Land matters : landscape photography, culture and identity

We cite from the COVER:
"Land Matters" ', Liz Wells writes, 'is a play on words: taken rhetorically, it means that land is important; taken literally the phrase refers to business relating to land. It also refers to the "matter" or substance of land, to soil chemistry'. Land Matters is about the ways in which photographers engage with land, its representation and idealisation. It proposes that the visual interpretation of land as landscape reflects and reinforces contemporary political, social and environmental attitudes.
Liz Wells asks what is at stake in landscape photography now. She discusses strategies through which photographers invite us to question imagery and representations, as well as commenting on land use and environmental change. She places critical appraisal of key examples of work by photographers working today in the USA and Canada, in Britain and Ireland, Scandinavia and the Baltic areas, dating from the final decades of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first, within broader art historical and political concerns. She also explores themes of the pictorial, the picturesque and the sublime that resonate historically.
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