Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men, by Deborah Bright (1985)
An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography
[Editor’s note- The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Exposure magazine, the journal of the Society for Photographic Education. Throughout the year, we will be republishing a selection of essays that were first published in the pages of Exposure, to introduce a new generation of photographic educators and students to this rich history.
The article is presented as originally published in Exposure 23:4 Winter 1985 pp 5–18. Following the article is a series of Letters to the Editor by William Jenkins and Deborah Bright, published in Exposure 24:2 Summer 1986 pp 51–53.]
Introduction by Deborah Bright, December 2019
It’s 1985.
While the movements for equality and civil rights in the United States for African Americans, Latinx communities and women had achieved much since the 1960s, the work was far from finished. A backlash was in full force, driven by economic dislocations as manufacturing fled to low-cost global labor, right-wing religious mobilization in the political sphere and a generalized fear of change among those who assumed that whiteness and patriarchal privilege were natural states of being. The ERA to the Constitution was almost ratified by 2/3 of the states but stalled (and still is).
It’s 1985.
It had been sixteen years since the Stonewall uprising and the visibility of gay rights, but the government and medical establishment were doing their own stonewalling as gay men died by the thousands from a deadly virus with no treatment in sight. Earth Day was only fifteen years young but the Reagan administration, as would the Trump administration decades later, rolled back environmental regulation and used executive branch privileges to bypass Congress and cede control of public lands to connected commercial and industrial interests.
It’s 1985.
The New Topographics had launched a decade earlier at George Eastman House, at the apogee of MoMA curator John Szarkowski’s influence and championship of a highly selective method of “photographic seeing” that prioritized an image’s formal qualities and style over its content. While Szarkowski proposed a very teachable model for making graphically sophisticated pictures, his formula elided any discussion of what the pictures actually showed (the freaks! the naked girl on the floor under a stack of pancakes! the interracial couple with baby chimps!)¹. This omission, which was not an oversight but a strategy, would be addressed using the new tools of what came to be called theory.²
This is a suggestive summary of some of the context for the publication of my essay “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography” in Exposure. I had just begun teaching a photo history survey course at DePaul University and was exploring “landscape theory” through the writings of J.B. Jackson and D.W. Meinig’s The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), and Paul Shepard’s Man in the Landscape (New York: Knopf, 1967). I had the good fortune to befriend Jan Zita Grover who introduced me to these sources in relation to my own landscape projects, Battlefield Panoramas (1981–84) and How the West Was Won (1984–85). Grover was active in SPE, a co-editor (with David Jacobs) of Exposure, and one of a cohort of photography critics and historians such as Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Anne McCauley, Christopher Phillips, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Sally Stein, who believed that photography scholarship must be grounded in an understanding of the culture and period when the images were made, as well as how the photographs were received and used by their makers and intended audiences.
Bringing the new methods of art history and theory to bear on landscape photography was somewhat novel at the time as most photo historians and critics focused on images of the body within the contexts of gender politics and consumerism, ethnic oppression and colonialism, police and criminal typologies, medical and scientific uses of photography and domestic scenes/family photographs. This scholarly turn was timely and understandable, given the more obvious relations of hard and soft power that shape these categories of photographs and are, in turn, shaped by them. Meanwhile, landscape photographs went largely unexamined, perhaps because they were then presumed to be benign and less politically loaded than pictures of human bodies. But theory teaches us to be the most skeptical of ideas that are assumed to be universal or beyond examination. In 1985, it seemed like the right time to look at American landscape photography with a fresh critical eye, and I am forever grateful that SPE and Exposure gave me a platform for doing so.³
Deborah Bright is a Brooklyn-based artist. She serves on the board of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, the only museum in the world whose mission is to showcase queer visual culture. In her former academic life, she served as chair of fine art at Pratt Institute (2012–2017) and before that held a joint appointment as professor of photography and history of art/visual culture at the Rhode Island School of Design (1989–2011). Her photographs have been exhibited internationally, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Museet for Fotokunst, Copenhagen; Nederlands Foto Instituut, Rotterdam; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Cambridge Darkroom; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Bright published The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire (New York: Routledge,1998), a groundbreaking collection of images and writings on photography and queer politics. Since 2014, Bright has returned to painting and drawing as her primary expressive media and this work may be seen at www.deborahbright.art
I suspect no landscape. vernacular or otherwise, can be comprehended unless we perceive it as an organization of space; unless we ask ourselves who owns or uses the spaces, how they were created and how they change. -J.B. Jackson⁴
Landscape photography has been enjoying a spectacular resurgence in the coffee table/art book press. During the past year alone, glossy tomes such as Landscape as Photograph, Edward Weston’s California Landscapes, The Essential Landscape, Second View, and An American Field Guide have piled off the presses and into the bookstores. In addition, the Spring [1985] issue of Aperture was given over to the topic “Western Spaces.’’
