The role of Photography and defamiliarization in Land art

Land art was formed in early seventies in the USA. Land art artists take their art works out of museums and galleries and expose them to the audience in the natural environment. Since such art works are displayed in an outer area of museum and galleries and there are formed from natural elements, they were short lived and died in nature. In this respect photos are important to keep a record of them; and thus, Photos merely witness land arts and they became important themselves too.
Photos demonstrate the work in books and galleries and make them survive as an art work. Also photography and land art are relatively similar in art work process, art impact, the importance of audience, dealing with reality, and having conceptual significance. This writing attempts to study the role and importance of photography in the artworks of land art artist and determines the importance of the nature of this branch of art in deconstruction and de-familiarization /alienation. The question is what is photo do to de-familiarize land arts?
Findings of this study include: art work magnitude, its mortality, and being located out of galleries and in natural environment. Photography immortalizes a mortal and transient work. And in most case the photo of the art work sells best. Today all land arts are generally known by their photos as image publishes and propagates “tracks” left by artists.
This study will conclude from mentioned art works that: the importance of “the role of photography” to survive the artwork and “the importance of deconstruction for de-familiarization/alienation” in order to fade the similarities of art works and increase the concentration on environment and art works through methods such as ambiguity in concept of art works, eliminating visual habits, change in magnitude of art works, performing art work out of museum or galleries, evolving the material of art work and merging it in to environment, changing a work to an art work by package or displacement of place or holding it in an unfamiliar environment, more emphasis on domestic and ritual values, emphasis on natural layout, the art of cooperation and team work and etc. there are some related examples of Iranian and foreign works in the current study. Actually de-feminization/Alienation makes it complicated to understand a work of art thus subjectively makes it an obstacle, and this is achieved through the heart of concepts and accepted ideas and their illustration from a different perspective. Artistic de- familiarization/alienation forms by breaking common frames and presenting new ideas and new exhibitions. The point is that this de-familiarization is a process that forms from within, i.e. the idea, and then affects the outside, i.e. the form and appearance of an artwork. In this regard, de-familiarization works as a basic and core component and dominates all other elements. Test method applied for this study is: descriptive – analytical, and in some cases it used case study. Information also gathered from libraries.