Looking for my place
in the history of photography.
Many years ago I received a photographic publication titled “Celebrations.” I have always remembered this title because nothing better exemplifies the way I feel about my photography.—Bob Kolbrener, Landscapes
- the fence along the U.S.-Mexico border cut by a flash flood
- an ordinary urban strip dominated by utility wires
- a pile of rags and hundreds of cigarette butts at a homeless person’s campsite
- a handicapped man and a seated couple on concrete steps—the steps leading down to a road—an overpass scrawled with graffiti beside the steps
- a parking lot in front of apartment buildings, with the photographer’s shadow on the pavement
- a massive water tower looming behind suburban houses
- an ordinary tree in front of highway ramps and roadbanks, the tree spilling out of the frame of the photograph
- empty parking spaces in front of a warehouse
- a couple seated in front of a suburban home with undeveloped desert hills in the background
- a bomb crater and a destroyed convoy
- gravel bars in the Columbia River at Hanford, Washington, with a power line crossing the river in the background
- an aerial view of power lines across the Flint Hills in Kansas
- a water slide dominating a small hill
- a woman posing in front of a road and a trailer park surrounded by desert
- junk cars in a meadow
- a photograph with out-of-focus trees and lights on its left side and a large metal object on the right not entirely within the frame of the photograph
- a small sign saying “ICE” in the midst of a large expanse of desert
- a vacant lot with mowed grass above a low brick wall, a few scattered evergreens, and several utility poles
- statues at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, poorly visible through the foliage of trees
- a view from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, with a boulder with “JOE” spray-painted on it in the left foreground
A few years ago, Laurie and I had a chance to see the exhibit, In Response to Place: Photographs from the Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places. An introduction to the exhibit noted that photographers in the 1970s had “sought to correct the exclusionary stance of Ansel Adams and his peers” by depicting “the human occupation of the land … including industrial and domestic buildings and signs of use and misuse.” The statement went on to say that, “although this anti-Romantic ‘New Topographic’ style seemed radically different at the time,” it was “simply the flip side” of the earlier approach. The current exhibit was said to represent another change. “Taken as a whole, the beauty of the pictures created for In Response to Place is … a rich and complex beauty, one that acknowledges a more intricate understanding of how human beings can both preserve and decimate the natural world.”
Intrigued by those words, I turned to the photographs. Of all of them, my favorites were Annie Liebowitz’s black-and-whites of rocks, cliffs, and dwarf pitch pines in New York’s Shawangunk Mountains. But Liebowitz was quoting as saying it was difficult to photograph nature: “99.9 percent of the time,” she said, “it’s going to look like a postcard.” I liked her photos, but her comment made me wonder if she did. Maybe she thought they looked like postcards. The only other image I genuinely liked was one of Richard Misrach’s color photographs of a sand dune and soft clouds reflected in water at the Humboldt Sink in Nevada.
In some cases, I sympathized with the artists’ statements, but failed to see that their works lived up to their words. For example:
- William Christianberry, whose work included four color photographs of the Cohaba River and the Bibb County Glades in Alabama, wrote: “[T]o me, it’s not so much what you see as what you feel about the place—its age, its openness, the Native Americans who once knew the place. It’s that feeling that you hope will come through the camera and through you as the photographer.” But Christianberry’s photographs seemed fairly ordinary to me. I saw nothing that was obvious about age, openness, or Native Americans.
- Karen Halverson wrote: “I am never interested in showing just the beauty or just the mess we’ve made. Both things are true. Both interest me because they are there.” Okay. But Halverson’s four large color photographs depicted: an oak tree; a water spigot and a rolled up garden hose; an electric transformer beside a sprouting stump; and a marsh with less than half of a tree poking in from the left edge of the picture.
- Terry Evans spoke of how “incredibly beautiful” the prairie was and said her ambition was to communicate that beauty. Her photographs included mounted botanical specimens laid out on the prairie and aerial views of a pond and an oil pump house and of a landscape of burnt grasses with a power line marching through it. I had met Terry Evans and wanted to like her photographs, but they didn’t speak very loudly of the prairie’s beauty to me.
* * *
The photographic image of [Machu Pichu] as seen from Inti Punku is well known: almost every travel brochure shows it. What is less well known is that one must frame one’s picture carefully to avoid the hotel and its verandah roofed with lime-green corrugated plastic.—Ronald Wright, Cut Stones and Crossroads
American landscape photography had its beginnings in the West in the decade of the Civil War. Carleton Watkins photographed Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove beginning in 1861, supporting his work by also documenting nearby gold mines for their owners. Rebecca Solnit: “Perhaps people do not appear in Watkins’s Yosemite photographs because of the long time exposures photographs then required, or perhaps it had to do with the landscape aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful that Watkins had clearly absorbed. Either way, images of nature without human traces became definitive of the western landscape” [Solnit 2001: 100-101]. Solnit suggests that the Yosemite photos may have helped to legitimize the destructiveness of the gold mines, although it seems as likely to me that the gold mine photos served as a warning of threats to places like Yosemite. Watkins went on in subsequent years to photograph the Columbia River Gorge, the Pacific Coast, and other natural wonders. Another early landscape photographer was William Henry Jackson, who traveled west with the railroad in 1869, supporting himself by selling photos to railroad workers. According to biographer Peter B. Hales, even in pictures where the railroad was dominant, Jackson’s views were not simply a portrayal of the technological sublime: “[N]ature remained a mysterious, brooding force, worthy of attention and respect” [Hales 1988: 60]. In subsequent years, Jackson returned to the West as official photographer with scientific expeditions to Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. His most famous images were of Yellowstone, constituting for many Easterners the first convincing evidence that Yellowstone was not a fiction. From 1870 on, according to Hales, Jackson was influenced both by expedition artists Sanford Gifford and Thomas Moran and by unmistakable evidence that human development of the West was imminent. His photographs became more accessible to sophisticated Easterners, acquiring an “elegiacal quality” and “an understated directness that … energized the pictures” [97].
