I'm a member of several Photography forums and some, particularly in the US, have 2 Landscape forums - one for Landscapes with some noticable human elements (a person, a road, a fence etc) and one for Landscapes without.
UK based forums, such as
www.globalphotosite.co.uk, make no such distinction, possibly because there are very few areas in the UK that are genuinely untouched by man.
Now, I have no problems with Forum owners making their own rules and I happily abide by them. But it got me wondering - why make this distinction, and can it really be justified?
Photographers such as Charlie Waite, Joe Cornish and Peter Watson have all published books of Landscape Photography which include people, barns, gates, road, tracks and the like. Yet, they still call them Landscapes. Charlie Waite, in the introductory section of 'The Making of Landscape Photographs' says something along the lines of man has contributed to and enhanced the landscape (this is from memory, I don't have the book to hand at the moment). Here he's not talking about areas where man has literally ruined the land, but he does seem to include towns and other man made things.
One of the US forums cites the The American Heritage Dictionary's definition of Nature as a reason for making the distinction. Here's the definition: "the world of living things and the outdoors".
Personally, I think this quote is meaningless. Man is a living thing and the outdoors is, well, outdoors :-) And these sites don't always abide by their own rules - one site has detailed restrictions on what constitutes 'too much' in the way of human elements to even be posted in their 'Human Elements' forum, giving detailed sample images. So, when a (very good) photo with virtually no discernible 'natural' elements gets posted, the site moderators rightly comment that the image is outside of the site's guidelines. Yet, the same moderators (I presume) then select this image as their 'Human Elements' Image of the Week :-0
Why do I care about this? In reality, I don't lose sleep over it and, as I said, I abide by these forum's rules and I don't question their decisions on their forum. Partly out of respect for their opinion and partly because of the emotional responses such posts have had in the past.
What bothers me is that some (not all) posters who defend the separation of Landscapes into human/non-human seem to think an image is intrinsically more 'valuable' or 'pure' with no human elements. Personally, I don't see it that way. Yes, man has shaped the land, sometimes detrimentally. But so have animals. True, animals are following their instincts, whereas man is (sometimes) being creative.
Now, no forum I know of has an 'Elements of Aviankind' forum (for images where the trees contain birds' nests) or an 'Elelemts of Giraffe-kind' for the areas in Africa where the trees have been virtually stripped bare by them. Why? Because it would absurd to make such an arbitrary distinction. So what makes human elements different?
For me, man 'arrived' on the planet by the same 'process' as the animals (and I think this logic holds true whatever you believe) and, therefore, we and our endeavors are as 'natural' as anything else on the earth. This is not to defend the abuse of freewill that can be seen all around us but, rather, to question the viewpoint that 'Nature' is a term that cannot be applied to mankind.
So I think the distinction between images with no human elements and some human elements is arbitrary and rather pointless. As I've said before in this post, I have no issue with any site owner making their own rules, although it would be nicer if they truly abided by them. I just can't see any real value in them. And that's why my
Galleries section makes no such distinction.
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