Landscape 3 (C.53) draws photography into Roy Lichtenstein's Ten Landscapes Series — a chromogenic photographic print used as the ground onto which the screenprint is applied, the photographic image of sky and cloud visible beneath the printed strokes. Photography had long been understood as the most transparent and faithful of mediums once which recorded what was there.

By screenprinting onto a photographic base, Roy Lichtenstein complicated that transparency, making the photographic image visible as just another substrate, another surface on which strokes could be placed. The sky in Landscape 3 (C.53) is both a photograph of a real sky and a component of a printed image, its documentary status absorbed into a larger position. This exchange between media was typical of Lichtenstein's output in the late 1960s.

The Ten Landscapes were being made at a moment when the boundaries between print, photography, and object-making were being actively contested by artists across multiple tendencies — Conceptualism, Minimalism, Pop — and Lichtenstein's use of photographic substrates placed his work in that broader conversation.

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