Why landscape now? A few conjectures surface to mind: it is certainly true that among educated, middle-class audiences, landscape is generally conceived of as an up-beat and “wholesome’’ sort of subject which, like Mom and apple pie, stands indisputably beyond politics and ideology and appeals to “timeless’’ values. This would sit well in our current conservative cultural climate, where images of the land (conceptual, historical, or literary) from Lakes Tahoe to Wobegone are being used to evoke the universal constancy of a geological and mythic America seemingly beyond present vicissitudes.
But this is too simple an explanation — images of landscape cannot be perceived simply as an antidote to politics, as a pastoral salve to lull us back to some primordial sense of our own insignificance. Nor should they be regarded simply as the loci of our modernist pleasure in arrangements of material objects in ironic constellations — found “happenings” for the lens whose references to the worlds beyond the frame rivet all attention on the sensibility of the artist.
These two prevalent constructions of landscape remind us that ‘’landscape” as a subject of visual representation is a distinctly modern phenomenon. The taxonomic term “landscape” comes from Western art history and refers to a genre of painterly practice which only gathered momentum and prestige in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the aristocratic classical tradition of painting, landscapes were principally fields for noble action — carefully cultivated gardens suited to the gods and heroes who populated them. With the rise in the seventeenth century of the merchant bourgeoisie in Holland, a new sort of landscape emerged — a seemingly more “natural” landscape that celebrated property ownership: the working water- or wind-mill, the merchant ship at anchor, the farmer’s field, the burgher’s estate. English landscape painting in the eighteenth century followed the Dutch model, though it supplanted the formulaic quality of earlier genre painting with scientific accuracy that reflected the increasing prestige and achievements of empirical science and its offspring, technology. The word “landscape,” in English, initially referred specifically to Dutch paintings and only later denoted the broader idea of a view or prospect.⁵
Whether noble, picturesque, sublime or mundane, the landscape image bears the imprint of its cultural pedigree. It is a selected and constructed text, and while the formal choices of what has been included and excluded have been the focus of most art-historical criticism to date, the historical and social significance of those choices has rarely been addressed and even intentionally avoided.
To take an example, the “small-town American” landscape of mass-circulation graphic illustration signifies more than a generic place idealized by Norman Rockwell. It also connotes a semi-rural golden age, a psychological center from which a ruling middle-class minority draws its symbolic identity and nationalistic context — its ideology:
In this generalized image Main Street is the seat of a business culture of property-minded, law-abiding citizens devoted to ‘free enterprise’ and ‘social morality,’ a community of sober, sensible, practical people. The Chamber of Commerce and the Protestant churches are naturally linked in support of ‘progress’ and ‘improvement.’ For many people over many decades of our national life this is the landscape of ‘small town virtues,’ the ‘backbone of America,’ the ‘real America.’ ⁶
Despite its cultural dominance, this is a landscape in which the major portion of the nation’s populace — its urban natives and refugees (including blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, Jews) — finds no positive reflection but instead oppression.
Thus, whatever its aesthetic merits, every representation of landscape is also a record of human values and actions imposed on the land over time. What stake do landscape photographers have in constructing such representations? A large one, I believe. Whatever the photographer’s claims, landscapes as subject-matter in photography can be analyzed as documents extending beyond the formally aesthetic or personally expressive. Even formal and personal choices do not emerge sui generis, but instead reflect collective interests and influences, whether philosophical, political, economic or otherwise. While most art historical/curatorial scholarship has concentrated on the artistic genius of a select few (and the stake in so doing is obvious), it is time to look afresh at the cultural meanings of landscapes in order to confront issues lying beyond individual intuition and/or technical virtuosity. The sorts of questions we might ask concern what ideologies landscape photographs perpetuate; in whose interests they were conceived; why we still desire to make and consume them; and why the art of landscape photography remains so singularly identified with a masculine eye.
In the late nineteenth-century United States, after the “Indian problem” had been brutally solved and the frontier ceased to exist, a veritable Cult of Wild Nature flourished, having undergone several evolutionary phases since the continent’s discovery by white Europeans. This was characterized by a nostalgia for the red-blooded rigors of a pioneer life that had become obsolete. As with many significant movements in American cultural life, this one emerged from a pragmatic alliance of liberal reform and commercial interests: the first epitomized in the Progressive Movement’s precept that the “nature experience” was a desirable antidote to the unhealthy urban life, and the second in the creation of a middle-class tourist market, first by the railroads and later by the automobile interests.
