Landscape photography shows how over the decades pictures have changed from sacred to real and finally to ultimate landscapes. And how our vision is increasingly destabilised in the course of this. To illustrate this is the aim of this article. But let me start off with two general remarks. The first preliminary remark applies quite generally to talking about photography. Since a photograph is both an independent picture as well as a reproduction of something, we are forced time and again also to talk about the object of reproduction. In this which is reproduced, in turn, two things become manifest: on the one hand, an individual’s view, the photographing individual’s view of the world, and on the other, the motif, the world in front of the lens. In the first case, as something of an analogous individual, we feel fairly competent – we, too, are used to looking at the world. Yet in the second case, we perforce find ourselves in a whole range of different domains, for instance that of landscape in this case, of townscape, we are confronted with the topic of town as an urban organisation. Talking about photography always forces us to talk about many worlds. This fact itself turns it into a kind of destabilising discussion with a generalist’s claim. The second preliminary remark: this double duplicate of which I have just been talking – the photograph as a reproduction and a picture on the one hand, and the photograph as the world reproduced, as a trace and an individual’s specific view of the world – sheds some light on the title and subtitle of this article: the title “Destabilised Viewing” reflects the issue of the individual – I, you, we – whose position and whose view of the world today is possibly destabilised, and the subtitle “From sacred to real and ultimate landscapes” alludes to the issue of the world seen through photography and the world constructed and given meaning to by photography. Due to the nature of the medium, both are inseparably linked in a photograph and can only be separated in intellectual analysis – an interplay of passive and constructive perception, of the idea of “landscape” as a construct and a metaphor of thought, of vision as orientation. When in the mid-14th century Petrarca climbed Mont Ventoux in Provence, thus virtually raising himself to a point above the earth and leaving its embeddedness, and for the first time marvelled at Nature’s landscape from above (provided the letter mentioning this was not forged, as recently discussed), two things were born: the autonomous individual and the landscape separate from the individual, located in front. This gesture, this enlightened act performed by Petrarca symbolises a great change in values and orientation. The vertical orientation prevailing until then and the total unity and order under God disintegrate, are broken down into the horizontally aligned duality of individual and object, into a viewing, experiencing, thinking individual encountering a world lying at his or her feet and experiencing this world as the object of his or her vision; and into the vertically embedded, believing human being. The vertical alignment is transferred to the domain of faith. This reflects the split unity as described in the Bible in the context of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise. And similar to this, the breaking of a unity which was long experienced as natural and structured, almost invariably leads to insecurity – along with progress. Three hundred years later, virtually at the time of completion of this separation, a deep sense of insecurity pervaded Romanticism as a feeling of detachment, lostness, total separation from an overall context, from a larger, embedding narrative. If we leave the individual’s sense of lostness aside for the moment, this modern individual-object relationship – me here, the world there – established new, stable conditions, a new order. Man’s first point of orientation and structure in this world is Nature, the landscape he sees, be it rural or urban. The Renaissance delivered almost perfect pictures of this. Looking into the clearly structured city, into “La Città Ideale”, as represented in the example of the famous draft of an unknown 15th century painter in the Palazzo Ducale of Urbino (today ascribed to Leon Battista Alberti), strengthened man’s mind and sense of order, while letting the eyes wander across the landscape, across Poussin’s “Arcadia”, for instance, nurtured man’s soul and spirit. Mind and soul, the constructed ideal city and the imagined ideal landscape: a perfect pair complementing each other, even if both are a construction, a fiction of vision, and if both are also a representation of a society acting enlightened. This Renaissance world view places the individual at the centre and has the totality of the world relating to the individual (perspectively concentrated). It experiences its heyday and soon its last phase of prosperity in the 19th century, the era of the civil individual and the display of civil power. Let me present two examples. On the one hand, the panoramic picture, painted or photographed, becomes symbolic of the seizure of the world. The world is at our feet, it belongs to us, we can grasp it, meaning we can seize it and make it our own, and also understand it by penetrating it mentally. 