Catherine Hyland’s relentlessly impressive series of holiday landscapes

Date
9 December 2014

You know when you go on holiday and you’re so keen to make the most of every view that you walk around with your iPhone glued to your hand? That, in essence, is the subject of this brilliant series by Catherine Hyland, who was last on the site when she photographed a dilapidated theme park in China back in 2012. It is slightly more complicated than that however, as she explains; the series looks to draw attention to the “cultural concepts of landscape deeply embedded in the development of contemporary leisure sites.”

Entitled Belvedere, a term which is Italian for “beautiful view” and (as Catherine continues) “has been used since the Renaissance to characterise an architecturally enhanced vantage point,” the photographs call into question our consumption of environments which are built specifically as places of leisure. Capturing landscapes from a perspective which shows the strange mesh between man-made and natural, Catherine toys with scale to the point where the actual size of the constructions featured is almost incomprehensible, from a replica Eiffel Tower to a miniature version of St Peter’s square in Rome being trampled over by giant visitors. In fact, the people featured in each image are almost the only “point of entry” rendering it recognisable to us as viewers.

As a result every single photograph has a slightly strange resonance, making it seem both very impressive and yet slightly off. Even more extraordinary is the sheer quantity of work that’s gone into it; Belvedere consists of 53 images – an amazing number by any stretch of the imagination.

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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Catherine Hyland: Belvedere

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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