In a landscape photograph, both the mind and the heart need to find their proper place.
Before the landscape we look for an invitation to stand without premeditation. It is always, in some sense, our home. At times we may also look for an architecture of light and a poetry of atmosphere which welcomes the eye into a landscape of process and change. It may also be the map-the evidence of the thing itself. May it also and always be a vision of the double world-the world of appearances and the invisible world all at once.
Even when a landscape is profoundly disfigured or brutalized, it is always deeply animated from within. When we really see these awesome, vast, and terrible places, we may tremble at the feelings we experience as our sense of wholeness is reorganized by what we see. The heart seems to withdraw and the body seems always to diminish. At such a moment, our feelings reach for an understanding. This is the gift of a landscape photograph: that the heart finds a place to stand.
—Emmet Gowin, 1994
