Introduction
Landscape photography in general is to reflect the external visible forms and shapes of the world, and yet it still connote different aspects of metaphorical meanings, intentionally or not, people will always interpret or being ideologically influenced by that particular meanings inevitably. From serving as bases of various cultures by historical approach, to the reflection of social issues by contemporary approach, metaphorical landscape photography have played a vital role on social development. In general means, just before landscape photography began to be recognized as metaphors, it was first recognized as a tool for geographical science, then interpreted as symbolic, and eventually metaphorical. In this essay, it will be …show more content…
Eventually, an iconography of nationhood is built to bind people together in terms of similar social value.
In the case for America in the twentieth-century, the common practices of landscape photographs are applied for visual representation of distinctly modern phenomenon, and who was the photographer of the image was no longer …show more content…
135) states that “To the entire world, a steepled church, set in its frame of white wooden houses around a manicured common, remains a scene which says New England.”’ To the viewers, the point is not about what such a scene “says” New England, but more specific in what New England “says” to the viewers through the medium of such a village scene. This carried connotations of quiet prosperity, continuity of stability, cohesion and intimacy . In addition, through mass-circulation graphic by the mass media like patriotic posters, Christmas cards and calendars or other form of illustrations, these images constantly implant multiple social value or ideologies to the massive people. In general, the photograph of New England village is commonly assumed to symbolize for many people the best they have known of an intimate, family-centered, democratic community that contributed to the distinctive society development in terms of iconography of nationhood of the America.
These kinds of symbolic landscape applied as a powerful and effective means that connects and influences upon national education, institutions and history. Thus, consciously or not, people read photographs for something else by their own sense of value regardless of how the spaces were being photographed by certain intention, and such deep-rooted way of interpretation became more advanced over decades, not only offering people as a kind