Make no scenes, reveal the unseen: Photographs, photomontages, and mapping

In the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon, we place a strong emphasis on the subjective realities of landscape perception and experience. Their experience is that traditional photomontaged scenes created in Photoshop tend to generalize landscapes. Yet lately, landscape architects rely on photography and photomontage to do the heavy lifting in landscape representation. Thus the implications of this medium is among the most important to understand. One of the most effective ways of depicting experience and personality is to use digital and analog media in the same photomontage. Incorporating analog drawings into a digital photograph fosters the inclusion of the artist or designer into the image. Mapping is another form of thinking and communicating that, like photography, has a long tradition in the field of landscape architecture. The resulting maps are truly hybrids, complex compressions of measured lines and symbols with imprints of their own memories and experience generated through text, hand drawings, and photomontages.