Trash – © John NeelThe picturesque landscape – A thing of the past?
The picturesque landscape – A thing of the past?
The sad reality of our world is that the classical landscape no longer exists – at least not in the ways we imagine it to be.
Anything that attempts to show it, is more than likely, a substantial falsification or at least highly misleading. To do so is to simulate conditions that really no longer exist.
Yes, there are places that might still possess the appearance of the past. The sky and the earth still have beauty. But the reality is not what it may appear.
The real landscape has been contaminated by unchecked human activity. It is instead filled with air pollution, junk and debris, burning of coal, radiation from a number of sources including Fukushima, Chernobyl, all of the atomic bomb testing that happened in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, to date. As well as airplane contrails, oil spills, smokestacks, landfills, overfishing, deforestation, Monsanto, mining, wars, carbon emissions, climate change, dirtied and polluted waterways, endless highways, billions of cars, parking lots, factories, billboards, plastic debris, power lines, lights at night, animal extinction and thousands of other human-produced dreck caused by greed driven overconsumption of materials and resources. Not to mention a rapidly growing human population that will increasingly amplify all the problems we have and all those that we have yet to produce.
The shopping mall, along with advertising, and the automobile may be a few of the worst of man’s creations. For it is the mall and the car that make it so easy to consume. And it is the reach of marketing that has perpetuated our desire to have it all. The so-called “American Dream” has perpetrated the consumer mindset, which is what the rest of the world also wants to “enjoy”.
Trailer – © John Neel
If anything, the landscape has become a dumping ground for human waste and a shameless corporate battle for its resources.
As Photographers, it would be best to face reality and declare new “pictorial” views of the world as having been thoroughly man altered and/or mistreated in some form or another.
Eden as we might imagine it to be no longer exists.
Even those far away, “exotic” places that we might wish to escape, are not what they once might have been or what we might now imagine them to be.
Marketing Paradise is one of the ways that sells products. The fantasy of beautiful places sells everything from clothing to fragrances, alcohol, expensive automobiles – even our desires to escape to “Eden”. We imagine ourselves relaxing in an exotic forest or basking by the sea as marketing peddles the promise of pleasure and excitement.
The real world of land, sea, and air has been altered to a point, which may be beyond repair, and beyond our capacity to offset the damage we’ve done.
Vivarium Window – © John Neel
The landscape we would all like to wish for, conflicts with the unfortunate perspective we now have.
Paradise appears to have been transformed into a gigantic myth. Pristine landscape is a thing of the past. Eden is no longer a reality. It appears that the world has rapidly become the dumping ground for reckless fantasies and foolish dreams.
If we can do anything at all to get it back, we must do whatever we can do – as fast as possible. It means that we will have to totally redirect our line of thinking and the ways in which we see the world. Time is not in our favor.
Rather than making the living of life about ourselves – we must transform ourselves – to become completely focused on the needs of our world. It is our only hope for ensuring a livable future of this planet and for all the life it has made possible.
The world is life. At least for now.
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