In the same spirit, efforts to create pockets of arcadian nature in the cities through the institution of landscaped parks and nearby forest preserves reflected an upper-crust cultivated taste for aestheticized nature and that class’ conviction that such garden spots could elevate the aspirations and manners of the immigrants and workers who used them. In concert with these programs, wilderness areas began to be claimed and named as refuges of timeless order in a changing world — “God’s gift to the American people” — to be preserved as a legacy for future generations.
The religious overtones in the American attitude toward these wilderness areas is unmistakable. As Kenneth Erickson has pointed out, these landscapes were and still are truly ceremonial in nature, requiring both a code of personal conduct for users (park rules and regulations) as well as ritualized expressions of devotion (“pilgrimages” made on certain holidays and the compulsion to take snapshots of the conventional shrines of Nature). The role of visual icons as both talismans of the original “experience” and prompters for renewed inspiration seems obvious in such a context.⁷
In 1908, 69,000 tourists went to worship in the eleven national parks. Twenty years later, the figure had climbed to three million. What kind of landscapes were these tourists so eager to gaze upon? As one historian describes it,
they were not impressed by wilderness itself. They looked instead for the unique, the spectacular, or the sublime, drawing their standards from stereoscopic views, picture postcards, railroad advertising, magazine illustrations, Romantic literature and landscape art. Scenic beauty was an art form, and its inspiration a preconditioned experience.⁸
The railroads competed ruthlessly for the nature-tourist’s dollar by trumpeting the unique visual enchantments of their respective routes. The federal government published popular National Park Portfolios during the 1920s, which prepared the general public for its first views of Yellowstone and Yosemite.
As automobile travel became widespread in the 1920s, the Park Service’s Landscape Architecture Division engineered the wilderness to accommodate the new mobility with planned roads and numbered scenic turnoffs, sited and designed to conform to conventional pictorial standards. Nature was redesigned, we might say, for middle-class convenience and efficiency. With the active participation of government and private enterprise, wilderness scenery became good business. In this enterprise, photography rapidly surpassed other modes of graphic illustration to play a central role in merchandizing landscape for public consumption:
Sprawling enlargements, reminding prospective travellers of distant attractions, were spread like murals across the walls of ticket offices in smoky Eastern cities.⁹
These views became the established “standards” against which all future visual records of these landscape-spectacles would be measured. It was these “mechanical reproductions” of the chosen shrines that lured tourists into making the journey to find the Real Thing.¹⁰
The advent of motion pictures, particularly the Western, created a public taste for spectacular scenery used as a backdrop for thrilling dramas. The cowboy movie was firmly established as a genre by the 1920s and succeeded as no other form in masculinizing the western landscape. “Away up in the Canadian Rockies. amid the mighty forces of Nature, a man must be a man even to survive,” read the press release for James Oliver Curwood’s The Valley of Silent Men (1922)¹¹; another of his press releases touted a film as “A Supreme Test of Manhood That Shows What Real Character ls. It Surpasses Belief and Overwhelms Our Sense of the Beautiful.”¹² These larger-than-life celluloid landscapes were mirrored at a humbler level in the roadside attractions of Western tourist landscapes as well as becoming a marketing strategy for selling everything from cigarettes to presidents. Like Philip Morris’s Marlboro Man, today a white-hatted Reagan rides his horse or chops wood for the camera on his Santa Barbara ranch, a rugged individualist drawn up to specs by Central Casting.
In the American consciousness, then, the western landscape has become a complex construct. It is the locus of the visually spectacular, culled from the total sum of geographic possibilities and marketed for tourist consumption. For liberal conservationists, it represents the romantic dream of a pure, unsullied wilderness where communion with Nature can transpire without technological mediation, a dream that has been effectively engineered out of most modem experience. Once considered the essential ingredient in character formation, Nature has become commodified; its benefits can be bought and sold in the form of camping fees, trail passes, and vacation packages at wilderness resorts. As geographer J.B. Jackson has pointed out, we come in contact with Nature on a tight, highly-structured schedule — holidays and weekends — which are determined not by the change of seasons, but by the routines of urban work.¹³ This Nature has been designed to help us absorb its “benefits” as efficiently as possible: tourist literature and park displays ensure that we are exposed to the peak experiences at the site (sight).
