“The Beholding Eye” makes clear that to Meinig, “landscape” is not a concrete and unchanging entity, but rather a subjective experience. Meinig categorizes these experiences into several categories: landscape as nature, ideology, history, etc. He writes of the historical landscape, “[it] is not a full record of history, but will yield to diligence and inference a great deal more than meets the casual eye” (Meinig 43). This sentence immediately conjured memories of all the times I have had my photo taken in historically significant spaces: the Greek Acropolis, Mt. Katahdin, my great-grandfather’s front stoop. Most of these photos aren’t particularly artistic in composition, but that doesn’t diminish their importance to me. I offered myself a bit of time to reflect on this: how can objectively “bad” photos be worth keeping? Framing? Laughing and crying over? Here is where Meinig’s words become especially apropos. These photos are proof that for a single fleeting moment, my story intersected with something much larger. For me, the character of these landscapes was framed not by their aesthetic, but by their history.
This compelled me to think about when aesthetic does become the predominant lens for experiencing landscape, especially through photography. For me, it’s when I lose personal connection with the image–that is, it depicts a place I have not experienced firsthand, or fails to feature a person close to me. In these instances, the personal intersection between the history of that place and my experience of the world is erased. It’s a selfish sort of realization, but I think it sheds unique light on photography as an art form. Perhaps the goal of artistic photography is to cultivate an aesthetic experience of landscape intense enough that we care about the photo’s story despite not being directly included in it. A challenge, of sorts, to overcome our own self-centered thought patterns and engage outside of ourselves.