When the Landscape Bites

On 30 September, I had the opportunity to give a talk at the CALA Cultural Corporation about a subject that has been on my mind for some time: the way we look at and photograph the landscape.

I have been photographing nature for many years. I have travelled through mountains, deserts, ice and places I still struggle to describe in words. I continue to feel the same fascination before an extraordinary landscape. Yet, over the years, other questions have appeared. What are we really showing when we photograph a place? How much of what we see belongs to the territory, and how much to our own way of looking at it? Can a photograph go beyond eliciting admiration?

The final push came during a conversation with Julia Lafée from the CALA Cultural Corporation (IG @lafeej). We were talking about photography and landscape when Julia said something that stayed with me: “The landscape does not bite.”

That sentence opened the question that gave rise to this research. Is that really so? Is the landscape always innocent? Can a photograph, besides showing us something beautiful, unsettle us, challenge us or change the way we understand a place?

When the Landscape Bites grew out of those questions.

One of the first ideas I wanted to explore was the difference between nature, territory and landscape. We often use these three concepts as if they meant the same thing, but they do not. Nature exists independently of us. Territory has history, inhabitants, transformations and relationships. Landscape, by contrast, appears when someone looks at that territory, selects a part of it, and decides what to show and what to leave outside the frame.

That is where a discussion begins that I find especially interesting for those of us who make photographs.

An image can be technically impeccable, with extraordinary light and perfect composition, yet not necessarily say much more. The opposite can also happen: an apparently simple photograph can hold a story capable of completely changing our perception of what we are seeing.

To prepare this talk, I researched different ways of understanding and representing landscape, from Turner’s painting to the contemporary photography of Edward Burtynsky, Richard Misrach, Nadav Kander and several Chilean authors. I found works in which beauty coexists with destruction, where a mountain may in fact be an accumulation of mining waste, and where what does not appear in the photograph can matter as much as what we see.

The research also led me to question a widespread idea: that landscape photography is mainly about finding beautiful places and representing them in the best possible way. That is a perfectly valid way to photograph, and one I still enjoy. But the history of art and photography shows that landscape has many other possibilities.

The thesis running through the document is that landscape can go far beyond contemplation. It can speak about memory, power, absence, transformation and our own relationship with territory. It can even make us uncomfortable.

That is where the title comes from. A landscape bites when something alters our first impression, when we discover that behind a beautiful image there is a story we had not seen. That new understanding means we can no longer look at it in the same way.

I did not want to present this reflection as a criticism of nature photography or as an invitation to abandon beauty. That would be quite contradictory in relation to my own work. I wanted to open a conversation about the possibilities of our photographic language and, in the process, question some of my own certainties.

The document shared below brings together the research I prepared for that talk, its references, the artists and works I studied, and some reflections on my photographs of Antarctica.

One question runs through the entire work and will probably remain with me every time I raise the camera:

What happens after beauty?

GVIVANCO