Six Quotes

"On the relationship of modern life to nature: the pitorial and poetic moment in landscape emerges where its elements freely combine, like nature and the gradual realisation of history which it initiated. [...] The more aburptly and violently an abstract theory is forced upon that which had been realized, the more mathmatical does it process, and so in turn, the more radically does it carry out the separation of each element in single categories that fulfil a specific aim and, consequently, all the more certainly does it destroy all physiognomy, all the appeal of individual life."

-Ernst Rudorff, in: Preußische Jahrbücher, Vol. 45, 1880.

"Who can define the moods of the wild places, the meaning of nature in domains beyond those of material use? Here are the worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and revelations of great art are equally difficult to define we can grasp them only in the depths of perceptive spirit."

-Ansel Adams, Yosemite Valley, 1960.

"The landscape as a limited detail of the world connotes, and continues to represent the centre of artistic interest. Therefore, what we are concerned with here has less to do with the question of limiting conditions of a regionally determined development of art than with the question as to those common themes, which determine the significance of landscape in art photography."

-Friedrich Grassegger, in the essay: "Landscape Photography from the Collection of the State Museum of Lower Austria

Grassegger, Friedrich, and Fritz Simak. Landschaft : Zwei Sammlungen : Fotografie Aus Drei Jahrhunderten = Landscape : Two Collections : Three Centuries of Photography. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 2007. Print."

"...global space bears the inscriptions and prescriptions of power, its effectiveness redounds upon the levels we have been discussing - the levels of architectural (monumental/building) and the urban. Where global space contrives to signify, thanks to those who inhabit it, and for them, it does so, even in the 'private' realm, only to the extent that those inhabitants accept, or have imposed upon them, what is 'public'."

-Lefebvre, Henri, and Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. Print.

p. 228

"The photograph is the art of putting all that aside, standing between you and the world - whereby the absence of the world is present in every detail, augmented by every detail."

-Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 1994.

"Structures help to recognizes objects. [...] structures also become archipelago for aerial photography. [...] (it) creates to the full and shows a part of the larger whole, whereas, through abstraction and through pictorial detail [...] emphasizes the structures.

-Friedrich Grassegger, in the essay: "Landscape Photography from the Collection of the State Museum of Lower Austria

Grassegger, Friedrich, and Fritz Simak. Landschaft : Zwei Sammlungen : Fotografie Aus Drei Jahrhunderten = Landscape : Two Collections : Three Centuries of Photography. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 2007. Print."