Let’s say you were an art director and you had to chose a single static nature shot that had to represent the idea of America, what would you choose? The shot has to be one of nature with no or minimal signs of human construction and has to be instantly recognizable to anyone across the globe as representing “Americanness”.
While there are obvious choices when it comes to cityscapes, landscapes seem a lot harder to me due to how diverse the US is. After a lot of racking my brains, my personal choice would be
To be honest I would have guessed that to be somewhere in Africa or Australia. The mountain/valley could be in Norway, New Zealand, or other places. They don’t look any more American than similar photos from places outside the US or even the Americas, if you mean North America rather than the US.
I don’t think there is anywhere in the US that doesn’t look like somewhere else on the planet unless you focus on very specific geographic features like Meteor Crater or the Grand Canyon.
Even if you allow human habitations and go for a classic ‘american suburbia’ shot, those are found everywhere from China to Capetown nowadays. Ditto cityscapes.
Get your spacious skies, amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties in there. Shots of some rocks or holes in the desert are distinctive but don’t really represent “America” as a whole to me so much as “tourist attraction in America”.
Of course, my shot lacks the oceans and deserts and swamps and all that but for a single photo, I’m sticking with my ideal.
I see how things like the Grand Canyon are more instantly recognizable, but I feel like that is more recognizable as “the Grand Canyon” and that it’s Americaness is more of a secondary feature.
Without reading anything but the thread title, I thought of Monument Valley, for the same reasons laid out by others in this thread. Only a very tiny part of the US looks like that, but nothing anywhere else in the world looks like that, and thanks to movies and TV it screams “America!” like nothing else.
Like others I immediately thought “Monument Valley” without reading any other posts. I know it is not typical American landscape, but what matters is that it is distinctive. Various other countries have mountain ranges, vast rolling planes, etc.
For me, it’d be the backdrop to those classic Marlboro Country-type ads, which always looked like the Rockies or High Plains to me, not the desert - Montana, maybe?
