Liz Wells is best known for editing two of the most frequently used anthologies in courses devoted to the history and practice of photography: The Photography Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002) and Photography: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2009). She is also a coeditor of the journal Photographies, launched in 2008, and has curated several exhibitions of contemporary landscape photography. Her first monographic publication, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity collects six of Wells’s essays on photography’s intersection with landscape as both representation and lived experience.

Land Matters draws upon a lengthy catalogue of previous scholarship on this topic, something Wells openly acknowledges. Of especial interest to Wells’s study is Deborah Bright’s essay “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men” (1985), which interprets photographic landscape tropes as reflections of issues of identity (Deborah Bright, "Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry Into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography,” Exposure 23, no. 1 [Winter 1985]; rev. ed. published in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Alternative Histories of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987, 125–44). If Bright’s essay is the jumping-off point for Land Matters, Wells distinguishes herself by considering a more diverse geographic range of photographers and by probing a few specific points of difference. For example, she complicates Bright’s earlier criticism of John Pfahl’s aestheticization of industrial landscapes, images that have proved highly marketable. Wells argues that if commercial viability constrains Pfahl’s ability to critique the industries he depicts, such ideas may also transcend the limitations of the gallery environment, a thoughtful point that deserves deeper elaboration than she affords it. Unlike Bright, who is focused primarily on questions about identity, Wells engages in broader questions about landscape and place-making, which has become a significant topic of discussion in landscape studies due to the pioneering work of cultural geographers like Denis Cosgrove and J. B. Jackson. In this way she merges questions of identity with concerns for history, geography, and memorialization that are often very specific to the distinct regions that each chapter addresses—namely the United States, Canada, Britain, Finland, and the Baltic States.

The first chapter, “Landscape: Time, Space, Place, Aesthetics,” provides a thorough overview of the emergence of the landscape genre in art; the role of perspective in organizing vision in landscape conventions (as well as contradictions to those conventions); notions of beauty and sublimity in landscape; and the genre’s relationship with issues of identity, place, and time. Each of the next five chapters begins similarly: a close reading of a single contemporary photograph or photographic series evolves into a geographically and historically specific argument. This structure suggests that even when considering historical photography, Wells’s primary subject matter is the landscape of the present, something that clearly distinguishes Land Matters from more historically motivated anthologies like W. J. T. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), in which each chapter focuses on a discrete historical case. In fact, the emphatic present-mindedness of Wells’s book—despite her occasional reference to historical antecedents—gives the impression that the primary audience for the book is the introductory student of photography with a secondary audience in students of art history, cultural geography, or historical landscape studies.

Chapter 2, “A North American Place: Land and Settlement,” addresses the idea of human settlement as it relates to notions of history and memorialization in work by Sally Mann, Ed Hill, and Suzanne Bloom (Hill and Bloom are collectively known as MANUAL), and a host of lesser-known but intriguing photographers. Wells’s third chapter, “After the Frontier: Environment and the West,” builds off its predecessor and examines the long shadow cast by Ansel Adams and other early twentieth-century photographers of the North American landscape. Through close readings of work by Richard Misrach, Rick Dingus, Mark Klett, Terry Evans, and Robert Adams, among others, she adroitly surveys the meaning of the American West—photographed extensively since the early days of the medium—as a concept in the present tense, considering man-altered landscapes and interventionist projects like Water in the West (1989–97), an innovative group initiative to photographically document the impact of water’s presence and absence on our understanding of the west. Chapter 4, “Pastoral Heritage: Britain Viewed Through a Critical Lens,” examines contemporary British landscape photography as a way of engaging with ideologies of class, region, gender, and ethnicity, ranging from canonical figures such as John Davies to figures like James Ravilious, whose documentation of the North Devon landscape between the 1970s and 1990s as a “working countryside” (to paraphrase Raymond Williams) is fascinating but here lacks the necessary context for non-UK readers. Chapter 5, “Views from the North: Landscape, Photography and National Identity,” scrutinizes contemporary Nordic and Baltic landscapes, using as examples photographers whom Wells acknowledges are obscure outside of their own countries but argues are deserving of greater recognition. The final chapter, “Sense of Location: Topography, Journey, Memory,” builds off the critical reception and influence of the iconic exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975), analyzing different modalities of topographic art, including the “walked-topographies” of Hamish Fulton and Richard Long.

Like her earlier anthologies, Land Matters functions well as a survey or introduction—in this case to some of the crucial themes in landscape photography—and may therefore achieve the position of influence her earlier books have. Yet for all its value as a pedagogical tool, Land Matters presents a distinct challenge to introductory audiences precisely because of Wells’s oft-stated goal to expand the canon. The dilemma is twofold. Firstly, when Wells tackles canonical photographers like Adams, she has a tendency to focus on lesser-known works such as Fort Collins, Colorado (1976) from his lesser-known series Summer Nights (1985), which she uses to articulate an argument about the visual stillness and implied silence of his photographs. Her analysis of the poetic resonance of the series title is elegant and well supported, but it seems off-topic from the chapter’s stated subject matter of critical re-appraisals of the American West, which might be better served by discussion of his more influential series such as The New West (1974), Denver (1977), or From the Missouri West (1980). The same could be said of the ways that Wells only cursorily addresses prominent landscape thinkers like Cosgrove; while cited, his work is not deeply contextualized for its contributions to cultural geography. By comparison, the anthology Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007), edited by James Elkins ande, Rachael Ziady DeLu provides a deeper appreciation for the intellectual history and scholarly debates underpinning Land Matters. Wells also admits that much of her primary research for portions of the book, such as the chapter “After the Frontier: Environment and the West,” was conducted as far back as 2002, and does not account for recent research and scholarship such as Robin Kelsey’s very relevant study Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Secondly, there’s Wells’s penchant for focusing on photographers whom she herself allows are relatively unknown outside of their respective countries or regions. On one hand, such a practice could go a long way toward expanding the canon, but Wells only infrequently provides a satisfactory understanding of whole projects, careers, and historical contexts given the large quantity of photographers introduced in each chapter. This is especially the case in the chapter on Nordic and Baltic photography. In some ways the most revelatory chapter of her book, it is also the most frustrating because of its hasty explanations of remarkably complex issues like Swedish and Danish intra-European colonialism or the demise of socialist realism in Nordic countries. The paucity of illustrations is likewise a problem; many of the works by these unfamiliar photographers are described but not reproduced. In these regards, Land Matters occasionally seems to be caught between competing desires: of avoiding the burden of comprehensiveness while clearly also wanting to cover a broad range of photographers, geographies, and landscape traditions. These issues aside, the book has much potential for the student of photography and is a welcome resource for those interested in contemporary issues in landscape representation.