Drawings vs. photos in the representation of landscape architecture

At the beginning of the last century, Walter Benjamin questioned the reproducibility of works of art, focusing on photography and movie. The re-reading of his famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, opens questions about the authenticity of drawings (both analog or digital) and digital images’ reproducibility in contemporary Landscape Architecture. The first part of this text attempts to update and relate to landscape design representation Benjamin’s concepts of concentration and distraction in perceiving works of art; to question the contemporary duality between landscape drawings and digital images to concentration and distraction. The second part presents two contemporary landscape architecture approaches to better speak about concentration and distraction, photography and drawing, originality and reproducibility. The first one is related to Gareth Doherty’s methodology in perceiving and drawing places and territories as original works of landscape representations; the second speaks about James Cor- ner’s landscape analysis, drawings, images, and design strongly connected to the reproducibil- ity of digital pictures. The last part of the text affords the authenticity of drawings, which Benjamin identified in the possibility of being placed at a specific time and within a particular place, affirming the impor- tance of the originality in contemporary drawings to represent landscape architecture ideas