A Brief History of Landscape Photography
If you’re into landscapes, then sooner or later, the history of landscape photography is something that is going to take your interest as the evolution of the craft becomes relevant to your style. Landscapes have fascinated humanity since way before photography and the painting tradition is good evidence of that. In earlier times, photography was pretty limited in terms of technology, so landscapes were the perfect subject for the new discipline in the nineteenth century since it was almost static. Let’s jump in and see how it all evolved.
The Birth of Landscape Photography
It is hard to trace the exact origin of landscape photography since the very first photography that we know of was taken in an urban landscape during 1826 or 1827 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. Then in 1935 the English scientist Henry Fox Talbot came into play with various photography innovations.
Landscape photography was delivering something that only painting was capable of doing until that time — rendering reality in a two-dimensional format.
A lot of landscape images and portraits were taken during the Victorian era of photography, but it was in 1904 when Edward Steichen produced a photograph known as Moonlight: The Pond that landscape photography gained certain recognition in the art world.
