Transporting Landscapes

Landscapes are all around us—literally. So what makes an image of the preexisting world into an artwork, which is to say an aesthetic object that engages the mind through technical or conceptual virtuosity? When it comes to landscape painting, the answer is easy: capturing the many-splendored natural world on canvas requires immense skill in and of itself, and the artist is also free to take liberties with the scene, investing it with symbolism, narrative, or other forms of ideas. The painter Jessica Hess dazzles with her photorealistic vistas, for instance, while Alexis Rockman approaches the landscape as a stage for fantastically surreal, sci-fi scenarios.

In photography, then, the artist can play with the readymade landscape through dramatic cropping, finding appealing geometries or compositional elements, or selecting specific sites that fit a theme he or she is exploring. Often these approaches come together, as in the work of Joel Sternfeld, who is famous for his pictures of vegetation sprouting from New York's formerly abandoned High Line railway, or Olivo Barbieri, whose tightly compressed pictures draw parallels between geological growths and the mega-sized architecture of the modern city. Then, of course, there are outliers like Kim Keever, who creates dreamy naturalistic settings in a fish tank in his studio and then photographs them for an effect that merges painting and photography.

To learn more about the various approaches to landscape art—and send your imagination on a tour of extraordinary locales—explore this diverse collection of artworks.