Sotheby's New York, February 2006. The auction house is seething with excitement. You can almost smell the vicarious pleasure of those who have come to watch and the steely determination of those who have come to buy.

Furious bidding ensues, until the auctioneer's gavel goes down on a landscape photograph no bigger than an A4 envelope. The closing price of $2.9m made it the most expensive photograph in auction history, though in this fast-moving world, that record was soon broken.

The photograph, Edward Steichen's melancholy image of a moonlit pond in Westchester County, New York state, is widely considered to be one of the finest examples of 20th-century landscape photography. The works of Steichen, arguably the most accomplished of all landscape photographers, are prized simply because of his pre-eminence. "There is nothing more blue chip than a Steichen", says Francis Hodgson, the head of photographs at Sotheby's. "And this is a fantastic image, particularly if you look at the quality of the light bouncing off the water." Although Steichen's excellence has never been in dispute, it is telling that a landscape, rather than a portrait or still life, should achieve such a high price. Though landscape photography has always been popular among enthusiasts, it has rarely made such waves at auctions. At the same auction, two portraits of Georgia O'Keefe by Alfred Stieglitz also broke the million-dollar barrier, but they were outstripped by the landscape. "It is so difficult to get landscape right," says Hodgson. "There are countless examples of competent landscape photographers, but the genre is almost invisible at the high end." Recently, however, landscape photography has experienced a renaissance. There is a desire among many photographers to return to its roots.

The origins of landscape photography lie in landscape painting. The work of early British pioneers such as Roger Fenton was seen simply as an extension of the great painters; he and other 19th-century contemporaries had an obvious link with the pastoral tradition ­ they evoked the landscapes of Constable and Gainsborough, albeit on film.

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Influenced by the great Americans such as Ansel Adams, modern landscape photographers have developed their own style, often using their pictures to record environmental, economic and social change. The threat of environmental catastrophe has prompted many to use their work as silent but powerful polemic. Adams himself was a pioneering environmentalist ­ his pictures of the national parks taken in the 1920s are a testament to the havoc wreaked upon the US in less than 100 years. British heirs to this tradition include the much-underrated Fay Godwin, the former war photographer Don McCullin, Joe Cornish and Charlie Waite, whose images document environmental change in a beautiful yet sometimes forbidding way.

According to the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin, "High-definition television has surpassed photography in many ways, but landscape photography still holds its own." He also believes that as we become more urban, our appetite for photography that harks back to the rural past grows. "There is a desire for an escapist vision of rural wildernesses." The urban landscape has become a fascination for many photographers. Some, such as John Davies, specialise in post-industrial scenes documenting the changing face of Britain; others, like Andreas Gursky, produce gritty images of urban scenes on a spectacular scale. Gursky holds the record for the most expensive photograph sold by a living artist, and has become the Damien Hirst of the landscape photograph ­ his controversial work is much prized by collectors. These days, if you are seriously interested in landscape, you've just got to get a Gursky.

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