Coincidentally -- "Luminous Landscape"

[Isaac]

"Luminous Landscape: The American Study of Light 1860-1875" was the title of a Harvard (Fogg Art Museum) exhibition catalogue in 1966.

And in the confluence of the idea of the sublime with perceptions of the American landscape in the work of certain artists -- particularly the so-called luminist painters, Fitz Hugh Lane, John Frederick Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, and Sanford Gifford -- a new formulation of sublime expression eventually emerged.
...
In luminist painting... the personality and style of the artist were effaced and great efforts were made to develop a formal style consistent with the moods of nature as it actually appeared. The "idea" contributed by the artist lies in his choice of scene and the realistic manner in which he conveyed the condition or mood of nature, not in the translation, interpretation, or rearrangement of nature as in romantic art.

p70-71 American Light: The Luminist Movement 1850-1875

[Schewe]

Hum...I wonder where Mike was in 1966?

:~)

[Isaac]

Oh! Now you've unleashed a riot of speculation! ;-)

[Rob C]

Oh! Now you've unleashed a riot of speculation! ;-)

Don't be silly; nobody other than myself was around then.

;-)

Rob C

[michael]

In '66 I was just out of university; a young freelance photographer, working mainly as a photojournalists. I rarely shot landscapes at that time!

Michael

[Philmar]

Hum...I wonder where Mike was in 1966?

:~)

Maybe the Fogg Art Museum....or like many others that decade, just in a fogg 

[2jbourret]

I'm not sure if the O.P. meant to allude that the use of the title for the site is inappropriately 'lifted' from the show at the Fogg, but it seems to me to be fair game. For those of us who do shoot landscapes, 'luminous' is a quality that is often a fairly lofty goal.
Now, whether or not this site is purely devoted to landscape photography is another question, but it has a great name.

[Isaac]

I'm not sure if the O.P. meant to allude that the use of the title for the site is inappropriately 'lifted' from the show at the Fogg...

Not in the slightest.


iirc someone previously commented on the influence the Hudson River school had on their photography, and I thought a couple of people might be interested in the "luminist" artists that followed-on -- particularly their interest in sublime calm.

[2jbourret]

Right, thanks Isaak
Victoria Adams is a great example of a painter working is a similar vein today:

http://www.victoriaadamsart.com/paintings/2012/

[Isaac]

After one of those what would be the point moments ("working in a similar vein today"), I went so far as to read the Artist's Statement --

But the correspondence between that tradition and the real landscape we inhabit—much of it now destroyed—will never be the same as it was for past painters in that tradition. Through my work I hope for the effect of an elegy for nature—elegy both as a lament for a tragic loss, but also as a reaffirmation of the importance of viewing landscape as an essential human need.

My interest is (not surprisingly) photographers who'd worked in a similar vein, say... Joel Meyerowitz and particularly John Pfahl.