The counterpoint you offer, of tourists “standing precariously on or near the road, holding a digital camera at arms length, capturing part of the stunning scenery, to presumably affirm their presence, make a record and invoke a memory and feeling” is one I’d like to tease apart a little. It’s a good example in my opinion of an image captured that portrays ‘something’ but something that will vary with the viewer.

I live in this part of Scotland, and I work regularly in the place you’ve holidayed. I’ve seen numerous images presented of this area, and specific locations within it, in magazines, online and also in several landscape photographer’s books often labelled as ‘wilderness’ images, but where the scene is one I’m intimately acquainted with and know that it’s not any kind of ‘wilderness’ at all, but often right beside a main road. The wordy captions mention roaring stags and the wind sighing through the grass, but omits to mention the thunder of the fish lorries heading for Spain filled with crabs that pass 20 feet behind you. What was obviously important was not what was behind the photographer, but in front, and what that scene evoked at that moment.

The reality is that this apparently ‘empty’ and ‘wild’ landscape is bound by many invisible threads. To the casual visitor it is a wilderness, an ‘epic’ landscape. To the ecologist it is a web of interconnecting but unseen life forms each shaping and influencing the other, and the landscape that supports them. To the hill walker the invisible contours of hill and glen mark safe routes and dangers depending on season. For the gaelic historian and elderly local resident it is a place of ghosts and stories, of lives lived and gone. To the stalker or estate manager it is a place known as intimately as the marks on a hand, each dip and rise a place of potential concealment in the stalking season. To the politician it marks a boundary between defeat and victory. To the bard or songwriter it is a place that informs their art with its truly ‘epic’ quality – that ‘storytelling’ of place that is so common in celtic culture. To the local resident it is simply ‘home’.

And if one adds the gaelic nomenclature a whole other complex web of understanding imposes itself across the scene, binding families to land, land to deed, or to something we can only guess at. So for example we have Achiltibuie in the north west, which is the phonetic pronunciation of achadh uillte buidhe, or ‘field of the yellow brook’, although the local tradition has it as achadh ghille buidhe – ‘field of the golden-haired lad’. And with the knowledge of this ‘history’ as imparted by the ‘language of place’ we may be enlightened about a feature, the brook, that we may not have noticed, or intrigued by the presence of a golden-haired lad, and who might he have been, and why was he here.

I think you hit the nail squarely on the head with: “What these counterpoints establish for me is the need for a more complex view, one that refuses a simple black or white rendering of the situation, and appreciates the co-existence of seemingly contradictory attitudes”

Photography for me is magical in that one photograph of landscape, a ‘simple’ tourist ‘snap’ (your word) is not one story, but many stories, richly overlaid in a web of promise, needing only some sense of where the edge of the pages may lie in order to gently turn them to gain understanding. In many respects that tourist ‘snap’ is profoundly honest in a way many other images are not, for it simply accepts what it sees, is a response to the immediate, but contains so much more than any one individual can possibly know. And therein lies the unfathomable, wonderful, depth of the still image.

“Recognising the capacity for manipulation does not mean abandoning the documentary promise. Everyday, amateur photographers with their vacation snaps understand this, and we should too.”

I thoroughly agree.