Wild North Wales

Bedford’s photographs present North Wales as the Other, a primitive wilderness of mountains and streams barely touched by humans. His interpretation focused attention on the relationship between humans and wild nature while incorporating Romantic aspirations of acquiring self-knowledge in and through a pure environment. Consequently, his work assisted the creation of an English identity based on contrast to the Other, and supported the idea that a culturally empty landscape filled with natural resources was suitable for colonization. Growing out of the eighteenth-century tradition of topographical watercolors and linked with nineteenth-century topographical illustrations in tourists’ guidebooks, Bedford’s photographs drew on established, artistic aesthetic modes to synthesize style and content and to demonstrate the incorporation of traditional artistic standards in a new medium. Through this new medium and capitalizing on Victorian faith in sight and visual evidence, Bedford expanded the social and political agendas incorporated in landscape to a broader audience.