This paper will explore the problematic nature of the specific and the generic within photography. It would seem that the ontology of the photograph decisively grounds the image in place and time: this, here, now. To show ‘woman’, for example, photography has no option but to show a woman. To show a tree, the camera must relay a specific tree, a particular individual specimen of its genus. Yet Joan Fontcuberta’s Orogenesis landscapes result from deploying digital technology subversively to generate landscapes that never were. He used free software called Terragen which is specifically designed to interpret cartographic data and generate landscape images from this information. Mischievously, Fontcuberta supplied iconic landscape paintings rather than maps into the system. There was thus no camera, no this, here, now and thus no history, no event, no contingency. What he creates are instances (or, more accurately, instantiations) of the landscape photographic genre: indeed, onlythe generic, a kind of cultural residue, a digital distillate. I will seek to demonstrate that the nature of the programming of Terragen in effect reinstates a photographic genre created by the f64 group of American photographers, favouring deep focus, high resolution, imposing grandeur and an heroic model of the picturesque. Fontcuberta’s images, in their oscillation of the specific and the generic, provide a rich source through which to investigate the correspondences and discrepancies between rival scoping regimes.