For others, the western landscape is the repository of the vestiges of the Frontier with its mythical freedom from the rules and strictures of urban social contracts — a place where social Darwinism and free enterprise can still operate untrammeled, where tract houses can sprout in the waterless desert. As one pundit put it, “For Americans, true freedom is not the choice at the ballot box but the opportunity to create a new world out of nothing: a Beverly Hills, a Disneyland, a Dallas, a Tranquility Base.’’¹⁴
Repressed or unexpressed among these mythical landscapes that conventional photography and Hollywood cinema have served so well is a landscape that cannot be defined strictly by aesthetic or geographical categories. The sort of landscape I am referring to, and which I think photographers might have a stake in revealing, is that landscape which J.B. Jackson has called “a field of perpetual conflict and compromise between what is established by authority and what the vernacular insists on preferring.”¹⁵ A landscape, in other words, whose construction by culture is made explicit — indeed, whose construction is made the very subject of photographic investigation.
Beauty, preservation, development, exploitation, regulation: these are historical matters in flux, not essential conditions of landscape. The political interests that landscape organization reveal are subjects that the practice of landscape photography has not clearly addressed. Before I speculate on strategies photographers might use to reveal landscape’s cultural construction, it would be useful to assess some of the inadequacies in traditional landscape photography.
The dominant landscape aesthetic in museum/gallery photography was self-consciously established as an off-shoot of the American purist/precisionist movement in art during the late 1920s and 1930s. A second, West Coast landscape school, founded by Edward Weston and continued more popularly by Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, represented the continued taste for the picturesque sublime from nineteenth-century European and American painting. This aesthetic was premised on an identification between a mythical Eden and the American landscape and was well-suited to the conservative social climate of post-Second World War United States basking in its reborn Manifest Destiny as a world superpower. Popular Sierra Club publications, such as Porter’s In Wildness Is The Preservation of the World (1962), celebrated the same sanitized conception of the natural world that Walt Disney promoted in his wildlife films. Porter anchored his vision in literature, specifically the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalists, whose ideal of a uniquely American wilderness proposed a landscape where deity could be touched through intuition.
The publication of Aperture (begun in 1952) and Minor White’s eclectic reworking of Stieglitz’s Equivalent provided artistic landscape photography with something resembling a theoretical base. Borrowing heavily (via Steichen) from the turn-of-the-century Symbolists, Stieglitz defined a photographic Equivalent as a metaphor for the vision or feeling of the artist rather than as a transcriptive record of the subject. However, as Andy Grundberg has succinctly pointed out,
For all its virtues in making us engage photographs more closely and complexly, the aesthetic of the Equivalent… has one major shortcoming: after asserting that an apparently transparent image of the world is imbued with an individual vision or feeling, it has difficulty defining what that vision or feeling is. Used as a critical instrument, the theory of Equivalence is unable to determine any intended meaning in a photograph. But as a credo, it has served as the dominant aesthetic of American photographic modernist practice.¹⁶
For Minor White, Ansel Adams, and their generation of art photographers, intuition and expression were the central issues, not visual form. Thus Aperture could routinely publish portfolios as stylistically diverse as those of Robert Frank and Frederick Sommer, for “the final form of the image was of less importance than its evocative meaning.”¹⁷ It was on this slippery beachhead that the Aperture forces were eventually challenged and overwhelmed by John Szarkowski’s curatorial juggernaut in the 1960s and 70s.
As a landscape photographer and as modernist photography’s most influential tastemaker, Szarkowski used landscape photographs extensively to shape and bolster his assertions about photography’s essential “nature.” Employing a formalist vocabulary peculiar to his reading of photography (“vantage point,” “detail,” and “frame”), Szarkowski invoked the work of selected nineteenth-century landscape photographers as evidence for his theory of form. In keeping with his notion of photography as a medium with its own irrepressible forms, he proffered these photographers as “naifs” through whom landscape could be represented photographically without regard for the pictorial formulae of European painting. Szarkowski referred to Timothy O’Sullivan, that seasoned professional, as “a mutant, native talent,” displaying the “kind of natural grace by which a great dancer or singer seems possessed.”¹⁸
In addition to its patronizing tone, such writing sheds no light on the historical circumstances in which O’Sullivan’s photographs were produced. Significant issues of patronage, audience, means of reproduction and distribution are neatly elided in favor of a formal theory applied equally to any body of photographs from any historical time and place. Plucked from their historical world of contracts, commissions, stereographs, and stubborn Senators, nineteenth-century photographers like O’Sullivan are thus rehabilitated as the sires of a bloodline of artistic photographers legitimized by a powerful American cultural institution, the Museum of Modern Art, and its provincial satellites: the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran, the Walker, and now, the Getty.
