In his book Crossing Open Ground, the late writer Barry Lopez distinguished between two landscapes: the exterior landscape, which he described as “the one we see,” and the interior landscape, which he described as “a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape.” Each landscape has its own elements and relationships, but the two also interrelate. Lopez explained: “The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.”

The term “landscape photography” may be used to describe photographs of the exterior landscape—the one we see. The term may also be used to describe expressive photographs reflecting the interior landscape—the one each of us carries within.

Each person’s interior landscape is unique and largely invisible to the eye. Still, if we know something about the ways one’s interior landscape may be affected by elements of the exterior landscape, we may use these elements to express our own interior landscapes and to affect other people’s interior landscapes. Such is the purpose of landscape photography practiced as expressive art.

Photographic artists aiming to express subjective notions—aspects of their interior landscape—in their work often find themselves at odds with those who, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, still believe that “true” photography consists only of objective representations of the exterior landscape.

“What is truth?” asked Friedrich Nietzsche; he then answered his own question: “a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”

Truthfulness is not a quality imposed by any medium; it is a quality of information relative to context. Just as information exists in many forms and may assume different meanings in different contexts, so too does truth come in many varieties. There is objective truth and subjective truth. There is truth to appearances and truth to feelings. There is literal truth and metaphorical truth.

The truth of art is not necessarily the truth of nature, just as the truth of a metaphor is not necessarily the truth of its words taken literally. Being literal or metaphorical, in turn, is not a measure of the value or greatness of the truth expressed. However, failing to account for the distinction—treating literal truth as metaphor, or metaphorical truth as literal—may lead to great errors and misunderstanding. This is what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe meant when he wrote, “The genuine law-giving artist strives for the truth of art, the lawless artist who follows a blind impulse strives for the reality of Nature; through the former, art reaches its highest summit, through the latter its lowest stage.”

As an avid naturalist and outdoorsman, I began my journey in photography more than three decades ago, striving to document the exterior landscape—the truth of nature—believing that no form of beauty can improve upon natural aesthetics. Today, I am an expressive artist striving to express my own internal landscape—the truth of art. I still believe that natural aesthetics cannot be improved upon.

What I was lacking in my earlier years—the linchpin connecting my love of natural beauty with qualities of my inner experiences—was an understanding of art, and an understanding that the truth of art is not in contradiction with the truth of nature. “Art,” wrote Paul Cézanne, “is a harmony parallel to nature.”

László Moholy-Nagy proclaimed, “The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.” To be photographically literate means, among other things, to recognize that some photographs are intended as reportage, others as art. Some photographs are meant as objective illustrations, others as subjective expressions. Some photographs are best understood literally, others metaphorically. Some photographs aim to portray the truth of the exterior landscape, others the truth of the photographer’s interior landscape.

In this collection of essays, I hope to help readers consider landscape photography as art: as expressions of a photographer’s interior landscape, distinct from landscape photography as objective representations of the exterior landscape.

Guy TalTorrey, UtahApril, 2022