Landscape as the Radical Other



by Michel Keding


 “And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big, and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical – Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces”

 - Binyavanga Wainaina: How to Write about Africa



As Europeans increasingly left their temperate homelands to allegedly discover new lands, they found themselves in climates and vegetations unlike anything they had known before. Ever since 1492, if not before that, adventurers, pioneers, naturalists, (para-)ethnographers and other travellers tried to account these marvels to their kinfolk in the form of stories, travel reports and of course, visual imagery.

Unsurprisingly, the dawn of photography and its ongoing improvement provided new means of representing these other worlds as mass-consumable goods in school books, on postcards, posters, in newspapers and other prints. As with anything alien, these new landscapes were charged with notions of danger, exoticism, brute force, but also outlandish beauty, untouched by spoils of civilization. Scorching heat, colossal rainfall and humidity, dangerous animals and insects, unknown diseases and of course, ostensibly primitive peoples formed part of the experience of barren deserts or lush rainforests that grew gigantic trees, colourful flowers with wondrous fruit and an almost impenetrable thicket.

These new landscape became repositories and tokens of radical otherness, as it were, constructed as inferior, savage, barbaric and/or noble, and essentially providing that contrast agent that to date is so important for European identity. Representation of landscape, and in particular photography, in this understanding never was or is simple collection of data, or a snapshot of reality, but is part and parcel of greater narratives that may said to be selective, partial, charged etc., but certainly not representative, objective or just to those that are being (mis-)represented.

The case of photography is of particular interest here, as the close resemblance to the visual experience makes consumers of this medium especially gullible. Photography usually has quasi-scientific credibility, it is ‘photo-realistic’ and we (at least us westerners), who emphasize and rely heavily on the visual in everyday life, are so easily tricked into believing what is depicted. Arguably, in present day there is a fairly common understanding that selection of frame, digital editing technology and context are powerful means of tweaking the effects of a photograph. Nonetheless, images stick in our memory, possibly more than other sensual inputs, they resurface with related tropes and are potent agents of reproducing distorted narratives on a cognitive level. This makes it particularly crucial that photography is questioned, contextualized, picked apart and criticized and that we unlearn to take it at face value.

Now, one could ask, what is the relevance of colonial photography in what is generally considered a post-colonial era? There are countless examples of continuities between colonial and present-day representations which are quite present in our everyday lives. We know the poster-children of charitable organizations that feed the narrative of the suffering, helpless African, stripped of clothes and agency, or the disneyfication of wildlife and noble savagery in The Lion Kind or Tarzan or The Gods Must Be Crazy. Similarly, there are specific notions of landscape tied to Africa that are easily recognizable. The above picture is an assembly of cover images of books staged in Africa, which circles through social media[1]. One quickly notices orange-red sunsets, usually an acacia tree, here and there wildlife. Rarely people, with the exception of Ralph Fiennes, who portrays a White Saviour in the film-adaption of The Constant Gardener.

What is it about the savannah sunset that evokes “Africa!” at first sight? For one, as opposed to the palm tree or rainforests, that particular landscape is not found anywhere else, so it prevents confusion. Secondly, one might say it feeds into a narrative of Africa as untouched, endless beauty, a place where giraffes and elephants still walk off into the twilight. Thirdly, it resounds with a far too common misconception, namely that Africa is a country.

This image is, to my mind, the equivalent of The Noble Savage in landscape photography – close to original nature, simple, yet elegant, untouched by the ‘side-effects’ of so-called civilization. In that, it becomes a particular token, which stands comfortably between other tokens that represent other strands of colonial and western narratives on Africa, i.e. the brutal, the war-torn, the helpless, the wretched. The short essay behind the above quote is a concise summary of representations.

Understanding the colonial legacy of these narratives is crucial in their deconstruction. Therefore, cultivating a new, critical practice of remembrance of this past is essential. Furthermore, we, as Europeans who have been socialized within these tropes, have to always scrutinize the how and why of the representations we create, be they science, knowledge, story or photography – because it is in that that we have created the Other, and through the Other, we sought to distinguish our Selves.



[1] https://twitter.com/SimonMStevens/status/464049317926686720/photo/1


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