Szarkowski’s scholarly legerdemain was nowhere more evident than in his protégé Peter Galassi’s much-ballyhooed thesis project, Before Photography (1981). Here again, landscape imagery of extraordinary obscurity, culled from both nineteenth-century painting and photography, was used to establish a legitimating art-historical pedigree for “photographic seeing.” As Abigail Solomon-Gadeau put it with her customary bluntness, selective raids on the art history slide-library can be used to support any proposition, no matter how absurd. The practice of obscuring historical contexts permits a curatorial theorist to construct a specious history that s/he then tautologically claims to have discovered.
Had Szarkowski lived out his professional life as an obscure academic pedant, weaving together his vision of photography’s immutable essence for an admiring coterie of undergraduates, his notions could be dismissed as one of those typical late flowerings of Greenbergian formalism that lost its punch in art theory a couple of decades ago. But such was not the case. Because Szarkowski had the unparalleled bully-pulpit of the MoMA from which to broadcast his version of the art history of photography, his curatorial choices of contemporary photographers acquired the lustre of proven winners and were collected, published, and rewarded with public and private grants.
Moreover, Szarkowski’s ideas about what constituted a successful photograph required that certain visual and technical criteria be met with grace, wit, and irony. These values and techniques were and still are disseminated by critique and example in almost every photography department and art museum east of the Sierras.
In the area of landscape photography in particular, Szarkowski’s influence seems to have been particularly crippling. As recently as 1981, he curated and wrote American Landscapes, a slender catalogue raisonée of photographs from the museum’s permanent collection. His brief introductory essay amounted to a roll call of the canonical masters, beginning with Civil War photographers and ending with Frank Gohlke, a designated heir. In some ways, this publication made far more explicit the limitations of Szarkowski’s vision of photography than other, more ambitious catalogues and exhibitions. There is, for example, the question of sexism in dominant curatorial practice: of the forty photographers in American Landscapes, only two women were included — Laura Gilpin and Dorothea Lange — both of whom are dead.¹⁹ Each was represented by a single image, while male counterparts such as Harry Callahan and Edward Weston were represented by three and four pictures, respectively. Lange’s inclusion seemed forced in other ways as well, for her images of landscape are rare and she meant them to be read in context with her images of human activity and the extensive texts she and Paul Taylor wrote to accompany them.
Perhaps no exhibition and catalog were more influential on the course of landscape photography during the past decade than New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, organized by William Jenkins for the George Eastman House in 1975. The aesthetic position enunciated by Jenkins pitted the nine photographers represented (only one woman — half of the Bechers — was included) against both the kitschy Kodachrome versions of wilderness immortalized on postcards and calendars and the touchy-feely Nature-worship of the Minor White crowd, which perennially haunts the fringes of art photography.
The New Topographics photographers — Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, the Bechers, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. — shun all the conventional norms of beauty and sentiment to which art and kitsch landscape photography appeals. Rather, they present themselves as self-consciously knowing “naifs,’’ artless artists working within the tradition Szarkowski has constructed for those nineteenth-century expeditionary photographers who worked “without precedent,” without style. For Jenkins and his photographers, however, “there is little doubt that the problem at the center of this exhibition is [my italics] one of style.”²⁰ In speaking for the photographers he curated (and Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz must have squirmed just a bit at this), Jenkins blithely claims that while their photographs convey “substantial amounts of visual information,’’ they are intentionally about what is in front of the lens, which he defines as above all an aesthetic arrangement, having nothing to do with the cultural meaning of those references. These photographers are artists, with an oeuvre, a characteristic style, and an art-historical pedigree. As John Schott aphoristically put it: it was not a matter of making statements “about the world through art,” but making “statements about art through the world.”²¹
The paradoxical fact that many critics and photographers regard the work of the New Topographers as moving beyond formalism to social critique has more to do, I think, with the impoverished expectations of what passes for social criticism in art than with any theoretical positions assumed by the artists in question. All acquiese to the notion Szarkowski advanced in Looking at Photographs — that “photographs describe everything but explain nothing.”²² Jenkins reiterates the substance, if not the economy, of the dictum:
The important word is description for although photography is thought to do many things to and for its subjects, what it does first and best is describe them.²³
While it may be true that individual photographs are open-ended, ambiguous — that they “explain nothing” — the contexts in which they are produced, distributed, and consumed explain much about how we are to interpret them, including the knotty question of their relationship to the subjects they describe.
