A Landscape Without a Main Character

Take the animal out of a safari photograph. What remains?

At first, perhaps, a picture that seems to have lost its purpose. Grass, ground, sky. A track going somewhere outside the frame. Nothing to identify, nothing to enlarge, nothing to send home with an exclamation mark.

This is where the landscape has to work hardest against the traveller's expectations.

The eye likes a subject. It likes to settle, to name, to feel that its search has been rewarded. Open country can withhold that easy satisfaction. Distances are difficult to read. A dark mark might become a bush rather than an animal. The horizon offers no helpful conclusion.

Stay with the view and smaller distinctions begin to matter. One section of grass lies flatter than the next. A line in the ground leads away from the track. Shadows interrupt what first appeared to be a uniform surface. The sky occupies a greater share of the scene than a photograph usually allows it.

The apparent emptiness was partly a problem of scale.

In cities, there is always something volunteering for attention: a sign, a window, a passing face. Here, attention has to make a little more of the journey itself. There may be no single thing to point towards. The relationship between things becomes the subject.

For a photographer, that can be uncomfortable. A small animal in a large frame asks the viewer to look rather than merely recognise. A frame with no animal at all risks being passed over. Yet it may say more about the experience of moving through this country than another close portrait could.

It records the hours as well as the seconds.

Eventually a sighting changes the balance. Heads turn. A direction is given. The landscape acquires a centre, and the excitement is immediate.

Before following it, remember the view that existed a moment earlier. All that country was already there. It had not been waiting for something to make it count.