the photographer intended it or not.

She explains how the American attitude towards ‘wilderness areas’ has long held religious overtones and how there was a conviction that garden spots ‘could elevate the aspirations and manners of the immigrants and workers who used them.’ Railroads vied for business by marketing the landscape that could be seen on their routes. With the increase in automobile travel came ‘planned roads and numbered scenic turnoffs, sited and designed to conform to conventional pictorial standards.’ Photography became the key method of illustration for merchandising the business of landscape scenery, and these images became the established standards against which future pictorial representations of these areas would be compared.

The public appetite for spectacular scenery was whetted by the introduction of cinema. The Western played a particular role in masculinising the western landscape, with cowboys and rugged scenery.

Even when landscape photography gets political, the art market has influenced the production of inoffensive, marketable images such as John Pfahl’s beautiful images of power plants in his series Power Places.. In contrast, Lisa Lewnz’s Three Mile Island Calendar sidesteps the high price art market and displays gritty images of the power plant alongside key dates in the ill-fated power plant’s history.

Bright goes on to suggest that women might further address today’s landscape issues by documenting the so-called ‘female’ spaces that have been primarily designed by men; ‘the home, beauty salon, shopping mall, etc.’ Women have consistently been ignored by the major museums when arranging exhibitions of landscape photography. Women, instead are seen as nature itself, inseparable from it, whereas men can ‘act upon nature and bend it to their will’.

Her final paragraphs are a rallying cry to photographers to recognise the their own ideological assumptions and consider whether we need to to move beyond the ‘restrictive terms’ of the art market and galleries, to question traditional assumptions of nature and investigate our accepted social reality.

Although the essay is now over 35 years old, I think many of Bright’s points still stand: whilst much progress has been made in getting women’s voices heard in landscape photography, names such as Helen Sear and Dafna Talmor as still very much known only in art circles. The call to landscape photographers to make more work questioning society’s assumptions on landscape and depicting reality are even more pressing in today’s climate crisis with an uncertain future ahead for humankind.