360-degree panoramas were created, such as the photographed San Francisco Panorama by Eadweard Muybridge and the painted Bourbaki Panorama in Lucerne (represented and interpreted in the wonderful work of Jeff Wall). 360-degree panoramas suggest total availability to the observing individual, and also cause a little dizziness – we’re not used to assuming God-like, omnipotent positions. Second example: the city of Paris. Under Haussmann it is reconstructed into the epitome of a modern, metropolitan Città Ideale, with Versailles as a prospect, as the constructional model. Clearly aligned, structured, the Place d’Etoile and the Arc de Triomphe at the centre, and the streets lined with houses radiating from there. A famous example taken from town planning, an image of the link between order and power, order and possession. The streets are wide enough to maintain order towards the inside – they are too wide for barricades but sufficiently wide for the deployment of troops – and they are aligned in such a way and long enough to span the world – at least mentally – ending only in the colonies. The 19th century is the culmination of this world view, of this statically structured civil order, and at the same time it experiences a first break at this time. Theodore Rousseau exclaimed words to the effect of “Let the civilised world go to Hell! Long live Nature, the forests and old poems!” In the 19th century, the electrification and dynamisation of the economy, of traffic, and town life unsettled the balance between urban and rural areas. With increasing size, the city – once a concept of social, rational aspects, a contract of good behaviour among the community of people – gradually turns into the epitome of evil, a Moloch, a beast that spreads, infecting rural areas. The country is colonised, Nature is managed. As a countermove to this – as an analogy and correction in one, so to speak – the landscape is subsequently upgraded to a matter of national concern for the protection of the country (from the townspeople’s perspective), and parts of the natural landscape are elevated to national parks deserving protection. To put it more clearly: in the society undergoing economic dynamisation and ideological secularisation, the contrast between good and evil is gradually spreading to rural and urban areas. What used to complement each other and get on well most of the time – after all, the town wall offered protection to peasants, too, in times of climatic catastrophes and war – now turns into a pair of contrasts. Landscape photography at the end of the 19th century and way into the middle of the 20th century is steeped in this. The best, most obvious examples of this are surely found in American photography, in the works of Carlton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Jackson, Edward Steichen right up to Edward Weston, Anselm Adams, Minor White or Brett Weston. These famous photographers present empty landscapes – in contrast to the full cities –, landscapes at peace with themselves, at least seemingly at one with the rhythm of the life cycle – in contrast to the dynamics and hectic of the cities; the landscape as such is canonised in these cases – contrasting with the Moloch of the cities. In her book “Landscape as Photograph”, Estelle Jussim speaks of the “landscape as God”, as an elevation, as a symbol. Edward Weston, Anselm Adams and Minor White, to mention just three well-known names of the 20th century, in their photographs turn Nature into a pantheist experience, into the naturalised divine. In photography the idea forms of the American landscape as great, untouched, sacred, capital-letters NATURE, it is idealised and stylised into the embodiment of the eternal, the consistent, the divine which is only challenged by its own forces – the sun, rain, snow and storm. Landscape turns into an untouched, sacred natural body as opposed to the cursed, polluted urban body. Here the mind of the American individual creates for itself a possibility of escaping, a refuge back to the origins, a surrogate for the sacred element that is lost. It recognises the divine in the natural-state Nature. The poet Walt Whitman provides the poetic voice to this. American photography can be regarded as being representative here because it is exemplary of the movement – exemplary, since the elevation of landscape accompanies the loss of Nature in a particularly distinct fashion due to the lack of mystifiable history in America. However, a similar development can be found in virtually any country. To sum it up: with respect to landscapes, photography, “this most formidable instrument of truth”, as it is sometimes referred to, was for a long time not used to “reveal truths so far concealed”, but its realistic character served as a visual certificate of poetic, pantheist, preserving, or political-ideological “glossing over”. Even in New Functionalist photography, for instance in Swiss photography of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The landscape experiences an elevation, in the name of whatever, with the sanction of the true, because it is created in a mechanico-technical, physico-chemical