The disenchanted landscape

Abstract

The disenchanted landscape is the concept here developed to designate a contemporary photographic production about the landscape based on an aesthetic of disenchantment. Landscape, as we know, is the form of representation of space created simultaneously with modernity itself, through linear perspective and the emphasis on the representation of nature as opposed to culture. Photography inherited, to a large extent, the task of representing modern space and the ruins of the past in the form of perspective. The disenchantment described here manifests precisely the loss of belief in the modern project and the melancholy it provoked. If Modernism exalted the idea of ​​progress in much of its production, a century later the confidence in technological utopia was emptied in the face of the destruction caused by the exploitation of natural resources on a planetary scale and the proposition of a geological era caused by human intervention, the Anthropocene. But is photography, the form of modern representation par excellence, capable of problematizing modernity itself? This is what I will attempt to verify based on some works on the ruins of the Amazon rainforest.