Take a View – Landscape Photographer of the Year

I went to see the ‘Take a View – Landscape Photographer of the Year’ exhibition at the National Theatre on the South Bank in London yesterday.

The exhibition is well worth going to if you are interested. Some of the photographs are beautiful and overall the standard was very high. The colours and textures and of course locations are what made the show.

But that to me was the problem.

There was no sense of who the photographers were. If someone had swapped all the name labels on the images people would have been hard pressed to tell. There was no sense of individuality. Very few of the images transcended the obvious and stunning beauty of the locations. And finally there was nothing there I hadn’t seen before.

And to achieve any of those things, I think, is what makes landscape photography so difficult to do.