manner. Experiencing the world through images always lags behind the development of the real world. We know this contradiction of image reality and actual reality from our own experience. It finds its equivalent yearning in our desire to prefer living in the old part of a city rather than in the suburbs or new parts, in the medieval Marais rather than on Boulevard Haussmann, and finally on Champs-Elysée rather than in the Paris banlieues. Then at the end of the 1960s, it is the USA of all countries that experiences a striking pictorial revolution. The notion of the American landscape as untouchable, sacred, capital-letter Nature was suddenly confronted with the idea of a changing landscape, with the occupation, the management of the land, the metamorphosis of Nature into a territory that had been taken possession of. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Dan Graham, Ed Ruscha and other young artists opposed the notion of a delightful and detached landscape with a contemporary realistic view of a down-to-earth, every-day, trivial environment. This new generation of photographers scandalised the notion of the beautiful, existential landscape image at the exhibition “New Topographics” (Rochester, 1975), for instance. The ‘divine’, the sacred landscape, was transformed into a landscape representing real facts and an artistic concept. The American Lewis Baltz may be presented as a kind of role model for the development since the sixties. Lewis Baltz and his colleagues simply populated this American ideal, which at times appeared barren, empty, yet always at peace with itself, beautiful and fulfilled. The heroic, poetic “Me and Nature” first turned into “Us and the park” and finally even into a trivial “Them and the little garden”. They – the others, society; and we – the future generations, those who came too late. Since if there used to be untouched spots in Nature in the past, then now there will always be a single-family home or used rubber tyres there as a sign that someone has already been there. In the photographic image, landscape has also turned into territory, delimiting, excluding, and most importantly – occupied. Landscape as territory, and territory as built-up, designed, occupied space. And that which is built – for example, the “Tract Houses” by Lewis Baltz in their indifferent triviality, or the “New Industrial Parks” in their frosty, minimalist elegance – as mute, almost faceless architecture. Baltz had to add the odd photograph taken at an angle to assure the observer of the fact that he was not taking pictures of large screens instead of buildings, taking pictures of built matter and not immaterial images. After the American landscape, Baltz and his contemporaries desecrated, disenchanted the private home and its setting. His houses and towns tell nothing of the skylines, nothing of the cathedrals of the anonymous societies – as did the photographs of Charles Sheeler, Edward Steichen or Alfred Stieglitz – but of the endless American “front garden” of the middle classes. “Maryland” and “Park City” – in-vitro homes and towns that in a pragmatic-economic fashion bypass the occidental ideal city featuring a centre and a meaningful, hierarchically arranged structure. Real Estate landscape, traversed by Baltz in the manner of a land surveyor and recorded photographically, Real Estate landscape that makes town and countryside merge under monetary aspects. These photographs of Lewis Baltz and his contemporaries were shocking at the time, because they rendered a number of things vulnerable that had as yet been sacred: – the Edward Weston or Anselm Adams-style “good, nice photograph”: they set matter-of-fact, unromantic, seemingly scientific stocktaking against it. – the “dedicated” photographer: because they do not pester us with their perfect design, their emotions and opinions, they do not reveal or moralise. – the individual self, since it no longer experiences fulfilment or elevation when observing, not even instructions or moral comments, but itself as part of a system. The view in these photographs is no longer sustained by a Utopia, except for that of examining in as non-utopian a manner as possible, to investigate what is happening with the towns and suburbs. The photographers and artists use this image purism and the congruity of form and content as a critical instrument, they replace the illusion of photo-artistic skill with the illusion of mechanistic description and so enforce a fundamentally new role on the observer of their work, i.e. on us: that of looking unsentimentally at the present, current world, and having no choice of doing anything else. During these sixties and seventies, the images of landscapes become real, they catch up with reality. Rendered profane, purified and trivialised: real without any ostensible ideological programme. After the great discrepancy between the demonised townscape and the idealised natural landscape in photography, the images now converge again. Stripped of their passionate emotion, they are turned into related elements of the same system. This type of photography requires observers who do not marvel, but think, who look out for the social implications. It wants ist observers to