Erlebnisraumbilder

Erinnerung und Erwartung zwischen Skizze und Fotografie

Abstract

Landscape is not merely the physical space that surrounds us. It is far more complex, as it is constituted by our presence in that space, by the way we experience it and by the way in which we project our own experience, our memory and expectations onto it. This kind of experience exceeds the plain physiological and cognitive perception of the physical space. It is a wide-ranging, individual, in every way private experiencing and perceiving that first turns nature into landscape. This quality of landscape as experienced space is palpable in the history of landscape images and their practices from the 18th century onwards. In as dissimilar media as sketches and photographs, the success of such images persists until now. For them, I propose in this paper the idea of 'Erlebnisraumbilder' – 'images of experienced space'.