As an example, the uses of Stephen Shore’s landscape photographs provide a fascinating case-study of how different contexts can invite radically different readings of the same image. During the American Bicentennial, the Smithsonian Institution invited architect/theorist Robert Venturi to organize a theme exhibition on cultural symbolism in the American vernacular landscape. The resulting exhibition and catalog, Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City (1976), prominently featured Shore’s large-format color photographs of various landscapes. One of these had appeared the previous year in Jenkins’ New Topographics; another reappeared seven years later in Shore’s own monograph, Uncommon Places (1983). In Venturi’s Signs of Life, Shore’s photograph of a small Dutch colonial-style cottage in a neatly manicured suburban setting appears with the following caption printed beneath it:
Decorated house fronts are suburban billboards with flags and eagles, foundation planting, doors, porches, roofs and walls, windows, grills, shutters and ornaments as part of the symbolic content.²⁴
In the New Topographics catalog, the identical photograph is captioned, ‘’West Avenue, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, l 974.’’ This laconic place-and-date appellation follows the formula for titling landscape photographs shown and reproduced within art contexts. (Its intentionally non-specific formula does not customarily include the street name, but in this instance, perhaps it sounded more “topographic.”) The modernist premise underlying this second title-choice is, of course, that one does not make photographs of things or events, but rather makes pictures to see forms in flat arrangements with their own internal coherence. Making any reference to the world outside the frame beyond the title is deemed superfluous, if not downright distracting.
This refusal of historical context is taken to its extreme by Shore in his own book, Uncommon Places. In Signs of Life, Venturi’s caption of Shore’s photograph of a town thoroughfare reads. “On Main Street, the buildings of one era are transformed by the signs of the next.” In Shore’s fine-art monograph, the identical photograph is reproduced with no caption or adjacent image of any sort — only a page number. An index at the back of the book refers each photograph’s page number to the conventional formula of place-and-date. Nothing textual (and thus con-textual) is allowed to distract the viewer from an appreciation of the photograph as pure visual form; anything reminding us of the historical contingency of the photographer and/or his subject is rigorously eliminated.
But art venues invariably use external devices to control our reception of a photograph. Mats and frames, neutral walls, discreet labels, high rents, and the gallery hush provoke a palpable reverence before the images, even before we’ve inspected them closely. In catalogues and monographs, the high seriousness of the images reproduced is constructed through the inclusion of each photographer’s resume. Thus in New Topographics we read that photographer Robert Adams received both an NEA fellowship and a Guggenheim grant, in addition to being exhibited at the MoMA, while across the page, Adams’ photograph automatically “confirms” the credentials of “proven genius” set forth verbally.
I single out Robert Adams because he is the most complex and articulate of the New Topographers and has made no secret of his liberal interest in the social issues surrounding the landscapes he photographs. However, his logophobia in the presence of the image has resulted in a self-defeating tendency to give lectures and write essays that reveal his passionate feelings about what he photographs while the images themselves remain isolated within museum and gallery spaces whose institutional discourse tends to suppress expression of social concerns.²⁵ This balkanization of images and text renders both Adams’ written essays and photographs weakened statements; it also remands his photographs to the precincts of Art, there to be admired for their “attic restraint,” to quote Szarkowski, rather than for their expression of a socially critical point-of-view.
In a revealing passage in one of his essays, Adams says that one day, after spending weeks making beautiful formal pictures of open-pit mines for a commercial client, he felt impelled to drive eighty miles out of his way to photograph a monument erected by the United Mine Workers to commemorate the massacre of miners and their families by the state militia.
What I wanted and I knew it was hopeless, [my italics], were pictures of the monument that would somehow indict the new strip mines to the north. But in most cases the miners there were uninterested in a union and were, for all I had been able to discover of their consciences, now themselves probably members of the National Guard.
I was left at the end of the day with a sense of the uncertainty of evil, of the ambiguity of what photography could do with it, and of the fact of my own limited skills. After years with a camera I had wasted still more time trying to do what it apparently was not given me to do.²⁶
Adams’ twinges of liberal guilt about working for a corporate client in an industry with a violent union-busting history are, in his eyes at least, absolved by his projecting onto “the miners” a conservatism and lack of self-interest comparable to that of their bosses’ — “they were uninterested in a union and were … now themselves probably members of the National Guard.” Adams’ abortive pilgrimage to the monument and his recounting of how he tried to make an incriminating picture (and failed) get him off the hook, justify his limitations, and make him look like the good liberal he is — “It apparently was not given me to do.” One might ask, given by whom? God? Nature? John Szarkowski? Who told Robert Adams he could not make photographs “that would somehow indict the new strip mines to the north”?
