Jonathan Raban’s travel memoir of the Montana prairies, Bad Land: An American Romance (1996), makes brilliant use of an aside into photographic history to make a point about the nature of the landscape. He begins by relating his own difficulties with his Pentax Zoom 105, whose widest focal length of 38mm had been more than enough to deal with English landscapes and scenes of the Pacific North West but which was utterly defeated by the emptiness and expanse of Montana. The sheer openness, featurelessness and flatness of the land had defeated visual artists before, he notes: in this place, the conventional rules of composition break down for want of anything to pin them to.
In the Museum in Terry, Montana, Raban encounters the work of an Edwardian English photographer, Evelyn Cameron, who had come to Montana with her husband to breed horses. Starting with a plate Kodet camera, later moving up to proper professional equipment in the form of a Graflex, Cameron solved the problems of composing pictures in a landscape such as Montana’s, which Raban (invoking also an earlier Montana photographer called L.A. Hoffman) describes as learning to compose along a horizontal line rather than lines of perspective, and placing that line high in the composition, making the most of what an empty foreground could do for the picture’s subject and taking advantage of the contrasts between the vast prairie and a small fenced off area of settler’s land. By leading the reader through Cameron’s developing awareness of how to treat her surroundings he draws us imaginatively forward into those surroundings ourselves without once having to resort to any contrived literary description of the landscape on his own part.