Anesthetic Landscapes: Reflections on the photography of John Ganis
in The Anti-LandscapeSearch for other papers by Hannes Bergthaller in
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This paper employs Wolfgang Welsch’s concept of a “dialectic of the aesthetic” to discuss the landscape photography collected in John Ganis’ Consuming the American Landscape (2003). According to Welsch, the modern drive towards aestheticization of the life world, in a dialectical reversal, produces anaesthetization. Ganis’ photographs draw attention to the sharp disjunction between the aesthetic effect of a landscape and its ecological condition, and deliver a subtle critique of traditional landscape aesthetics, which both facilitated the commodification of landscape and anaesthetized people to the latter’s consequences. In doing so, they present a plea for ecological education and provide a visual record of what collective human life on the land actually looks like today.