Landscape and Landscape Approach in Geography

Abstract

The landscape direction in painting and the landscape approach that arose on its basis had a significant impact on the development of geography. However, the main attention of the researchers was paid to the issues of definition and typologies of the geographical landscape. For the first time, the article raises and solves the question of the content of the landscape approach itself, provides its main characteristics, and discusses the results of its application in geography. The on-screen perception of the surrounding world, which underlies the approach, contributed to the creation of three-dimensional representations of terrestrial landscapes and, on this basis, the formation of geographical images of countries and regions (image-paintings by Yu.G. Tyutyunnik). For many decades, landscape images, along with geographic maps, have been important products of field geographic research. All this contributed to the development of the geographical imagination in the community of geographers. In Russian geography, the heyday of the landscape approach coincided with the beginning of the development of the landscape concept, and its crisis turned out to be timed to the early Soviet stage of the dehumanization of Russian geography. The article examines the history of the formation of the concept of “landscape” in painting, analyzes the requirements for a geographical landscape from the classics of world geography A. Gottner and V.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, discusses the negative consequences of the loss of the landscape approach for Russian geography and the possibility of its application at the present stage.