This editorial introduces three visual essays that explore landscape as a field of perception, memory, intervention and repair. Cristina Gastón and Judit Taberna frame images not simply as records of territory, but as means through which landscapes may be documented, interpreted and redefined. The selected projects—Mattias F. Josefsson’s Making Temporal Landscapes, Oskar Alvarado’s Where Fireflies Unfold, and Alicia F. Barranco’s The American Dream—offer markedly different, yet complementary, approaches to seeing and understanding place.
Josefsson’s visual essay examines the transformation of the Norwegian landscape through snow. Developed during a four-day workshop with first-year architecture and landscape students, the project uses performative actions and photography to investigate site, scale and perception. The temporary interventions create subtle spatial forms that disappear with the thaw, yet the pedagogical knowledge gained remains embedded in future acts of seeing and design.
Alvarado’s Where Fireflies Unfold revisits the Spanish village of Deleitosa from an intimate and imaginative perspective. Distancing itself from W. Eugene Smith’s 1951 representation of rural deprivation, the series draws on ancestral memory and childhood experience. Through nocturnal images, low directed light and an atmosphere of mystery, the work invites viewers to complete the meaning of the landscape through their own interpretation.
Barranco’s The American Dream presents Holy Hope Cemetery in Tucson, Arizona, as a socially divided and wounded landscape. Her colour photographs reveal the contrast between ordered, maintained burial grounds and neglected areas associated with marginalised communities. The cemetery becomes a visual chronicle of inequality, memory and the need for repair.
Together, these essays demonstrate how photography can mediate between direct action, attentive observation and critical documentation. They show landscape as temporal, inhabited and politically charged, while affirming the visual essay as a powerful form for reflecting on how places are shaped, remembered and transformed.