Originally Posted by
bthphoto
Actually, that's the antithesis of the landscape concept I'm after. As an ecologist, I see the landscape as a space that is defined by processes interacting over time, not a place where something happens. By way of analogy, consider a performance space, the size, shape, and character of which is defined by the performances conducted there, versus a stage that is defined by its construction and design, and which remains the same, regardless of the performances conducted there.
I understand that may sound to many as though I'm pressing some esoteric point of semantics. Some professional wildlife biologists have similar difficulties with concepts of landscape ecology and try to translate them into principles of population biology and animal behavior, because that's what they're familiar and comfortable with. However, the different is more than semantics, even if it's not immediately apparent to someone who hasn't spent 30 years contemplating it.
Consider a photograph of a stand of trees. It may be visually compelling, expansively composed, and evoke grand emotions associated with wilderness, purity, and adventure. However, could it have been conceived in a way that also leads a viewer to consider that its existence is dependent on nutrients that originated through decomposition at the top of the watershed, that its character is formed by the nature of the disturbance that set back its seral state, the seed source and distribution vectors available at the time, or that the community type it represents arrived and survived at that location through a series of events and processes that happened to synchronize at the right time? Or consider a photograph of a mountain stream. It may be visually compelling and evoke whimsical emotions associated with a sunny day on the stream bank. However, could it have been conceived in a way that also leads a viewer to consider its character as a constantly fluctuating artery transporting sediment and nutrients from one landscape position to another, providing perturbation to disturbance-dependent plant communities, and structural environments for aquatic organisms? Those are examples of the types of things I wish to be able put into imagery, and hopefully that will help illustrate the difference between a place and a process-defined space.
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