More recently, Ansel Adams became the foremost photographer of wild nature. Rebecca Solnit notes that Adams, like Watkins and Jackson, supported himself with commercial work—for example, photographing the University of California for its trustees—but rigorously eliminated human beings or evidence of their influence from his wilderness photographs [Solnit 2001: 91]. A principal difference between Adams and his nineteenth-century predecessors was that their photographs conveyed an impression of nature as “permanent and immutable” [Szarkowski 1980: n.p.] whereas Adams depicted the ever-changing evanescence of light and weather. For Adams, wrote critic John Szarkowski, “the landscape is not only a place but an event” [n.p.]. Eliot Porter was another important landscape photographer of the mid-twentieth century. Rebecca Solnit: “Unlike his contemporary Ansel Adams, whose work located itself through landmarks, Porter’s did so through representative specimens—the sandstone of the Southwest, the warblers of the Midwest, the maple trees of New England” [Solnit 2002: 28]. Aiming his lens at “leaves, stones, creatures, or clouds,” Porter showed “that ordinary rocks are important enough, that we can love a place for its blackberries or its stream ripples, not just for its peaks and waterfalls” [34].
Photographers continuing in the tradition of Adams and Porter have generally been ignored by critics and historians. Although I personally enjoy and have tried to imitate the work of photographers such as David Muench, Ray Atkeson, Tom Till, Fred Hirschmann, and Carr Clifton, photography like theirs is generally dismissed. Solnit, for example, says the tradition from Carleton Watkins through Ansel Adams “has dwindled into calendar pictures and coffee table books, which are often important as fund-raisers for environmental organizations but which seem paralyzed by a worn-out aesthetic of purity” [Solnit 2001: 91-92]. She mocks the tradition by spelling out its rules of thumb:
- No human beings or their traces—that is to say, no history.
- Nothing dead, sick, rotting, dying, or in a state of decay—that is to say, no natural history. Though fallen leaves are one of the staples of this genre, even they must not have begun to decay; the loam into which they are dissolving must remain invisible: this is landscape without dirt, literally and figuratively.
- Water’s main purpose is to mirror, with glasslike perfection, the landscape looming above it, except when flowing over a waterfall or seen closeup as dewdrops, preferably refracting a flower field, or dangling from a cobweb.
- Repetition and pattern are good; fifty maple leaves or dewdrops are better than one….
- Colors should be bright, though there is an apparent split between those who simply push the colors as far as they’ll go in the darkroom and those who use colored lenses to give us a hotrod-bright purple and orange world….
- All animals are lovable and attractive, and unlike humans, they may appear either in the landscape or up close like flowers. The fact that they don’t do anything helps; the haunting eyes of wolves look different accompanied by a mouthful of elk calf guts….
- The photograph itself should be so clean as to never call attention to its own creation…. Dodging, burning, filtering, retouching, and superfancy lenses, yes. But no evidence of handicraft—no negative edges, no tripod shadows, no grain, no diptychs, and no inscriptions, which might call attention to the highly technological and toxic medium itself.... The merit of such photographs is not supposed to be the merit of Art but of Nature… [201-02].
The tradition that Solnit mocks is a tradition that’s influenced all of us. We see what photographers from Watkins to the producers of coffee table books have seen. More than that, we see the way they saw. Even in places that are not familiar from photographs, I have stepped off a trail in search of a better angle for a photograph and discovered a beaten path leading to the exact spot where I want to take my picture. It’s not that I’ve seen the place photographed before, nor, most likely, has anyone else. We simply look at scenery the same way, and a spot that seems right to me has seemed right to many others before me. I take that as a sign that we’ve all be taught a way to look at landscapes, and I think it’s pretty clear who taught us.
* * *
We will worship the desert, stare at huge photographs of its expanse, images cunningly taken by lovers who carefully edit out of their frames all evidence of our own existence in this place.—Charles Bowden, Desierto
Rebecca Solnit accuses the tradition of beautiful landscape photography of suppressing a large share of American history. In regard to Yosemite, she tells the story of American Indians being forcibly removed from the land that became the national park, even though their practice of periodic burning had helped to create and maintain the landscape that European-Americans loved so much. The photographs of Adams and others, says Solnit, not only crop that story out of the picture but go even farther by implying that the landscape is “virgin”—blessed with an absence of any previous human presence [Solnit 2001: 101-02]. The popular image of the American West, says Solnit, has been shaped by nature photography and western movies. In the process, “the complex, shifting history of the [region]—Spanish monks, Chinese miners and railroad builders, Mexican ranchers, indigenous hunters and storytellers—has been winnowed out…” [99].
Perhaps even more importantly, the one-sided portrayal of our surroundings that bothers Solnit is said to continue into the present. “What I want to consider,” writes Charles Bowden, “is why so little art in the Southwest considers that we live in booming instant cities full of tanned bodies, vigorous crime, healthy doses of narcotics, and endless streets of ugly, mass-produced houses” [Bowden 1994: 15]. Of beautiful landscape photographs, Bowden says: “The focus is fine, the contrast perfect, the sharp teeth of our world almost always absent. No highways, no bulldozers, no beer cans, no men, no women, no children, no life…. I have a friend who recently sold a photograph of a proposed wilderness and was appalled when a careful examination of the image revealed a telephone line snaking through the saguaros. Had he known, he would have shot the picture so that this fact of who we are and how we live would have been carefully edited out by the lens” [23]. In Desierto, after discussing William Mulholland, who engineered the theft of water from the Owens Valley to supply the needs of Los Angeles, Bowden complains that every time he sees beautiful photographs of the desert “the crime has been erased” [Bowden 1991: 30]. (Funny, but every time I see beautiful photographs of the desert, the crime is magnified.) Historian Aaron Sachs argues that images like those of Watkins and Adams “paper over the history of our interactions with the land and with each other, and for that reason it is tempting to imagine a slightly different tradition of nature photography, one not so concerned with wilderness preservation as with contact, connection, communion, with balance and humility, with the real decisions confronted by people laboring in the landscape” [Sachs 2006: 219].
Still other writers find disconcerting limitations in photography itself. For some, like Lippard, “the camera becomes a prosthetic for direct experience” [Lippard 1999: 136]. As early as 1845, John Ruskin was initially fascinated by photography. “Yet Ruskin’s enthusiasm diminished as he began to note the devilish problem that photography created for the majority of its practitioners. Rather than employing it as supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it” [de Botton 2002: 219]. Janice Emily Bowers: “When I think about how I was with a camera in my hands ... I see a person occupied with distracting herself, substituting ritual for attention” [Bowers 1997: 54]. Noting that a number of her friends are professional photographers, Bowers says, “I respect and value their work, but, when I have a camera in my hands, I become blind to the world around me” [54].
For some writers, the whole idea of merely looking at landscapes, which photography embodies, is troubling. Landscape, in Paul Shepard’s historical view, “was the means of perceiving nature according to criteria established by art criticism, the avenue of ‘landscape’ by which people ‘entered’ nature as they did a picture gallery” [Shepard 1992: 72]. For Terry Tempest Williams, we learn from photography to believe “that our only place in the wild is as spectator, onlooker,” and become “a society of individuals who only observe a landscape from behind the lens of a camera or the window of an automobile” [Williams 2002: 106]. Rebecca Solnit acknowledges that there are “enormously important” reasons to “take only pictures, leave only footprints,” but goes on to say: “... I cannot help feeling something is sadly missing from this experience of nature. Looking is a fine thing to do to pictures, but hardly an adequate way to live in the world. It is nature as a place in which we do not belong, a place in which we do not live, in which we are intruders” [Solnit 1994: 263].
* * *
Adams said Stieglitz told him “when I make a photograph I make love.”—Ansel Adams: Classic Images, exhibit,
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, January 2003
I take those criticisms personally because they attack the type of photography that I do and the photographic examples that I try to emulate. What do I photograph? Landscapes, wildflowers, mountains, deserts, prairies, seashores, waterfalls, rocks, lichens, creeks, rivers, clouds, snow, ice, fog, fall colors, the new leaves of spring, wild places in general. I do not, by and large, photograph people. My usual response to the question “Why not?” is that I don’t visit a wild place to see people. If I wanted to see people, I’d stay in town. Nor, for the most part, do I photograph the works of people—their towns, houses, roads, power lines, mines, clearcuts, or farmland. Once those things become as scarce and threatened as wild country, maybe I’ll photograph them. Indeed, the relatively few human artifacts that I do photograph are ones that already seem scarce and threatened: old canals, covered bridges, architecture of earlier times, roads or farmland that respects the landscape.
I guess I’m supposed to be too embarrassed to admit this, but Solnit’s tongue-in-cheek rules of thumb are a pretty good rendition of the rules that I follow. I treat human beings, water, and repetition exactly as she describes. I don’t necessarily reject decay or predation—anything wild is potential subject matter—but I do turn my lens away from withered or half-eaten wildflowers. I like my colors bright, as Solnit suggests, although I also want them natural, so I do not “push them as far as they’ll go,” and I certainly won’t use colored lenses. As for “cleanness,” I not only exclude tripod shadows and other “evidences of handicraft” from my pictures, but I reject dodging, burning, filtering, retouching, and superfancy lenses as well. It is precisely “the merit of Nature” and not “the merit of Art” that I wish to convey.
Why do I take pictures? I take them because I see things that strike me as beautiful or spectacular or interesting, and I want to record them. I take them because I enjoy the process of framing a composition that looks right. I want the photos as a record of what I’ve seen, and I want them to be honest in the sense of being an accurate rendering of what I saw. I make little use of Photoshop, preferring to limit my adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color to changes that make the photos look as much as possible like what I remember seeing. I value the pictures for the memories, and I do look at them as the years go by. They don’t get stored away and forgotten. I look at them partly for the memories they evoke and also, to be honest, because I regard some of them as damn fine photographs. I neither think of myself as an artist nor aspire to be one. If there’s any art in what I do, it’s in the ability I’ve developed to find places, scenes, or objects that I want to photograph. I mean that both at the scale of, say, a map of the United States, where I can identify parts of the country or particular places to visit, and at the scale of specific landscapes where I find great pleasure in walking or scrambling to spots where the angle promises to be right for a better photograph. It’s mainly myself whom I seek to please with my photos, although I’d be lying if I said that’s all I wanted. I’m not interested in selling photos and have little interest in winning prizes, but I do like for people to see my photographs, and for that reason I greatly appreciate the ability to post them on the internet (on Flickr). It pleases me when people say they like my work, and I cherish any evidence that someone’s been influenced by it. I love it, for example, when people tell me that my photos have induced them to get out more often, to pay more attention to the beauty around them, to care more about the protection of wild places, or to dig their own camera out of the closet and start taking pictures again.
Obviously, I disagree with most of the critics of the Ansel Adams tradition. For example, I believe that the arguments about “merely looking” confuse wild places with nature. It hardly needs to be pointed out that humanity can’t restrict itself to looking at nature. We need it for food, clothing, shelter, and the satisfaction of other needs and wants, and we need to learn more sustainable ways of using it for those purposes. But wild places are only a subset of nature, and I contend that all societies need wild places as a counterpoint to human culture. I believe that’s true throughout the world, and has been throughout history, even if it’s only shamans or some other minority of the population who visit the wild places. Throughout most of history, human numbers have been so small and technology so limited that there was no need to consciously protect wild places. But that’s no longer the case, and treating those places gently—as in merely looking—doesn’t seem to be a bad idea at all. That’s not to say we should stay in our cars or behind our camera lenses, but it makes no sense at all to suggest that we should use Yosemite National Park the same way Native Americans used the nature that surrounded them. (Perhaps we should use it the same way they used remote mountain or desert locations where they went for vision quests.) If there’s any limitation in photography in this regard, it’s that photographs are purely visual and perhaps share some blame for encouraging people to settle for “merely looking.” But experiences that Laurie and I have had while taking pictures are by no means limited to the visual. We enjoy the exertion of tramping through the landscape, the smell of sagebrush and balsam fir, the sounds of birds and wind and rippling water, the roughness or smoothness of rocks, and much more.
With respect to the argument that photography can be a substitute for attentiveness and direct experience, I can honestly say that hasn’t been the case for me. Oh, I can recall times when sunlight or weather conditions have been extra-special and fleeting, and we’ve raced around taking photographs, and—afterwards, when the light was gone or the fog dissipated—I’ve realized that I never took the time to simply absorb and appreciate the experience. But those occasions are rare. Far more often, the search for photographs enhances rather than lessens my attentiveness. Paul Shepard’s idea of what we should do in wild places instead of just looking is to go hunting—in order to fully understand our human dependence on the rest of nature. But, as William Kittredge observes: “Reading the world as a hunter, whether for meat or wild fruits or photographs or experience, involves attentiveness” [Kittredge 2000: 114, my emphasis]. And, in my view, it’s attentiveness that matters. I don’t need to shoot a deer to know that animals die to feed me or that most of us think too little about our dependence on nature. Photography doesn’t distract me from nature. It brings me closer to it. I’ve looked through the viewfinder at wildflowers and experienced what I can only describe as affection. I’ve seen details through the viewfinder that I hadn’t otherwise noticed—to the point of being able to identify a wildflower’s family or genus only after seeing it through the viewfinder. In his logbooks, the painter Walter Anderson describes his observation of a green heron climbing a tree and writes: “I drew it in ecstasy” [Sugg 1985: 37-38]. When I read that, I knew exactly what Anderson meant, and scenes and objects that I had photographed in ecstasy flickered through my mind.
* * *
It’s interesting—no, “interesting” isn’t the word, “tragic,” maybe that’s the word—don’t you think, how so much that passes for spirituality these days is life-denying, life-denouncing, is more about death and dying than life and living. Photography passes my test for being the most life-enhancing spiritual practice I know of. To take up a camera is to dance with life, affirm life, embrace life, love life.—Minister and photographer Jim Dollar, on Flickr
I acknowledge the one-sidedness of my photographs. They do celebrate the beauty, spectacle, and wonder of wild places and show no evidence that anything is wrong. They have a decidedly “zip-a-dee-doo-dah" quality in that regard. They do convey an impression of solitude, an image of empty wilderness. They include virtually no human beings—often because no one was there except me, but sometimes because I purposely exclude them. Like many of my fellow photographers, I’ve waited impatiently for people to get out of the way and cursed their presence when they failed to move or kept coming into view. I have not attempted to address the genocide of Native Americans or the enslavement of black people in my photographs. I’ve had moments of uncertainty while contemplating the ironic gorgeousness of some of our battlefields, but invariably have either gone ahead and photographed the beauty or not taken pictures at all. I’ve made no attempt to document pollution, soil erosion, groundwater depletion, urban sprawl, or other mistreatment of the environment. Nor have I attempted a positive strategy of illustrating constructive steps by humans to live more sustainably with their environment.
Perhaps most tellingly, I’ve never attempted to put into a photograph the anger that boils up inside me as a result of things I see. I dislike roads that show no respect for the landscape, filling in the valleys and carving deep road cuts through the hills. I dislike the sprawl of housing developments, shopping malls, and golf courses across the countryside. I dislike power lines marching across an otherwise wild or pastoral landscape, and I dislike billboards (except perhaps for ones that are directly helpful to travelers looking for a nearby business or service). I dislike clearcuts in forested areas. I dislike the proclivity of real estate developments to clear every single scrap of nature or wildness from a site before construction begins. I deplore the tendency to advertise housing developments as adjacent to a park with no acknowledgment that the park is now adjacent to a housing development. I hate the spoiling of beautiful mountain valleys in the West by houses scattered on large lots so that no one—neither resident nor traveler—has an uncluttered view of a natural landscape. I abhor the assault on land and vegetation by jeeps, dirt bikes, and ATVs and the scars they leave behind. I’m irritated by the disfigurement of mountainsides by ski areas. I dislike the conversion of every type of terrain to the uniformity of golf course fairways and greens. I abhor big houses perched on hilltops or ridgetops—“for the views,” they say, although “to be seen” is what I think they mean. But do I photograph those things? No. It never crosses my mind to photograph them, and, if any of them is visible in a scene that I otherwise want to photograph, I’ll forsake the photograph.
Perhaps I’m guilty of feeding the impression that everything’s okay. Maybe my photographs suggest incorrectly that I’m happy with things the way they are. Or that I’m not bothered by things that in fact bother me. I’ve thought about such possibilities and concluded that the best way to address them is with words rather than pictures. I don’t know how well I’ve succeeded, but I’ve had a rule that the narration of slide programs should include discussions of the negative side of things. At a minimum, if a photograph required me to wait for crowds of tourists to get out of the way, or to duck beneath a power line, or to screen someone’s house behind a tree or a rock, I should say so. If a park was lovely but too small, or a beautiful landscape was posted against trespassing so we couldn’t walk there, I should say so. I now believe that the photographs I post on the internet should have the same type of commentary. In addition, I’ve written a number of essays—also posted on the internet—which address the negative as well as positive aspects of wildness, nature, and the environment.
But maybe I’m missing something. Perhaps there are lessons I should be learning from the new wave of landscape photographers. By and large, I haven’t liked their work, but our culture has a long history of learning new values and new ways of seeing from the art world. And, significantly, that history includes a lot of initial rejection. Trends that people have initially regarded as ugly or boring or worthless they’ve eventually learned to value. Impressionism is the classic example, but there are many others. Wild landscapes without religious, historical, or mythical connections were once rejected. So were depictions of ordinary people, as opposed to saints, royalty, or aristocrats. Am I missing something in the newer work of photographers outside the Ansel Adams tradition?
Rebecca Solnit implies that Adams, by cropping hotels, gift shops, parking lots, laundromats, and beauty parlors out of his Yosemite photographs, failed to teach Americans to see those things [Solnit 2001: 101-02]. My question, though, is: Did he need to? Those facilities are pretty hard to miss in Yosemite Valley, and most visitors go to them. If Americans failed to be taught anything, it was to be angry about the presence of those things. But that’s a hard thing to teach with a photograph. Make a beautiful photograph of them, and the message may seem to be that the intrusions are perfectly okay. Make an ugly photograph, and most people won’t pay attention. The glorious message of Adams’s photographs was that the important things at Yosemite were the rocks, trees, water, and light. Turn your back on your car, your hotel room, and the gift shop, Adams said, and give your attention to these things instead.
Solnit seems to believe that some of the newer photographers are on the right track, although she also notes that, since the mid-1980s, there has been a trend “away from photography as an adequate medium and from landscape as an adequate category toward installation, video, and conceptual work” [Solnit 2001: 98-99]. I studied some of the photographs reproduced in Solnit’s book, paying special attention to ones addressing subject matter of special interest to me. Having spent a fair amount of time around Scottsdale, Arizona, I’ve been angered by the rampant conversion of the Sonoran Desert into housing developments. One of Mark Klett’s photographs is a view down across a saguaro-studded desert where streets, curbs, and cul-de-sacs have recently been constructed [92]. Very prominent, only slightly to the right of center in the photograph, is the mid-section of a quite ordinary saguaro, so close in the foreground that neither the top nor the bottom of the cactus is included. I can’t help but wonder why Klett didn’t step to one side or another or at least back up and include the whole plant. I assume he photographed it that way on purpose, but what am I supposed to think about it? The saguaro certainly doesn’t look majestic. Rather, it simply looks in the way. Is Klett troubled by the subdivision? I might think so if he seemed to have more respect for the saguaro. As it is, I’m not sure.
What if that saguaro weren’t in the picture? Most likely, it would be a boring photograph. (It is anyway, as far as I’m concerned, but it would be even more boring.) It might provoke anger, but most likely it wouldn’t get much attention at all. And what if the saguaro were photographed in a more aesthetic way? Include the whole plant. Better yet, find a plant that communicates the dignity of saguaros with less ambiguity, so that the subdivision appears unmistakably to be invading something worth caring about. What I would fear in such a case is that the photo would become so attractive that its message would again be confused. The curving lines of the newly constructed streets do have a certain appeal, and the photo might look like a real estate advertisement heralding the compatibility of subdivisions and saguaro forests.
I have similar reactions to two family vacation photographs by Cynthia Rettig [Solnit 2001: 106-07]. In one, cliffs surrounding Lake Mead are viewed past the side of a motorboat. In the other, we see the shoulder and back of the head of a man leaning on a picnic table in a posture that suggests he’s target shooting. I see the photographs as negative statements about motorboats and target shooting, but I also see them as further evidence that the only way you can make a negative statement with a landscape photograph is to make an ugly photograph. If I had come upon Rettig’s photographs in an art gallery or museum, I wouldn’t have looked at them twice because they’re very ordinary photographs. But, if they were beautiful photographs, I might have thought they were meant to praise motorboats and target shooting.
The same dilemma is illustrated in a different way in the work of Richard Misrach. His photographs, as Solnit notes, “work in an aesthetic language of the sublime close to that of calendars, but they portray power plants and bomb sites as beautiful” [Solnit 2001: 203]. I studied the photographs of a Navy bombing range in Misrach’s book, Bravo 20. Of the bombing range, Misrach writes:
The landscape was magnificent. I was surrounded by the vast expanse of the alkali flat, which acted like a great reflector of light. As the sun broke the horizon, Lone Rock cast its shadow across the landscape…. The sky, the colors, the atmosphere, were cool and brilliant. The landscape boasted the classic beauty characteristic of the desert.I have seen that contrast. Not as dramatic as a bombing range, but I have seen “staring” new houses (Henry Thoreau’s word) adulterating beautiful landscapes, and I’ve seen scars left by ATVs and dirt bikes on terrain that I hesitate to walk on except as lightly as possible. But what of Misrach’s photographs? Of thirty some photographs in Bravo 20, not one, to my eye, conveys a “magnificent” landscape. The light is dull, and, even when shadows are long, the photos seem washed out. Skies are gray or hazy, never clear or bright. On the other hand, the photos do convey a ravaged environment: bomb craters everywhere, rusting bombs lying about or protruding from the earth, blasted vehicles that served as targets, pools of water of suspicious color. The images may look like “calendar art” to Solnit, but they don’t to me. They show a shamelessly devastated landscape, but I don’t see in them the beauty that Misrach’s words evoke. Consequently, the impact is lost of the contrast between beauty and horror (which Misrach’s words proclaim). Whereas I prefer to photograph the beauty and talk or write about the horror, Misrach writes about the beauty but fails to photograph it.
It was also the most graphically ravaged environment I had ever seen. I found myself at the epicenter, the heart of the apocalypse…. Only the smell of rusted metal. Bombs and lifeless holes. Side by side were great beauty and great horror (Misrach 1990: xiv).
The difficulty of communicating a negative message about landscape with a photograph worth looking at probably accounts for the tendency that Solnit observes for landscape photographers to abandon photography in favor of art forms that allow them to add words, video, performance, earth-moving, and other elements. What would Ansel Adams have done? Confronted with Mark Klett’s scene, he would have exalted the saguaros with a photograph and joined the Sierra Club to fight the subdivisions.
My favorite photographs in Solnit’s book are ones of Manzanar, California, the site of a 1940s Japanese internment camp, by Masumi Hayashi [Solnit 2001: 102-03]. The scene is a boulder-studded desert landscape below the eastern wall of the Sierra Nevada. The photographs, to my eye, are handsome but not extraordinary—except that they appear to have been clipped apart into dozens of rectangles and reassembled so that small spaces remain between the rectangles. Solnit says the separate images “seem to address the reconstructedness of memory, the fractures in truth” [103], and that may indeed be part of their appeal. More certainly and more simply, the breaking up of the photographs like a mosaic forces the viewer to look again—to see that these are not straightforward landscape photographs—and at least to wonder what the photographer had in mind. I could imagine doing something similar with photographs of battlefields. When I showed Hayashi’s photographs to Laurie, she immediately thought of creating collages or mosaics of large photos of beautiful landscapes surrounded by smaller photos of threats to those landscapes. I thought about that, and, yes, it did seem that I could do that, too. But it would require me to photograph the threats, and I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to spend my time and mental energy photographing bulldozers, newly laid streets, houses under construction, or shopping malls and golf courses. I do not wish to honor those things with the same attention and care that I give to wildflowers, rocks, and waterfalls.
* * *
… every where the trace of men,
Paths, homes, graves, ruins, from the lowest glen
To where life shrinks from the fierce Alpine air.
Gaze on them, till the tears shall dim thy sight,
But keep that earlier, wilder image bright.—William Cullen Bryant,
“To an American Painter Departing for Europe”
Being fairly well saturated with deprecations of Ansel Adams, I found it refreshing to come across David Rothenberg’s essay on restoring the sublime, that Romantic Era notion of “an overwhelming beauty that comes at us so strong that we are nearly afraid” [Rothenberg 2002: 16]. As Rothenberg acknowledges, the idea of the sublime is no longer held in high regard and in fact “has been under attack as long as it has been around” [17]. The philosopher Immanuel Kant defined the sublime as the “absolutely great,” but “[t]hat didn’t stop him from announcing that the beautiful was better, because it was the goal of pure contemplation separate from the easy specularity of the powerful, the wild” [17]. Significantly, as Rothenberg points out, Kant was a promoter and defender of the rational, objective, scientific paradigm, and the romantic notion of the sublime disputed the vision of the human mind as the center of the universe and questioned the confidence that human ingenuity would conquer all. Rothenberg: “The pull of sensation away from the pure safety of the human mind, out into nature itself, was a straight challenge to [Kant’s] vision of the grand miracle of the human mind, contained within itself…. The sublime is the absolutely great, but [for Kant] there is something better: the human mind. How’s that for hubris?” [17-18].
