Notes on Liz Wells "Land Matters" Chapter 1

The land is important, business relating to land, substance of the land, soil chemistry.
How photography engages with the land
Representation and Idealisation
Landscape as romantic or Topographic
Political, Social, Environmental
Culture, History and Attitudes
Human Intervention
Intervention of Nature - natural changes

"Vistas encompassing both nature and the changes that humans have affected on the natural world" (pg 2)

Relation to the landscape and environment

Memory and Experience
Our response is a complex tapestry

Space and Place (pg 2)
To Landscape, Landscaping

WJT Mitchell "Landscape and Power"
To impose a certain order
Space - Expanse of land
Space to think
Living Space
Distance between areas

Jacques Derrida - French Philosopher
to touch the void is to risk the trauma of uncertainty
Naming is taming
To name represents comprehension
Naming turns space into place
Wilderness or outer space has not been named, inhabited, known

Photography involved in detailing environments - helping culture to appropriate nature (pg 3)
"Photographers have a responsibility to consider how we picture, to reflect upon the implications of thinking through the visual." (pg 4)

Topopholia - human desire for comfort or familiar spces come to reassure.

Depth of sensory response; explores how art enhances experience.
Viewing art is more than more representation (pg 4)

Julia Kristeva - French Philsopher
Suggests that the systematic disrupts the poetic (pg 5)
The feminine operations of poetic interfere with patriarchal social order (pg 5)
Association of mascline with culture, and the feminine with nature.
Culture/Nature Feminine/Masculine - interelated

Nature is both internal and fundamental to what constitutes us as human, and "out there" in what we experience the external world through the senses, including sight (pg 5)

Renes Descates Cartesian theory - separation of the mind and body
Experience sensation; rational mind retains an observational and analytic stance (pg 5)

"Photographs cannot replicate the multi sensual actuality of the out of doors, but they do offer some form of imaginary substitute .... memories of actual physical experience and mediated experience are complexly inextricably entwined" (pg 44)