Furthermore, for what is Adams indicting the strip mines? Corporate greed? Boom-towns? Immigrant workers? Ravaging the landscape? Even though he does not reveal the precise nature of his distress, any number of indictable situations could be documented photographically, accompanied by explanatory texts and, particularly with Adams’ national reputation, published in forums that reached his intended audience(s).
Adams’ most recently published attempt to address a “social issue” while still fetishizing the purely visual is Our Lives and Our Children, Photographs Taken Near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant (1984). Our Lives and Our Children provides an excellent case-study of the poverty of dominant art photographic practice in speaking to specific, material concerns.²⁷ Photographs seeking to construct social concerns without reference to their status as historical objects become diminished by their “universalized’’ status as art objects. It should be obvious that modern patron-institutions (cultural, corporate, governmental), all justifiable targets of social critique, have a vested interest in keeping art and the critical discourse surrounding it free from overt politics. As Allan Sekula, Hans Haacke, Douglas Crimp and others have demonstrated, art institutions have been successful in accomplishing this task, both through action — control of funding, endowments, curatorial practice, art historical scholarship, etc. — and through self-representation — the conventional wisdom that the separation of art and politics is just plain “common sense,” that the museum, like Art itself, is about timeless and universal concerns.²⁸
Returning to landscape, what can photographs of landscapes tell us about how we construct our sense of the world? A comparison of two bodies of landscape photographs made in the same period, of similar subject-matter, and addressing similar social concerns will demonstrate the difference between landscape work committed to questioning the conventions of landscape photography and an art photography that merely perpetuates or dissolves them into barren irony. Every critic who has assessed John Pfahl’s widely-published portfolio Power Places has expressed astonishment and some confusion about his apparent lack of political consciousness in making such lush, large-format, beautiful pictures of nuclear power-plants. Even those who are quite at home with traditional art photographs seem a bit nonplussed when confronted with Pfahl’s serene impression of Three Mile Island, reflected in the still, quiet waters of the Susquehanna River early on a sunny morning.
Exhibited without any statement that might anchor his images for the viewer, the photographs bespeak a kind of romantic nostalgia for the picturesque landscape; power plants, like rock formations or ancient trees, can be objects of beauty — the sublimity of the modern atom by the shores of ancient seas. Pfahl’s photographs elicit other readings as well: that “energy” is “natural” and found in every landscape; that human exploitation of resources is universal and necessary, even in the most primordial, picturesque settings, and so on. As social responses to the issues raised by nuclear-energy development, such readings play squarely into the hands of utilities management, which uses very similar visual images to make precisely these points in corporate propaganda.
If setting up a “dissonance” between the romantic pastoralism of the landscapes and the potentially dangerous power plants within them was Pfahl’s intended strategy, it is not carried through consistently, for he photographs non-hazardous power places such as hydroelectric facilities and dams with identical concerns for beauty and formal control. One suspects other motives at work here, namely marketing strategies in the art-collecting world. It is worth recalling that Robert Freidus, Pfahl’s New York dealer, has stated explicitly that the “theme portfolio” is the cornerstone of his art-photography selling success.²⁹ By combining conventionally beautiful photographs of socially-loaded subjects with a fashionably ambiguous high-tech/political/ecological theme, the work was highly marketable without offending any potential buyer — a corporate client in the energy industry, for example.
In contrast, Lisa Lewenz’s Three Mile Island Calendar (1984) uses photographs of that power plant within a very consciously-constructed political context, wittily appropriating the vernacular Christmas-calendar format as a foil for her serious message. Instead of the conventional Kodachromes of mountain’s majesty, we see TMI photographed in gritty black-and-white from the homes of nearby residents. On the calendar itself, in addition to traditional famous anniversaries and birthdates, Lewenz adds dates of significance to the history of atomic energy, creating oddly provocative juxtapositions. For example, along with “Father’s Day” we read, “Radioactive Iodine released by Dresden-2 reactor, Chicago, 1970” or “U.S. Supreme Court rules: NRC can OK nuclear plant without waste study, 1983.” Her inclusion of landscapes within the frame of people’s homes makes explicit the lurid connection between what lies out there and the privacy of our homes. Rather than the fantasy of a landscape world beyond society, or only marginally related to society, Lewenz creates an analysis of landscapes as a social production.
