La distance critique et l’impossible narration photographique

La photographie de paysage depuis Ed Ruscha

Abstract

“Describing the landscape”, as Jean-Christophe Bailly does, is a wonderful way of conveying this complex notion, which encompasses both reality and its image. However, photography, not being a language, seems to me incapable of doing so. I will try to explain why. Then I will attempt to demonstrate why, since at least the publication of Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963, the most reflective landscape photography has been characterised by a critical distance from the notion of landscape and the act of photography itself. And how does this distance make landscape photography the preferred medium for critical, political, economic, ecological or iconological discourse?