In Reviewing American Landscape Photography Back West refers to Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present.

This catalogue of an exhibition curated by Sandra S. Phillips at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art explores the tradition of landscape photography. The subject of landscape photography is the land, and the dramatic, quite possibly tragic, reshaping of the West by Americans in the last century.

The West has remained a favorite, though not exclusive, subject for landscape photographers in part because its skeletal deserts retain the scars of land use more clearly than other landscapes and also because of their interest, in deflating the grand style of western landscape photography that they inherited). Then there is this remark:

The idealization of individualism and of corporate enterprise, so vividly optimistic in nineteenth-century photographs and so important even to the work of Ansel Adams, has become despairing, and reveals a flawed and damaged landscape that is only occasionally brightened by an appreciation of the fragile beauty of what remains. The optimism that energized Dorothea Lange and her colleagues to rally for change has been transformed into a weary acceptance of what exists and what we have done

There is not a similar critical landscape tradition in Australia. That landscape tradition has been preoccupied with celebrating the beauty of wilderness.