Let's Sketch the Lay of the Land in Vertical Landscapes, Hoàn Kiếm Lake, Photo Hanoi, Vietnam, November 2026
Landscape photography has long been associated with horizontal compositions, where the grandeur of nature is captured through wide horizons and vast vistas. This traditional framing aligns with our everyday visual experience and reflects a visual culture shaped by horizontal formats in art and media, particularly cinema. Yet Vertical landscapes defies this norm by presenting landscapes through vertical framing. This choice compels viewers to adjust their gaze, focusing on the scene’s depth rather than its breadth.
This shift disrupts how we consume and interpret landscape photography. While horizontal compositions evoke calm and stability, vertical framing can instill awe or confinement, raising the question: when freed from the limits of horizontality, how might space be experienced differently?
Artists: Lý Hoàng Long, Jean – François Spricigo, José Manuel Ballester, Brendan Ó Sé, David van Dartel, Alexandre Deschaumes, Eva Jonas, Matthieu Gafsou, Štěpánka Stein, Francesco Chiot
1 x 3m Lightbox
Supported by the British Council
Let's Sketch the Lay of the Land draws together encountered forms, surfaces, and assemblages to explore the processes by which people situate themselves within landscapes.
A particular focus is cast upon how this is expressed in rurality, cultivation, and craft - in the burning of reeds, moving of rubble, felling of trees, and etching of figures into hillsides.
The traces in land and guiding hands passing fauna can be read both from the perspective of an observer, someone looking on from the periphery, and, more intimately – by capturing the impressions blades of grass left on a person’s calf.
This dancing in and out of images, asks us to consider the constant hum of the working with and into landscapes, in equal measure, from a circle left behind after a paddling pool’s summertime stint in the back garden to a grand chalky figure imprinted into a rolling green hillside.
Let's Sketch the Lay of the Land published by September Books.
68 pp. 20 x 28cm
Saddle Stitched Design
Isbn: 978-2-490572-04-5
September 2020
SOLD OUT on September Books' web.
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See Let's Sketch the Lay of the Land exhibited as part of Brighton Photo Fringe in October 2020 and at Serchia Gallery, Bristol from July to September 2021.
