A Curved Line Seen Straight
Bas Blaasse

When faced with a multitude of images, I sometimes find myself selecting a few in a way that feels at once arbitrary and deliberate, hoping that spending more time with them might, consciously or not, reveal more of the paths along which my gaze can wander. I often call such choices random, though I doubt they ever are. What do my decisions say without my knowing? What do they see? What contours of an unspoken disposition emerge in the images I pause with?
Often my eye is caught by what appears to lie on the surface. A scarred sandy landscape, an inverted scan of something I find hard to categorise, or a portrait series of a young soldier whose youthfulness is palpable yet bound by the rigour of a frame. Or the rigid records of chance encounters along a highway cutting through jungle, a dog squared anachronistically against a crocodile, or a collection of black-and-white military prints, some well preserved, others worn and fragile, documenting the slow, deliberate colonisation of a living land. Again and again I am drawn to the things within photographs—the people, their faces, the vistas. In short, to those aspects that lend an image its force, its seeming transparency, as if one could look straight through.
I call them things that appear to lie on the surface, because the surface of a photograph—the paper, the emulsion, the chemicals—is never the same as what can be read within it. The same holds for any image: the medium itself cannot solely dictate the meaning, let alone exhaust it. And composition too makes its claims: a cropped corner, a bounced flash, the mottled grain of a scan can highlight or obscure, pulling the gaze one way or another. Appearance is never impartial. What is depicted can voice something quite different from the medium through which it appears, just as perspective can draw meaning into the light or let it slip from view. Yes—image, material and technique, subject and mode of depiction, gaze and method are never easily disentangled.
The history of art bears this out. The French plein air painters of the 1830s, stepping outside with their portable tubes of paint, could only do so thanks to the technologies of an industrialising society. The Impressionists found their conditions in the rhythms of a rising middle class. Bourgeois life financed their time and produced the pigments with which their paintings would later be canonised. Material and technique carry the imprint of the choices and constraints of a historical period whose consequences today feel irreversible.

Not long ago, I sat behind the wheel as my partner and I drove through what felt like an endless expanse—a forest pared down to uniformity, a continuous sea of pines and birches. The road curved gently, extending ahead and behind until it disappeared into the trees. Traffic was light, and cruise control held us to a steady pace.
Looking back, one image dominates my memory: the monotony of trees gliding past as though a fleeting frame had been stretched across hours, days, weeks. The image has lodged itself as something made remarkable precisely for its unspectacular and uninterrupted sameness. Strange how the entire journey condenses into a generic postcard of a forest. Even the diversity of tree species dissolves into that projected stillness, spanning the more than two thousand kilometres we crossed.
The forest seemed unchanging, cast in a way that suggested a world simply as it was, as it should be, as it had always been. Like the green and red of my parents’ living room, the blue coffee pot on their stove, or the yellow sofa on which I watched National Geographic as a child—details often born of chance, yet inseparable from my memory of childhood and home. It could not have been any other coffee pot. Growing older perhaps means realising that what once seemed self-evident is bound to a particular environment, tethered to the perspective of a life and a body.
As we moved through the forest, technology deepened the spell. Cruise control, automatic distance keeping, subtle corrections whenever I drifted toward the edge of the lane—all seemed to relieve me of the ordinary acts of driving. My attention drifted outward to the rhythm of trees, water, and sky. Repetition soothes. The comfort was seductive, almost irresistible. Yet at times I was jolted out of the trance: the car would brake abruptly. I was at the wheel, yet not in control.
And then the system failed. No distance keeping, no corrections, no GPS. All at once my own hands mattered again, and I had to press the pedal, watch the mirrors, read the signs. It was as if a matrix that had quietly overlaid the world had been lifted, leaving the road bare. Until that moment, I had, almost without noticing, relied on navigation to disclose what lay ahead—whether the road would swing left or right, whether a line of traffic waited, whether a sharp curve was imminent. Predictability soothes. Now each rise could hide a dangerous crossing, each gentle bend could harden into a sudden one. The landscape changed character: no longer a calm image sliding past but an exposed space—open, uncertain, potentially hostile. With technology, I drifted into the aesthetics of my surroundings; without it, I was alert to its dangers, and I had to act rather than observe.
Which part of a territory resists being captured by a map? We say that a map is only a representation, never the territory itself, because it helps me navigate but cannot replace the experience or the complexity of real life. But what becomes of that statement when my very experience of a place is shaped through the way it has been mapped?