Rothenberg did not wish to disparage science or the human mind, and neither do I, but we grow nervous when science goes beyond a healthy curiosity about the world and assumes an arrogance that humans are better and more important than anything else. We distrust the assumption that nothing can stand in the way of our dominance or our ability to solve any problem that comes along. I recently heard an engineer advocating nuclear power who, when questioned about the waste disposal issue, said, “I don’t know, but I’m confident that a solution will be found.” Perhaps he’s right. I suppose there’s ample evidence to support his point of view, but there’s also ample evidence that every advanced civilization of the past has eventually outstripped its resources. People in each of those civilizations probably said the same thing—“We’re confident that a solution will be found”—right up to the very end [Diamond 2005; Childs 2006]. Rothenberg believes the idea of the sublime can once again become a counterpoint to such hubris. If humanity is going to survive over the long run, there will have to be, sometime, a shift from the Kantian worldview of humanity as separate from nature (and superior to it) to one in which humans understand themselves as part of it.
It seems that way to Rothenberg, too. He admires Arne Naess for seeking “a way of understanding” in which we primarily see, not separate objects, but “apprehend the qualities of things only through their relations with each other” [Rothenberg 2002: 91]. “Naess,” says Rothenberg, “sidesteps the phenomenological tradition, with its subject experiencing the world, and hints instead at a world that as a whole experiences itself, with no primary subjects or objects, but instead as a web of relations” [91]. Short of accomplishing that kind of shift in perception, Rothenberg admires anyone with the humility to acknowledge so much complexity in the world that we can’t possibly know or understand it all. Noting that Aristotle viewed nature as needing to be completed by human beings, Rothenberg suspects that, “if he had lived to see what the polis has become, [even] he might occasionally need to flee to unfinished high points if only to gain a sense of perspective” [43]. Likewise, Rothenberg respects Ed Abbey for his “addiction to philosophical conundra” [77], and I, too, have underlined passages of Abbey’s like: “The desert world accepts my homage with its customary silence. The grand indifference. As any man of sense would want it” [Abbey 1979: 195].
This is the value of the sublime. “The sublime,” says Rothenberg, “is the pull toward astonishment at the world” [Rothenberg 2002: 29]. It jerks us out of the artificially narrow pathway by which we persuade ourselves that we can know everything and control everything. The sublime is joyful as well as frightening, telling us not only that the world is beyond knowing and controlling but that it’s okay to be that way. We can get along. We may need to adjust our worldview, but we can get along.
What bothers Rothenberg about the current status of the sublime is that it tends to be disparaged. It’s “a difficult word today, meaning really good, wonderful, the best that there is. But it is no longer this specific and looming kind of spectacular aesthetic, where nature is drawn or described as more intense than it could possibly be” [16]. Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and other painters of the Hudson River School are said to have been unrealistic. Landscapes that they made to appear dramatic are now seen as “gentle and humanized, crisscrossed by roads” [21]. The “hard-hitting environmentalist picture book” when Rothenberg wrote his essay was filled not with Ansel Adams’s sublime images of Yosemite but with photographs of clearcuts [23]. Comet Hayatuke, the brightest object in the night sky that many of us will ever see, was easy for many people to ignore. Rothenberg: “The tragedy is that it is so hard to be affected. The sublime answer is to work to take it in” [28]. Rothenberg reports that, if he purges from his mind the idea that the Hudson River paintings were unrealistic, he can still see—in his home territory along the Hudson—the same colors, hues, and scenes that Cole and his contemporaries painted [27].
Tellingly, however, at several places in his book, I find Rothenberg inadvertently illustrating the problem as well as the solution. Like annoying numbers of other writers, he repeatedly badmouths the national parks. Acadia, for example:
Take a look at even the lesser-known trails of Acadia National Park. Every junction mapped and signed exactly. Overused paths that are eroding down to bare roots and rocks. No place to park! Mountain bikes zooming down carriage roads that are so well-restored that they are nearly like paved highways through the woods. Often a toxic haze of pollution on a summer afternoon [Rothenberg 2002: 156].Yes, I have seen signs, overused paths, and carriage roads like highways at Acadia, and I suppose we’ve had trouble finding parking places and may have noticed a toxic haze. But none of that comes close to dominating my impressions and memories of Acadia. What I remember are oak and pine woods, great sweeps of boulders and open rock on the mountains, views of bays and islands, plants at sea level that I normally see high in the mountains, the complicated rhythms of swells and waves, and an elaborate shoreline architecture of ledges, points, chasms, and tidepools.
If anyone at Yosemite fails to see what Ansel Adams photographed, it’s because they simply haven’t looked. Colleagues of mine with photos posted on Flickr prove that time and again. If you allow yourself to be seduced by descriptions of the parks as nothing but roads, RVs, parking lots, and gift shops, that’s what you’ll find. If you think all the forests have become clearcuts, you’ll find plenty of clearcuts. If you believe the saguaros have all been bulldozed into subdivisions, you won’t bother looking for them. I recall Scott Russell Sanders’s book, Hunting for Hope, which begins with his teenage son’s anguished tirade: “Your view of things is totally dead. It bums me out. You make me feel the planet’s dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it” [Sanders 1998: 9]. Here’s Sanders later in the book (worth quoting at length):
Like the London Underground, with its drab concrete and flickering lights and tattered ads, much of the world we have made starves our senses. As we insulate ourselves from wildness, retreating farther and farther inside our boxes, life loses piquancy, variety, delight. So we gamble or drink or jolt ourselves with drugs; we jump from airplanes with parachutes strapped to our backs, or jump from bridges with elastic ropes tied to our ankles; we ride mechanical bucking bulls in bars or drive fast cars or shoot guns, hunting for a lost thrill. We cruise the malls on the lookout for something, anything, to fill the void. Bored with surroundings that we have so thoroughly tamed, we flee into video games, films, pulp novels, shopping channels, the Internet. But all of those efforts eventually pall. As the novelty wears off, once more our senses go numb, so we crank up the speed, the volume, the voltage.
