I Photograph Landscapes, But I’m Not a Landscape Photographer – What Paul Strand taught me about looking past genre

The French composer Maurice Ravel, whom you likely know from his ubiquitous Bolero, lost his battle with history. Despite his protestations, he is now labeled an Impressionist, lumped together with the other titan of the movement, Claude Debussy.

History’s confusion is understandable. On the surface, Ravel and Debussy sound similar enough with their non-functional harmonies, whole-tone scales, and dreamy orchestrations. But where Debussy embodied impressionism in the purest sense, writing music with broad gestures that breezily suggested other gestures, Ravel was a Swiss watchmaker; every note served an exacting architectural purpose, to the harmony, to the melodic line, to the timbre, to the long-form structure of the piece.

Ravel was really a neoclassicist. He did not want to be conflated with Debussy, but history didn’t care.

Poor Ravel’s mislabeling is not just a musicological curiosity. It happens to photographers too.

My friend recently ribbed me (gently) for being a landscape photographer. He knew full well I’d yet to reconcile my love for the subject with my indifference toward the genre. How is it possible to like shooting landscapes and yet feel so distant from landscape photography?

I found my answer in Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and someone they both admired.

Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson

Ansel Adams is to landscape photography what Henri Cartier-Bresson is to street photography. The casual observer can easily see the differences in what they shoot, but the curious observer understands the most interesting differences are in how and why they shoot.

Adams constructed the photograph. He pre-visualized the outcomes, worked for hours in the field capturing what he needed on his tripod, and spent hours more in the darkroom transforming tonal values in service of that vision. All to express the sublimity of nature.

Bresson noticed the photograph. He famously refused to crop and avoided darkrooms. His tiny camera was not a tool of construction, but an extension of the eye, one responsible for noticing that unrepeatable confluence of geometry, light, and human-life: Bresson’s famous “decisive moment.”

What Their Practice Has Become

“The world is going to pieces and people like Adams… are photographing rocks!” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

Groundbreaking and brilliant as Adams was, his practice is often driven to caricature today: the golden hour pilgrimage to a geolocated overlook, the subject and composition reverse-engineered from someone else’s photo, the edit that screams for your attention, so you attend, only to find yourself at a loud spectacle that somehow managed to say nothing.

“I still believe there is a real social significance in a rock—a more important significance therein than in a line of unemployed.” – Ansel Adams

Caricatures exist for Bresson’s self-proclaimed inheritors too: any random street corner with some human in motion, unsettling invasions of privacy while on the hunt for pathos, humanism replaced with exploitation and voyeurism.

Neither genre nor their caricatures speak to me philosophically, so I no more want to be conflated with them than Ravel did with Impressionism, but I photograph landscapes… a lot. So I have to reckon with not feeling like a landscape photographer.

For a long time I thought maybe I existed on the midpoint of a line defined by Adams and Bresson. But there exists someone else, a third vertex ahead and respected by them both, who clarified how I see: Paul Strand.

Paul Strand

Paul Strand is not a household name, yet he casts a long shadow over both Adams and Bresson. The first photograph of his I ever saw was made a generation before Adams or Bresson captured their most celebrated photos. I was at an art museum, and it stopped me in my tracks.

Look at the balance he achieved in an era without influencers peddling compositional dogma.
Look at the formal clarity he sculpted out of that brutal New Orleans afternoon light.
Look at the tonal control you will recognize in Adams’ iconic vistas.
Look at Bresson’s decisive moment as it contrasts the architectural and humanistic stillness.

There is no performance. The figures are not posed. The scene is not arranged. And yet the geometry of light, architecture, and human life feels as inevitable as Adams’ mountains and as spontaneous as Bresson’s stolen moments.

Strand thought about the rectangle of the photograph the way an architect thinks about a building: every element had to justify its presence and contribute to the whole. He was deeply influenced by Cubism, and you can feel it in how he organized space. Shapes interlock. A shadow isn’t so much a shadow as a geometric form in dialogue with the object it is cast upon. He was applying Cubist spatial logic to the real world as we see it.

Strand’s sculpture of light is equally rigorous. He wasn’t interested in pretty or moody light. He was interested in revelatory light, light that described surfaces and separated planes. Rather than merely glow, they clarify in their refusal to let atmospheric prettiness substitute for structure and substance.

He did this without losing sight of his humanism, his desire to dignify the marginalized, or his argument for a more equitable world. And he did all this at a time when photography was considered not a real art but rather a refuge for failed painters.

Strand elevated the craft, and it should be no wonder that Adams and Bresson admired him for the pioneering master that he is. He is far more than a midpoint between Adams and Bresson. He is the leading vertex from which both originate.

Paul Strand is the shapes and tones before an image resolves into a porch and its shadow.

What Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Paul Strand showed me was that subject matter and philosophy are not the same thing.

I am not so much a landscape photographer as I am a light-shape-and-color photographer. I have read somewhere the term for this is formalism.

And so my invitation to you is this:

Read between the lines.
Hear beyond the notes.
Look past the scene.

You know, the kind of thing Paul Strand would do.

______________

This is my first essay ever (not including the ones I had to write for school). Thank you so much for spending the time to read and reflect.

I will be happy to hear your thoughts here or on Instagram.

Derek Zhao

Share this post: