pictorialism

I don't often use the term landscape when describing photography. I prefer something like 'environmental' or even 'cultural landscape'.  

The term landscape seems to me to be very loaded with connotations from painting,  particularly from the 18th and 19th century, that we are hardly even conscious of. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think the term conjures up a set of assumptions and even a set of locations. In Scotland, typically picturesque locations can be found in places like Loch Katrine in the Trossachs, Rannoch Moor, the entrance to Glencoe from the old road, Laig Bay on Eigg.

Landscape pictures are generally assumed to be have a peaceful, panoramic, scenic and beautiful appearance. (I am making huge generalisations, I know.)

In photography, exponents of this type of landscape photography are Colin Prior, Charlie Waite, Lee Frost, Craig McMaster and many others.  (I should probably include myself too, if that isn't too presumptious.)

I don't under-estimate this style of work at all, but it is not the only way to photograph the natural or the built environment. In the same way that street or documentary photography can be challenging, so can 'landscape'. 
If, as many participants in these courses state, we want to move beyond pictorial and picturesque pictures, then we need to find a way of thinking about what we are trying to do with the pictures.

Triangular models are very useful for helping to simplify quite complicated ideas.

Here's a tool for analysing pictures. It is difficult to decide how to judge pictures. One way is to ask if a picture has these three elements: craft, visual style, meaning.

Craft can be: skill, effort, care, attention;

Visual style is tonality, composition and design, use of colour and an appeal to the senses;
Meaning is content. Does the picture communicate anything?

I boiled this down from an attempt at a definition of art:
"Culturally significant meaning, embodied with skill within a sensuous medium." I read this in a book, 'Art Theory, A Very Short Introduction' by Cynthia Freeland, published by Oxford University Press.

This can be endlessly flexible, with different aspects of the triangle taking on greater of lesser emphasis in relation to each other. Traditional pictorial landscapes tend to be strong on visual appeal and craft, and less so on content or meaning. A news picture may be very strong on factual meaning, but have little craft or style to it.

The skill or craft may involve the lengths you go to in order to achieve pictures at all - access or achieving a vantage point; the meaning may be an emotional content; the visual style may be a challenging, visually discordant one.

It may be that you really don't like landscape at all, or that you find being in such an environment distasteful or disturbing in some way. Well, as my old boss on a newspaper would say: "That's your story!" The photographer Leonard Freed would say that he would have a 'sickness' about something, authority or the police for example, so he would go and shoot a project on that subject. Trent Parke travelled his own country, Australia in an emotionally disturbed state after 9/11 and created some strange visually magical images as a result. Josef Koudelka's pictures of the industrial corners of Europe are powerful, not pretty. I doubt if he liked the places much. Who said "Aesthetic or anaesthetic"?

So a strong, even, negative emotional reaction can be put to use if you can catch on to it, identify, and try to communicate it. Some people draw benefits from trying this that go beyond producing good pictures.