Jorge,
I very much enjoyed your essay, and wanted to bring up a related issue
to that of space, which is time. I'm thinking about the ways that it is
carved by industrialization, whether by the length of the workday, or
by technology-- the time involved in painting an ideal landscape is
different than the comparatively instantaneous release of the camera's
shutter. The space within the canvas or within a print through
reproduction offers something compelling and apart from the
surroundings of the city or town. There's a process of commodification
of an environment, and in the process a landscape is opened to
possibilities, of course, often without consideration of its
inhabitants. One predecessor to 'landscape tourism' was scientific
literature, whose illustrated texts enabled armchair travelers
beginning in the late eighteenth & early nineteenth century.

The limits on how far one could travel was always an issue for an
'elite' or a 'popular' consumer, but there is an element of
democratization in travel that arrived with the railroad. How does one
'appreciate' the finer details of landscapes that fly by windows? I'd
like to suggest that such looking required one to gaze ever deeper into
the distance, and reinscribed the ideal landscape that much further
away. This may have also contributed to the popularity of the large
scale landscapes by such artists as Albert Bierstadt, whose looming
canvases featured majestic mountains with a miniature human presence.

Sincerely,
Ellen

Ellen Fernandez-Sacco, Ph.D.
Oakland, CA


On Nov 3, 2005, at 11:48 AM, jorgeg34 wrote:

> A new feature is now on-line at our
>
>     Landscape Appreciation Website 
>
> this time on how Popular Landscape Tourism begun. With it I hope to
> start an exchange of views on the connections between visiting
> landscapes and appreciating them. In many ways this is a continuation
> of the topic of "elitist" and "popular" perceptions of landscape that
> we started to discuss a few months ago.
>
>         Regards to all
>
>                 Jorge
>
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