Such experiences return me to the question of landscape itself. When we speak of landscape today, we often think of a view: a scene stretched out before the eye, or the painted image of a piece of land. Yet the word carries a longer and more complex history. The English landscape derives from the German Landschaft, a term with a double meaning: a bounded territory and the visible appearance of a place. But where Landschaft had referred to the fabric of community, in England it came to signify an aesthetic stage, a way of rendering order and authority as if they were natural.
One of the earliest English uses of landscape belonged to the theatre. Stage scenery, drawn by the lines of perspective, turned nature into illusion—orderly, harmonious, seemingly eternal. Perspective made the world appear as if it unfolded from a single eye. It was a vision shaped as much by geometry and surveying as by art: the art of perspective was inseparable from the new science of mapping. Land became not only a scene but also a space that could be divided, measured, and exchanged.
In this process the very idea of land shifted. Where custom and landmarks had once set its boundaries, surveying recast it into geometric parcels, ready for trade. And where estates and gardens seemed to present timeless nature, they were in fact carefully staged displays affirming the taste and power of the elite. Villages were dismantled, communal rights erased, and what remained was a landscape that suggested harmony while obscuring the communities it had displaced.
The western landscape tradition that flourished in the early nineteenth century—its canvases now filling museums funded by wealth extracted from land and lives—was both symptom and engine of this shift. It signalled a new role for art, new expectations of what images could do. One could say that the landscape gaze loosened art from its representational compulsion: no longer obliged to heroic themes or moral lessons, it turned instead to the shimmer of light on water, the way trees both withhold and exhibit space. Art became less a matter of what was shown than of how it appeared, of the experience of seeing itself. Painting did not invent the power relations that shaped land, but it aestheticised them—teaching the eye to read dispossession as harmony, to take enclosure for beauty.
Reflecting on this tradition, I wonder what it taught the painters. To draw or paint a landscape is, at first, an exercise—a training of the eye. Artists and scientists may differ in aim, yet both must cultivate a familiarity that turns what lies before them into something perceptible, thinkable. A geographer studies altitude, wind, and soil; a painter traces the contour of a rock, the shadow of a tree, the flow of a stream. Different orders of reality, yet both converge in what we call landscape—always shaped by the approach through which it is seen.
What we see differs across periods. The picturesque or the photogenic are modes that shape our eye by allowing relationships between elements to appear as memorable, worth retelling, recording, and sharing—even of a ravaged field or a felled forest. They shape by imposing selection in a world of scarcity. People say that to see is to be equipped with the interplay of mental and bodily functions that belong to the culture of an age. In what ways have disciplines such as art history or the scientification of modern life schooled my gaze?
It is tempting to trace what and how we see back to cosmology or metaphysics. But can any practice be simply reduced to the worldview in which it is set? Worldviews are not isolated. The history of photography, for instance, is too vast, too layered, too multiple to be confined within a single frame of thought. More often, studies suggest, our ways of seeing are less the offspring of grand conviction than of the daily routines that quietly train what and how I see.

In this light, perhaps there is some truth in the claim that photographs cling to reality—not because they tell the truth, but because they prepare, prefigure truth. But in what way? Which reality do they reveal? Today, the theoretical world tends to view the authenticity of photography with suspicion—let alone its claims to truth. Yet this has done little to bridge the gap between the way most of us use photographs and the warning that no image is ever neutral. The way we look at photographs and allow them to surround us in daily life—as if they were immediate conduits of events that unfolded before a lens—sits uneasily alongside the recognition that what results is always the outcome of an encounter: between photographed and photographer, and the technical mediation that binds them. None of these elements can be removed, and yet they rarely settle into reconciliation.
Is that a weakness of the will? Or does it speak to the power and allure of a technical invention whose mechanical components draw both photographer and viewer into a world that lends purity, impartiality, and self-discipline a sharper appearance? From the very beginning, the photographic process proved itself useful to the further systematic division of time and space, even as its advocates insisted on the poetic quality of this new ability to arrest what always flows.
I find it difficult to draw a line between the romantic impulse to aestheticise life and the early developments of photography. It feels odd to see the world of seemingly exact repeatability, technical frameworks, and mechanical execution arise in the very same moment as the desire not to reduce the meaning of life to its description in terms of accuracy and correct correspondence.
Every worldview discloses a reality in a way that seems to exclude another experience. And yet the tendency to appreciate erased or unfamiliar communities for their supposed purity—as if they were not our contemporaries but belonged to another temporal register, idealising them as if untouched by the demands of utility—is a close relative of the measuring instruments that accompanied anthropologists, soldiers, and cartographers on their journeys from Europe to the Americas. Are not the longings of subjectivism and the attempts at objectification children of the same story?
What aesthetic desires surface once I have learned to look through the lens of that history? Does a technology harbour its own longing? And how could I resist its influence if I have not yet discerned what that influence consists of? To say that photographs have “no outside” is to note that every image is shaped by the interplay of gaze, choice, position, subject, and machine. By definition, photography excludes all that lies beyond the frame. But what, then, remains as a perspective from which to compare what I take it is that I see? How am I to grasp what takes place at the edges, when from the centre where I stand I can only call them periphery? How can I know what I do not register, if all I ever see is what I take myself to be seeing?
And yet these blind spots are never mine alone but ways of looking sedimented over time. It brings up the question of what possibilities have emerged through specific choices, and which of those choices are themselves the result of earlier ones. What do I recognise, almost instinctively, in the suited figures of anthropological fieldwork? Why do I find beauty in the ritual of archival gloves, in the precision of documentation, in instruments laid down by history’s winding hand? What does it mean that the very tools of perception are themselves shaped by the logic they set out to disclose? And how might I begin to loosen the hold of what I have inherited?