Exactly thirty years ago, when scholarship on Olmsted was in a kind of extended infancy still largely confined to social and political historians, the first serious exhibition of Olmsted's works was mounted by a group of Harvard landscape architecture students. With the advice of Professor Norman T. Newton and later Albert Fein, this group attempted a comprehensive view, and considering what was known at the time, they largely achieved it. The 114-page , Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.: Founder of Landscape Architecture in America, by Julius Gy. Fabos, Gordon T. Milne, and V. Michael Weinmayr, was illustrated with original plans and photographs borrowed directly from the offices of Olmsted Associates - still operating then in Brookline, Massachusetts. At a time when Olmsted's writings had been glimpsed by precious few, and when his parks were largely abused and abandoned, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. was a brave and important effort. It was the beginning of a period of documentary and descriptive groundwork that finally enabled the ascendancy of landscape in scholarship on Olmsted.

By 1989, CCA Director Phyllis Lambert and then-Associate Curator of Photographs John Harris could no longer be interested in being merely descriptive or documentary - or comprehensive. By selecting photographers with established artistic motivations of their own, they struck an interpretive agenda that would be anything but documentary - a characterization each of the artists would reject out of hand anyway. What is praiseworthy is that the formidable CCA has shown a commitment to broadening its inquiry into the history of ideas about the built world by foregrounding landscape in a project of this magnitude, especially with a subject so vaunted and complicated as Olmsted. Its aim is high, even if the title is misleading: Viewing Olmsted leads some to expect comprehensiveness, even though the artists don't pretend to seek it. It is gutsy - others have said naive or ignorant - to attempt an exposition of Olmsted's works with nary a plan or a map or a model, nor any written text describing Olmsted's intentions - without indicating what he did or didn't do.

It is up to the viewer to apprehend Olmsted's design work in these photographs, and that takes a certain knowledge of landscape architecture's task. It looks more like nature - unless you know that nature here was always designed. Geoffrey James' obliquely framed views often have an ancient feeling, where the artifacts of Olmsted's construction are typically grown over, a bit ravaged, lapsing toward ruin. Robert Burley's work also captures this quality at times. But there is no romanticized ancientness in Lee Friedlander's photographs, and he is the only one among the three who moves beyond a moody detachment and into realms that seem driven by experience, of eye, body, and mind. Friedlander never seeks the frontal prospect or the pastoral overview, but instead places the viewer forcefully in contact with the landscape: peering from behind structures, leaning over objects, squinting through masses of vegetation, or staring right into rocks and lilac blooms. Even in his wider views, the distant horizon is placed in contrast to a nearby body - a trunk or a pole - or it is barely discernible through a veil of unruly twigs and leaves. Or it is obscured altogether. And although Olmsted's spaces are ostensibly more artifice than nature, here nature appears as the subject, the frame, the unrelenting reference. Friedlander's nature is a material force, an aggressively surrounding presence amid the structures and spaces of urban life. One senses his challenge: sure, try and design nature out of the landscape - you can't.

Where is Olmsted in all this? Olmsted frequently recedes in these views. Often the focus of attention has more to do with later interventions, or with the evidence of contemporary use - such as graffiti, or cars, or eroded banks, or unmanaged vegetation - because that is what's there, and that is what was interesting to the photographers. But the worry that's voiced in the public's raised expectations is rooted in a new fear about an old dependence on the pictorial - where the subjective, abstracted state of being that is captured in the artist's vision stands for the landscape. It is not enough. To even the critical eye, so many of these images give the sense of landscapes constructed in carefully composed moments for scenographic effect. That may not be out of line with the original intentions at times, but the real work of seeing Olmsted demands more than momentary viewing; it requires context. What's not in these photographs is critically important to understanding Olmsted: the shaping of space in relation to the particulars of local topography and urban infrastructure; the leveraging of enormous investment of public money and political capital to make landscape an essential part of city building; the connections with transportation and housing that linked the working class with the parks; and the people themselves, the denizens of workers and aristocrats alike who were there, participating in the most vivid physical expression of American democracy - Olmsted's parks. How do you photograph these? Their absence underlines the artist's freedom to interpret widely, and insists that the viewer do likewise.

By choosing to be interpretive but not didactic, when didacticism has come to be expected, and then by generating wide exposure of the interpretive project, the CCA invites these criticisms, and, one expects, is prepared to face them down. I think we owe them a debt of thanks for raising debate. After all, this is a photographic undertaking, not another attempt to rehabilitate Olmsted. In the prologue, the essays, and interviews with the artists, everyone is clear about this. John Szarkowski is especially authoritative on photography's limitations in capturing landscape's complexity. In the end, the most significant thing for me is the building of the archive, for this speaks less of current polemics and more of a longer time frame and a larger agenda. As time blurs the artificial distinction between the artistic motives of photography and the documentation of works of landscape art, over 900 hand-crafted views will emerge as eloquent documents of the condition of these landscapes - and of how we saw them - at about their one hundred year mark. If that fails to entice, think of Eugéne Atget's great raft of melancholy images of the nearly ruined royal landscapes in the Île de France, taken before Henri and Achille Duchêne's revisionist rehabilitations drove out sentimentality in favor of a more Cartesian LeNôtre. A century later, we rarely trouble over Atget's affective romanticism of LeNôtre; we just keep staring and dreaming.

Gary R. Hilderbrand is assistant professor and director of the master in landscape architecture degree programs, Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He practices in Watertown, Massachusetts, and is editor of the monograph, Making a Landscape of Continuity: The Practice of Innocenti & Webel.