Art, environment, and the expanded landscape: a dialogue

This dialogue brings into conversation two recent volumes on landscape. While they take different approaches, both Stephanie O’Rourke’s Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and Kelly Presutti’s Land into Landscape (Yale University Press, 2024) foreground the potential for landscape to reveal new facets of our historical and present relationship to the environment. O’Rourke’s book explores what she calls the “pictorial protocols” of extraction—that is, how representing a landscape in a given way enabled it to be conceptualized and treated according to the logic of resource extraction in the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. Alongside this, it considers how such representations structured emerging ideas about race, climate, and waste. Presutti focuses on the making of an ideal French landscape and the real environments that needed to be transformed in order to suit that ideal. Considering work produced in a wide range of media over the course of a century, she makes an argument for landscape as a collective, intermedial process of negotiation and contestation between state power, local inhabitants, and the environment. In conversation, Presutti and O’Rourke comment on the current state of landscape studies, working with intermedial archives, and how our contemporary moment remains shaped by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about nature.