ABSTRACT
Landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify. This indeterminacy of affect seems, in fact, to be a crucial feature of whatever force landscape can have. As the background within which a figure, form, or narrative act emerges, landscape exerts the passive force of setting, scene, and sight. It is generally the “overlooked” not the “looked at,” and it can be quite difficult to specify what exactly it means to say that one is “looking at the landscape.”
