Landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify. This indeterminacy of affect seems, in fact, to be a crucial feature of whatever force landscape can have. As the background within which figure, form, or narrative act emerges, landscape exerts the passive force of setting, scene, and sight.
W.J.T. Mitchell
New topographics : photographs of a man-altered landscape, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, 1975.