be partners in the process of exploration, in the photographic fieldwork. For twenty years, from the mid-sixties to the mid eighties, the prevailing type of photography wants to “show what’s going on out there”, looks at things unvarnished, as neutrally as possible, almost scientifically. These photographs are deliberately made to appear very reserved and withdrawn, since the artists wish to differ from the human pathos, from the emotionality of the fifties. They create photographs in the spirit of conceptualism and structuralism, in other words, they are interested in identifying the structures, the morphologies, they want to find a typology or system underlying the rampantly growing urbanity. In terms of attitude, this type of photography can draw on role models: on a photographer of the twenties and thirties – Eugène Atget, for instance, or on Albert Renger-Patzsch or Walker Evans. Only the times and the prevailing influences have changed; landscape in general today is turning into a large, boundless periphery – from Nature to periphery, from the prairie to periphery: what changes we experience in the artistic work of Stephen Shore, Jean Louis Garnell, Gabriel Basilico, Fischli/Weiss, Joachim Brohm or Joel Sternfeld! The past ten, fifteen years have once more thoroughly churned up up the structures of towns and rural areas. Even at the beginning of the 20th century we do see a powerful dynamisation of the towns – a “futurisation”. The changes that occur today may possibly be even more fundamental. The capture of space was followed by the capture of time – “Fahren, fahren, fahren” is the title created for this by Paul Virilio – and the capture of time is followed by the annulment of place – we are here, work for there, and are connected online. What was possible for the first time with the telephone – communicating independently of place – now becomes commonplace in economic and private life thanks to faxes, e-mail and mobile phones. The relation between the periphery and the centre experiences a rotary motion, centres are vacated, converted, and the periphery becomes central to the economy. Suddenly peripheries are everywhere, they are the “areas of tomorrow”, detached from historicalness, from meaning as a result of something that has grown, arranged in a purely functional fashion. At the same time the problem of becoming invisible is aggravated. Essential things become invisible, are laid into cables, blackboxes, or underground. How do the photographers respond to this, how do we as observers react? On this, once more as a representative, Lewis Baltz and his adaptation to these new post-industrial hyperville conditions. His adaptation to the changing conditions from the mid-eighties onwards – I’ll call it the Baltzian Turn – is a complicated sequence of movements, which I would like to describe as backward exiting and ascending with a bow and half-spin, like a helicopter doing a tricky power start, like a camera tracking wildly. Exiting an inner and an outer triangular relationship: firstly, here the photographer, there the world, and over there the photo sign – seeing and showing what is going on, from a desentimentalised, quasi-scientific position, with the precision of a land surveyor, the coldness of an estate agent. What was to be seen in cool black-and-white photographs were the buildings and ruins of our times, the peripheral zones, rubbish heaps of the present, geometrical and organic architecture as an external sign of structures, power and decay. And secondly, here the photographer, there the photo, and finally, over there, the observer, initially staring at the world of images and then increasingly at the author. Both for a long time fruitful, successful triangular relationships, but then also fatal ones. So the popular author left his position, took pleasure in cropping (the reproductions of) his icons and accelerated his viewpoint. Ascending, because modern traffic routes, communication loops, no longer served the old locations, the old topography. These visual and mental thought patterns of the topographers became the outstation, questionable because quasi objective, questionable because quasi-out, questionable because static despite the ground under our feet having long turned into a runway. Baltz’s answer are the Generic Night Cities, the trilogy Ronde de nuit, Docile Bodies and The Politics of Bacteria. The Night Cities, single- or several-panel, always large-scale night cities, are infatuating due to powerful light-dark patterns with garish colours that stick out from the black of the night. They are a spectacle of spotlights, fascinating and pleasing as well as painful due to the strident artificiality. “Landscape” no longer as something located “in front of us”, but as a fully commercialised laboratory with us in the thick of it. The city as a huge quarter of passages, a grid of streets, of highways we travel along, and a number of terminals, the car park, the block of houses and finally the screen where we stop without arriving, without being at home – only to be on the way again electronically. These nocturnal landscapes, which he calls “Generic Night Cities”, seem like the stage for a last great spectacle. Urban landscapes by night: no daylight to provide a clear, hierarchical order, thousands of artificial, glaring lights lure and point. The town as a parking lot or lane, stop and go, one huge urban laboratory. The pictures seem as thin and two-dimensional and colourful as switchboards, the towns seem a little like chips opened up, full of circuits, a machinery of zest and strength and power and downfall. Without depth, without perspective, timeless and placeless. The great trilogy of Ronde de nuit, Docile Bodies and The Politics of Bacteria seems like three mighty history paintings at the end of time. Each are around 2 to 2 metres 50 high and 12 metres long, divided into segments, modules. The topic is surveillance, control, investigation. In Rondes de nuit we emerge from a kind of fairytale world – “the forest where I lost myself” – into the underworld, the basement, shafts and sewers; and at the end of the darkness we find ourselves facing the modern sea of stars, the dazzling sea of lights of a city, in front of Manhattan as the ultimate firmament. Extracts of video surveillances of a police station are mixed with images of cables, hoses and a mainframe computer. With Dante’s Inferno as literary murmur, with the reference to Dürrenmatt’s book The Assignment, in which onto the Cartesian theorem of “I think so I am” he imposes a contemporary drive: I am because I am being watched. In Docile Bodies – along pictures from neurosurgery – we penetrate through the outer layer, the appearance of things, into the inside of the body, into its mechanism. Endoscoping the body while it is being monitored on the screen means looking inside the body, docking it to the big machine, delegating it in new humbleness – the networked, connected body. The Politics of Bacteria is a montage of pictures that evolved in and around the new Ministry of Finance in Paris-Bercy. The structure of the work is symmetrical, arranged in the form of a three-part altarpiece. Centrally, in the middle, a surveillance situation, to the left and right of this a tapestry showing men with the looks and gestures of power, standing with their legs apart, hands on hips, uniforms, helmets. Outer signs as visualisations of something invisible, of power and repression. In each of the three works, these new, ultimate landscape pictures, closeness and distance, detail and total, brilliant and screened alternate so harshly that the observer cannot find peace, cannot assume an ideal position in the sense of the classical perspective. They are “sampled” pictures, arranged to form large, rhythmical image blocks, assembled into wall pieces. New panoramas, not those of belief in total overview, but cineramas, endoramas, videoramas, which by using assembled fragments aim to correspond to a fragmented, accelerated, restless and yet fundamentally controlled world. Another example of this, Swiss this time: the photographs of Nicolas Faure taken at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) pull the rug out from under the observer’s feet, dismantling spatial perspectives and all other points of reference or orientation. Having lost our bearings, we “float” around the landscape of a technoid world whose image alludes to topics of networking, transmission, intervention and control. We feel dizzy because we plunge into this fascinating world and at the same time associate with these images feelings of losing ourselves, of being at the mercy of something out there. Landscape photography has now turned into civilisation pictures, science pictures, media pictures. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk stated the following: “If it is true that we do not find truth about the world in what we see, hear and feel in a fundamentally passive way of perception, but need to imagine this truth beyond that which our senses tell us, having to ‘read’ it like an ontological code, then it is in the nature of this truth that we will think ourselves dizzy about it. He who does not feel dizzy, is not informed.” He who does not feel dizzy, is not informed – and he who is not extremely involved in the world’s motion, will constantly feel dizzy. The essence of today’s world can probably only be adequately experienced and grasped when in motion. But where are we to look? What will tomorrow’s landscape be? Will it entirely defy our idea of landscape? A cyber-landscape, with a virtual node, but without specific town characteristics, without a town centre? And who will be looking? What individual? Who will we be? Fleshly cyborgs in scanscapes? Petrarca climbed up a mountain; new, current landscape photography tends to go underground, loses itself in chaotic un-places, non-places, discusses switchpoints in the social fabric. When it reemerges  – and when it does so other than in the middle of a crossing in Manhattan – then it searches for peace (that before and after the storm), but not the kind of peace that is filled with sense or meaning, but emptiness, the simple haiku – then the occidental ‘signery’ (imagery) formerly Christian receives a touch of Buddhism, as typified in the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, or it is simple, almost trivial: there, looking, documenting – as in Thomas Popp’s photographs, for instance.