Blurring the Boundaries between City and Countryside in Photography

Abstract

In his article "Blurring the Boundaries between City and Countryside in Photography" Steven Jacobs discusses how, in recent decades, a new landscape has emerged in which the differences between city and countryside have been blurred. As a result, the urbanized environment is increasingly viewed and interpreted as a landscape. It is because of the hybridity of this contemporary cityscape that urban planners such as Mirko Zardini have argued for a revaluation of the notion of the picturesque linked with a sensitivity to irregularity and a mixture of the cultural and the natural. Since the late 1960s, the post-urban landscape has become an important motif in art photography as well. Jacobs demonstrates how artists and photographers such as Robert Smithson, Joel Sternfeld, John Pfahl, Jeff Wall, and Andreas Gursky pay attention to the whimsical environment in which natural and artificial elements merge.