One of the principal genres derived from western culture in art. In earlier paintings landscape began as a backdrop as part of the composition, in the late 17th century the appreciation of nature become more involved with French and Dutch painters I have researched a bit into this within my primary research at the national portrait gallery, looking into some paintings done by Dutch painters. The treatment of landscape differed as the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in an artificial and stylised manner, whilst the Dutch painted what they saw in a realistic ways such as trees and the nature outside and surrounding fields, such as Gogh did. 

Landscape as a gerne moved on in the 19th century to paint in a more realistic manner of the natural world. The evolution of landscape has led to the development in modernisation and coming to the end of work done by Impressionists and Post-impressionists. Since then more work within abstraction has risen for the better or worse and has become a high abstraction and a recuring and popular theme in the 20th century and now landscape at ideas of topographies as well as social and political, environmental issues. Fay Godwin does this through photography and is uses these ideas to tackle  issues.

The term documentary invented until the 1920s, used by John Grierson, a British film-maker and referred to it as moving pictures. The term documentary can be defined as the systematic recording of visual reality for the purpose  of providing information and understanding of the world, is inherent from the medium itself. This view which became known as realist paradigm, that the photograph itself is a slice of reality and we take, what we view from it and understand.

Earlier practitioners such as John Thompson documented the life of poor in London Street life in London (1876). Later on pressures from advertisements combined from group Journalisms lead to the independence of photographers, although Bill Brant was still able to continue as a photojournalist and an independent photographer as his works such as experimental nudes, portraits and landscapes had a toll on the younger generation and his work was quite influential and from here was a development of modernism in Britain.