Much of western art is set in the environs of the church or the courtly life. The landscape, the prototypical outsider, had to fight for respectability as a genre of its own. Pieter Brueghel‘s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus takes small notice of the mythic Icarus, devoting much of the pictorial space in favor of a pastoral scene. Some would say that this is a Northern European painter’s rebuttal of Italian Renaissance history painting as the highest genre, others might argue that it places the everyday work of the farmer in greater significance than an ancient literary figure. Indeed, the latter is echoed in the Flemish proverb “and the farmer continued to plough.” The landscape as a worthwhile subject would emerge from conversations had upon viewing earlier works such as these.

Centuries later, students in their third-year of Photography investigate the play of light in the landscape around them: