Multiple narratives describe landscape: as a resource, scenery, infrastructure, environment, everyday life, ancestral knowledge, or inspiration. Reading Landscapes is a small selection of books from the CCA Collection that highlights the ever-changing concept of landscape as represented through various forms of publishing. Given that publications are never neutral but communicate ideas within specific cultural contexts, and that omissions are inherent within publishing, the question arises: what role do books have in representing landscape?

Picturesque America is a subscription book that depicted a highly idealized vision of the United States in the wake of the Civil War. An ambitious commercial undertaking that reached hundreds of thousands of subscriptions in a time of low image circulation, the books targeted a growing class of tourists who could now travel the country on the new railway lines. While Picturesque America can be seen as a travel guide or souvenir, the depicted natural and urban landscapes served, above all, as a patriotic aid to nation-building during the Reconstruction Era.

First published as an illustrated periodical in Appleton’s Journal and later as a subscription book by D. Appleton and Co., Picturesque America’s forty-eight parts were delivered semi-monthly and could be bound into a two-part volume once complete. It collected over nine hundred woodcuts and fifty steel engravings accompanied by descriptive texts. At the time, engravings were relatively affordable to produce, enabling a wider dissemination to the public. Engravings were also easier to compose and manipulate than photographs: anything that didn’t “fit” into the picturesque aesthetic—industrial pollution, agricultural poverty, or Indigenous communities—was left out. Equivalent publications such as Picturesque Canada (1882), Picturesque Europe (1875), and Picturesque Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt (1881–1883) were later published across the globe.

As a gift to Queen Victoria for her 1855 state visit and railway journey from Boulogne-Sur-Mer to Paris, Baron James de Rothschild, president of the Chemin de Fer du Nord, commissioned a photo album from Édouard Baldus, who collaborated with Auguste Hippolyte Collard. These politically-motivated photographs showcased the newly built railroad infrastructure and were intended to represent the railway company’s strength and progress within the “picturesque” and modernized French landscape.

The Serpent River Book by Carolina Caycedo unfolds into a 72-page artwork resembling a meandering river. The two-sided leporello combines archival material, maps, poems, lyrics, satellite images, texts, and photographs gathered by Caycedo for the ongoing Be Dammed research project. Investigating the effects of the extractive industries on natural and social landscapes, Caycedo presents the multi-layered cultural meanings of waterways in collage form.

The book is divided into five chapters, each representing a section of a river and the corresponding human relationships with rivers across the Americas. The first two chapters represent the upper course, showing how the life and ancestral knowledge of Amazonian Indigenous communities is deeply rooted in the river. The following chapters, representing the middle and lower river courses, demonstrate the extractive and damaging relationships of neocolonial practices on waterways. Dams, while appearing to be symbols of progress and development, have transformed public bodies of water into privately owned resources, upsetting the balance of natural and social landscapes. The final chapter looks at the river delta, documenting community initiatives that seek to counteract the effects of the corporate relationship with water.