Noteworthy female landscape photographers - day 2!

Oct 8, 2020
2 min read

A professor at the San Francisco Art Institute where she has taught since 1969, Linda Connor, like Imogen Cunningham, has been a photographer since she was 17. Throughout her career she’s travelled far and wide where she's taken myriad strong and thought-provoking images throughout her career.

In part, my interest in Bakhtinian carnivalesque and dialogism led me to Linda Connor as much of her work illustrates a connection between the corporeal and the spiritual. She has/has had some potentially controversial feminist views on the objectives of women and men in landscape photography, once suggesting that men are looking to conquer the land with their photography whereas women look to document the land via an almost symbiotic relationship with it. I see her argument but tend to lean with those who have suggested the view is somewhat essentialist. I also have issue with the perception of human beings having an affinity with nature. A powerful relationship? Yes. But, an affinity? The idea seems to stem from the Romantics and an Enlightenment view (for more on this have a look at Affrica Taylor's fabulous book 'Reconfiguring the nature's of childhood') that I find a bit wishy-washy (technical term...!). In his book, Émile, well-known Romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau said many things which have resonated with me over the years with my education hat on but I have always felt a strong sense of idealism (the phenomenon, not the branch of philosophy) in his work, coupled with a rejection of a meaningful recognition of human beings experiencing what could be argued as potential ontological harshness. All of this seems to filter through into the idea of human beings relationship with nature in a way I find somewhat troubling, although I'd be delighted to chew this over with anyone who has a different or more comprehensive view! Anyhoo, controversy aside, Linda Connor is a thinker I admire and her talent and complex thinking shines through in her photographs, some of which are below. See what you think!