they are also appropriate and have a very real point. (1979b, 106–107)
Carlson goes on to extend the same considerations to the related medium of landscape painting. His general conclusion, in our terminology, is that such representations are not appreciatively apt for natural environments.
On the other side of the aforementioned ideological divide, we have writers such as Thomas Heyd, who rejects Carlson’s requirement that we bring scientific understanding to nature appreciation. We may, Heyd insists, instead draw on many different sorts of understanding in appreciation, including conceptions of nature to be found in fictional and literary works about the landscape, landscape painting, and mythological tales about nature from different cultures (2001).
Heyd describes these kinds of representations as “guiding and mediating” the appreciation of nature. But his discussion of examples makes clear that these representations do not really offer mediated appreciation, in our sense. Rather, they enable an appreciator directly experiencing nature to focus on, and find interest and meaning in, certain features. One of his examples is George Seferis’ poem Santorini, which describes the Greek island of that name. Of a visitor to the island, Heyd writes: “If she knows Seferis’s poem she will be much better equipped to appreciate aesthetically her natural surrounds.” (2001, 132) Reading the poem does not allow her to appreciate the island in lieu of directly encountering it; it simply provides a resource for her to employ when directly encountering it. Even landscape painting, in Heyd’s view, works in the same way: “paintings and sculptures featuring images of landscapes, animals, or plants… [may remind viewers] of the natural environment that surrounds them, and [they] may be enticed to fixate on that environment a little longer, thereby aiding in the aesthetic appreciation of those things” (2001, 134). The possibility that we might appreciate nature via experiencing representations is something Heyd does not consider.6
A similar passing over of mediated appreciation can be found in the writings of Arnold Berleant, who, like Carlson, is an influential figure in the field. Berleant’s views about aesthetic appreciation are starkly opposed to Carlson’s: he not only rejects the need to bring “objective” scientific understanding to bear in appreciating nature, but also argues that the aim of such appreciation is to overcome the very division between nature and self, object and subject. Yet despite their differences, when it comes to the inadequacies of appreciating representations of nature, he and Carlson are squarely in agreement, for Berleant draws almost the same stark contrast: “If we regard the painting of a landscape disinterestedly from a distance, we get a contemplative object, but what of the appreciation of an actual landscape?” (1993, 232) The latter is so different from our typical disinterested, distanced experience of appreciating a painting that, Berleant concludes, to attempt to appreciate nature through such art is to “abandon nature entirely in favour of its representation” (231).7
So to sum up, the idea of mediated appreciation, which seems so common in the case of everyday photographs and in the case of art, seems largely to go by the boards in discussions of nature appreciation. To be sure, none of the philosophers I have discussed makes the strong claim that mediated nature appreciation is impossible. On the contrary, none of them gives the phenomenon any general consideration at all. Rather, what notice they do take is largely negative, focusing on cases where mediated appreciation fails, and identifying problems with it (for further examples, see Eaton (1998) and Brady (2013)).
Two Problems with Mediated Appreciation
Whence, then, this hostility toward mediated appreciation of nature? I think we can identify two major concerns that might underlie it.
The quotation from Carlson, presented above, suggests the first. His critique of photographs and landscape paintings is based on the fact that, being so different from natural environments, they are simply unable to present enough of the relevant properties of those environments. A static, two-dimensional representation of a forest cannot present to us qualities such as the scent of pine trees, the forest’s changing appearance as the light wanes, the feel of the wind, and so on, all of which are very much relevant to that environment’s aesthetic value. In short, a photo of an environment, such as a forest, just could not have a significant degree of appreciative aptness, any more than, say, an audio recording of a dance performance could. The problem is not with how well the representation has been done; rather the problem lies in the inherent limitations of the medium itself. Call this the “Poverty of Representation” objection to mediated nature appreciation.
A second worry about mediated appreciation can also be extracted from Carlson’s writing about photography. Expanding on the differences between natural environments and photographs, he notes that the appreciation of photographs tends to involve formal and compositional qualities of the two-dimensional image, qualities such as balance, symmetry, and so on. Consider Ansel Adams’ famous photograph Moon and Half-Dome (1960): the image has been carefully composed so as to include a balance between the bright and dark regions, and a central framing of the Moon between the two peaks (King 1992, 262). For a more recent example, consider Max Waugh’s prize-winning photograph of a bison in Yellowstone National Park, Snow Exposure (Figure 3.1). The animal is perfectly centered and Waugh employed a long exposure time to give the falling snow a rope like quality, echoing nicely the texture of the bison’s fur, producing what is almost a “negative image” of the animal.8
Figure 3.1 Snow Exposure (2018), (photo by Max Waugh courtesy of the photographer).
Such formal, compositional properties make for a striking photograph; however, one could argue that they have little to do with the natural object that is represented in the photograph. The problem here is not our previous problem—that photographic representations are incapable of presenting certain properties of their subject matter. Rather, the problem here is that what is appreciated via the representation is not the subject at all, but something else—namely, the composed photographic image. Call this the “Appreciative Shift” objection to mediated nature appreciation.9
The Appreciative Shift objection is easily extended to landscape painting, where the artistic element of compositional choice is, if anything, even more pronounced. If we look at the typical process whereby an artist starts from a sketch done on site and later produces a landscape painting in the studio, we can see how specific compositional choices shape the final image. And we can further extend the objection by noting that the artistic element of photographs and paintings includes not only compositional, formal qualities, such as balance, symmetry and so on, but also expressive qualities. Some painters—Van Gogh furnishes the paradigm example—aimed above all to lend the landscape a certain “quality of feeling” in their representations of it.10 In such cases, the viewer’s focus shifts from the landscape itself to an emotional or expressive quality that the artist has projected onto it.
Neither of these worries about mediated nature appreciation—the Poverty of Representation objection or the Appreciative Shift objection—is misconceived. Each points to a genuine concern about the feasibility of certain forms of mediated nature appreciation. Furthermore, there have been particular practices of nature appreciation for which these objections are highly relevant. The Picturesque tradition of landscape appreciation, to cite the most notorious example, was practically based on the idea of an appreciative shift, wherein direct perception of the landscape itself was replaced by the appreciation of a “better composed” image, either in landscape paintings or devices such as the Claude mirror.11 Although the Picturesque has faded, its spirit lives on in digital photography practices such as the use of filters that allow easy manipulation of colors and detail to adjust an image’s “emotional tone”. Also, the practice of assessing the “scenic quality” of landscape by quantifying the formal features of photographs has been, and remains, an influential technique in much empirical landscape assessment.12 Much philosophical skittishness about mediated nature appreciation