In D.W. Meinig’s The Beholding Eye, Meinig says “Any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.” From this, I started thinking about the different people we’ve read and talked about in class and the different versions of landscape that they would see.
First, the lobsterman, looking out at a stretch of Mid-Maine coast, would see the landscape in front of him as a combination of system and wealth. If it is his own lobstering territory, then he knows the area well; how the tide swells, the direction of the current, and the influence of the weather. On top of this, he contextualizes the landscape in front of him in terms of wealth. Meinig’s explanation of landscape as wealth is more focused on the monetary values that the views of a place can have, but for the lobster fisherman, the landscape he is looking at contains very physical and very concrete wealth, submerged and crawling around in the waters below.
For an artist, like Eric Hudson, this same landscape means something completely different. He is likely to see it in many ways; nature, habitat, maybe ideology, but most importantly he sees the landscape as aesthetic. If he finds it beautiful and meaningful, he would begin to think about how he could conceptualize and present the scene in front of him onto a canvas or photo. He would think about what the art would tell viewers and the emotions that it would evoke.
Lastly, to someone like William Cronon, talked about in Cresswell’s Genealogy of Place, the landscape in front of him would mainly be seen through the lens ideology and place. He focuses less on the physical aspects of the view in front of him, and more on the underlying factors that have shaped it. His understanding is driven by the complex interactions of people, cultures, and the environment.