Picturing landscape : contemporary photography, collective visual memory and the making of place in the Netherlands

Through photography, people share what landscapes mean to them. In her dissertation, which is interdisciplinary between art history, cultural geography and landscape architecture, Van den Heuvel introduces a new methodology that consists of three steps: ‘georeferencing’, ‘geospecific comparison’ and ‘geogeneric comparison’. The method helps to analyse how landscape pictures create meaning of a location or – to speak with Yi-Fu Tuan – ‘make place’. Van den Heuvel first applies her method to three case studies in the Dutch landscape: the Haarlemmermeer area around Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam as photographed by Theo Baart and published in the photobook Werklust. Biography of a Landscape in Transition (2015); a tree nursery in the banks of the Lower Rhine as photographed by Gerco de Ruijter for the photograph Baumschule #2 (2009) and the nature reserve of a heath area near Laren in the Gooi-area in the Central Netherlands as photographed by Kim Boske for the photograph Mapping 5 (2008-2009). Conclusively is stated, that photographers do not only work with the physical elements that appeared before their cameras. Also, the photographer workds rhetorically with compositions and motives that persist from famous landscape painting to create meaning of a place.