Photo

Digital landscape representation tends to be used mainly to provide illustrations of designed landscapes that have not been actualized, rather than to deploy operational design strategies during the design and reception process. The present study offers a critique of this direction of digital representation towards realism in current landscape design. To illustrate this pervasive trend, the authors have coined the term ‘photo-fake’: an image that imitates the actual existence of a designed and not-yet-actualized landscape. The study then discusses several photo-fake conditions (invisible frame and the viewer’s position, creating illusions, landscape as theatre and human figures as spectators, and digital aura), through which the visual materials developed in 2012 for the International Competition for the Master Plan of Yongsan Park, Korea, are scrutinized. Through this analysis, the authors contend that a photo-fake’s realism is not the actual realism of the physical world but rather depends on the established pictorial convention of fine arts and 18th-century picturesque aesthetics in landscape architecture