Jay Appleton began with a ‘Habitat Theory’, which examined animal responses to their surroundings, and extended that to humans through our unique ability to understand symbols. He suggests that as we developed from our hunter-gatherer ancestors we came to understand previously-real threatening and comforting aspects of the landscape symbolically. Storm clouds, chasms and shadowy places were still felt to be potentially dangerous, though those dangers might no longer be directly experienced in the same way. He concluded that most people have an “inborn desire” for environments that allow the capacity to observe without being seen – to assess threats from a place of safety. He called this the ‘Prospect-Refuge Theory’.
Appleton recognised that there is no direct language for talking about the emotion of a place. We may describe a landscape as making us feel “happiness” or “foreboding”, “grief” or “ecstasy”, but the feeling of those words is very distant from the form of a landscape in a way that it wouldn’t be from the form of a situation involving a person. We are, he says, “using a second-hand terminology to describe a relationship which we do not properly understand”.
To try to narrow this distance he developed a series of objective measures that might allow us to evaluate a landscape in this way. Prospects, for example, may be Direct or Indirect (deflected, removed or offset in some way). Direct Prospects are subdivided into Panoramas – Simple or Interrupted – and Vistas, which can be Simple, Horizontal or through Peepholes. Panoramas and Vistas may be open or closed and have varying lengths of “fetch” (how far you can see). There is a similar classification system for Refuges, Hazards and Surfaces. With these tools, Appleton hoped to bridge the gap between the scientific and artistic studies of the outdoors to create a new theory of landscape aesthetics that was reliable and consistent while also accounting for our subconscious emotional response to a setting.
Appleton died last month, but this idea is his enduring legacy. As a tribute, I thought I’d use the Prospect-Refuge Theory to analyse the hundred most popular, copyright-free images of landscapes on Flickr to see if there are any patterns to the landscapes we choose to photograph.
I began by overlaying the images on top of one another, to see if any general patterns would emerge. I lined up the horizons and made the images the same width but otherwise left the images untouched.