These manufactured sensations pall because they have no depth, no meaning, no being apart from ourselves…. Buildings may be comfortable, machines may be convenient, electronics may be ingenious, but they are never mysterious; they speak of no power, no intelligence, no imagination aside from our own….
No matter how clever our works, they will never satisfy this hunger. Only direct experience of Creation will do. The likeliest way to achieve contact with the life of the cosmos, the likeliest way to recover our senses, is by shutting off our machines and closing our books, climbing out of our tunnels, our cars, our electrified boxes, walking beyond the pavement to actual dirt or rock and opening ourselves to the world we have not made [53-54].
I’m getting worked up about this. Here’s what’s wrong with modern landscape photography. Charles Bowden says, when he walks in the desert, he doesn’t see the exquisite landscapes that photographer-lovers have cunningly photographed. He writes: “I think of the photographs because they seem magical—they express nothing that I feel or think as the hundreds of miles move through my body” [Bowden 1994: 22]. Well, I’ve walked in the desert, too, and I say that, if Bowden can’t see what the photographers saw, it’s his problem. He’s allowed himself to grow numb, and photographs of bulldozed saguaros and of streets and curbs newly laid in the desert encourage such numbness. Bowden insists—correctly—that most people have no idea what the desert really is, but he has his own deadly and austere vision of it, and that’s what he looks for, and that’s what he finds. My photos are meant to say: Look! Look beyond the road, the windshield, and the power line and see the beauty that’s all around us! That’s what Ansel Adams did. I remember liking earlier books of Bowden’s like Blue Desert and Frog Mountain Blues. They opened my eyes to drug and real estate atrocities in the Southwest, but they also revealed an unquestionable appreciation of the landscape. By contrast, Bowden’s more recent work seems to assume that the beauty of the desert is obvious, and it’s the dark side of the Southwest that needs to be told. But I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Arizona, and I don’t think the desert’s beauty is obvious at all to most of its residents. They live in air-conditioned houses, shop in air-conditioned malls, think outdoors is a golf course, and zoom past the landscape at eighty miles an hour in air-conditioned vehicles. Bowden says they “wince” at “what passes for growth and progress” [Bowden 1994: 18-19], but I don’t think they wince at all, for they have too little awareness and appreciation of what’s being replaced.
I completely agree with Bowden when he writes: “Based on what we write about the land and the photographs we take of the land, we cannot face ourselves in the mirror” [Bowden 1991: 31]. But he means that as a criticism of photography whereas I regard it as a criticism of ourselves and our creations, and I refuse to honor those creations by photographing them.
Instead, I will continue taking pretty pictures. I will try to show that, anytime you go for a walk in a wild place, something beautiful, spectacular, or wondrous is likely to turn up. I will show that little things are beautiful as well as big dramatic ones. I will show show that loveliness exists in every little fragment of wildness and not just at Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. I will continue finding beautiful places and scenes and objects to photograph until I die or become incapacitated. I will fill the internet with digital images in the same way that I’ve already filled closets with slides. Maybe I’m crazy. Perhaps I will become a weird old man (or am already). But I will be nourished by whatever wildness remains, and I will endeavor to produce such an overwhelming number of beautiful, spectacular, and wondrous images that no one can possibly miss their message.
SOURCES
Abbey, Edward. Abbey's Road. New York: Plume Books, 1979.
Bowden, Charles. “Dead Minds from Live Places.” Judy Nolte Temple, ed., Open Spaces, City Places (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), pp. 13-24.
Bowden, Charles. Desierto. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991.
Bowers, Janice Emily. Fear Falls Away. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.
Childs, Craig. House of Rain. New York: Back Bay Books, 2006.
de Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.
Diamond, Jared M. Collapse. New York: Viking, 2005.
Hales, Peter B. William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.
Kittredge, William. The Nature of Generosity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Kolbrener, Bob. Landscapes. A book of photographs perused in a waiting room, February 2003, perhaps self-published. I’m now unable to find any information about it.
Lippard, Lucy. On the Beaten Path. New York: New Press, 1999.
Lippard, Lucy. The Lure of the Local. New York: New Press, 1997.
Misrach, Richard (with Myriam Weisang Misrach). Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Phillips, Sandra S., Richard Rodriguez, Aaron Betsky, and Eldridge M. Moores. Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
Rothenberg, David. Always the Mountains. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.
Sachs, Aaron. The Humboldt Current. New York: Viking, 2006.
Sanders, Scott Russell. Hunting for Hope. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.
Shepard, Paul. “A Post-Historic Primitivism.” Max Oelschlaeger, ed., The Wilderness Condition (Washington: Island Press, 1992), pp. 40-89.
Solnit, Rebecca. As Eve Said to the Serpent. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Solnit, Rebecca. “In Photography Is the Preservation of the World.” Sierra, September-October 2002.
Solnit, Rebecca. Savage Dreams. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Sugg, Redding S., Jr., ed. The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985.
Szarkowski, John. American Landscapes. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1981.
Szarkowski, John. “Preface.” Celebrating the American Earth. Washington: Wilderness Society, 1980.
Williams, Terry Tempest. Red. New York: Vintage Books, 2002.
Wright, Ronald. Cut Stones and Crossroads. New York: Viking, 1984.
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