By mass-producing her-calendar and selling it for an affordable $6 instead of issuing her photographs as limited-edition, archivally-printed art objects priced in the hundreds or thousands, Lewenz makes clear the precedence of the informational over the aesthetic. She also opens up distribution to audiences who would never enter a museum or gallery. It goes without saying that Pfahl makes much more money at what he does than Lewenz; he is a “success” in current art-world terms and reaps the rewards of steady academic employment and visiting artist gigs. But Lewenz’s calendar demonstrates a successful attempt at moving beyond art photography’s limited, inbred audience and its ironic/aesthetic detachment from “life,” to using landscape images for articulating a clear position on both formal and social issues while reaching a wider public.
Other sorts of positions that might be articulated in landscape photography include land-use, zoning, the work place, the home. Women, I think, have a special stake in documenting this sort of “social landscape” — one that is quite different in nature from the “social landscape” delineated in the mid-60s by Nathan Lyons in his exhibition of that title for the Eastman House. Most landscapes that are used primarily by women — the house, shopping centers, beauty parlors, laundromats, etc. — are designed by men for maximum efficiency and/or to promote consumerism among women. Only recently has the history of an architecture by women for women been rediscovered and advanced. Such an architecture would fundamentally redesign living spaces and workspaces with women’s needs in mind — e.g., communal day-care, private work-areas away from family demands, and easy access to other women through horizontal social networks.³⁰ Such a sense of order-in-space could be analyzed in a feminist landscape photography.
Women might also recoup landscape photography for themselves in response to its present character as a male preserve in art photography. The image of the lone, male photographer-hero, like his prototypes, the explorer and hunter, venturing forth into the wilds to capture the virgin beauty of Nature, is an enduring one.³¹ Even those modernist topographers who point their Deardorffs, Sinars or Linhofs at ‘’the works of Man’’ (as in a Man-altered Landscape, to use Jenkins’ words, or The Hand of Man Upon The Land, to borrow one of David Plowden’s headings) fit that archetype. Weston, Porter, Caponigro, Strand, Plowden, Tice, Clift, both Adamses, Baltz, Deal, Divola, Klett — the roster of landscape photography’s acknowledged masters could go on and on.
Where are the women? As my comments on Szarkowski hint, their work has been systematically excluded from surveys of landscape photography at major museums. Five years ago. Lustrum Press published Landscape: Theory³² as part of its ongoing “Theory’’ series, wherein well-known photographers attempt to explain, with varying degrees of success, what they do. From “A” (Adams) to “W” (Weston), all ten of the photographers profiled in Landscape: Theory were men.
And the beat goes on: the Spring [1985] Aperture survey of Western landscape photography featured the portfolios of eleven men, NASA (which may as well count as a twelfth!), and one woman, Marilyn Bridges. This past April, a major landscape exhibition tellingly titled “A Vision of Nature” was mounted by the Photography Department of The Art Institute of Chicago. The curator not only excluded women from his retrospective, but set up a dubious historical account promoting the genius of the six masters represented — Adams (A.), Porter, Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, and White. No less than Marlboro Country, American landscape photography remains a reified masculine outpost — a wilderness of the mind.
Some women landscape photographers, such as Linda Connor, have protested the exclusion of women from the canon, but instead of challenging the structures of canon-formation per se, they offer what amounts to an essentialist theory of women’s landscape imagery, one that posits a more intimate, emotional response to Nature because women somehow have more affinity with It. According to Connor, women don’t possess the acquisitive, manipulative, territorial instincts of men, and this comes through in their pictures of landscape. Additionally, she asserts that women’s child-bearing capacity “makes an enormous difference” in how they perceive themselves and their relationship to the world, although she doesn’t reveal any specifics.³³
Ironically, this construction appeals to an old, pan-cultural assumption that has been used throughout history to devalue women and their cultural production. It holds that because a woman is more involved with the “natural” functions of reproduction and nurture, she is ‘’closer to nature” than men. The insidious corollary to this posits that the male’s lack of such “natural” creativity causes him to create “artificially” through the mediums of technology and symbols. Consequently, maleness and male activities arc more highly valued (and this is universally true) for their consciousness and artifice: men choose to interact with nature and bend it to their will while women simply are nature and cannot define themselves in opposition to it.
Feminist anthropologists such as Sherry B. Ortner have demonstrated how these constructions and their implications operate as universal givens for men and women in their perceptions of gender difference.³⁴ And psychologist Nancy Chodorow has argued convincingly that this notion of sexual difference is not innate; that it is inculcated within the structure of the family where gender roles are taught to children by both example and representation at many levels.³⁵ Rather than further perpetuating these restrictive notions about women’s special relationship to nature, feminist photographers might well use their work to subvert conventional masculine constructions of the wilderness and the Marlboro Man.³⁶ Merely supplementing the limited canonical notions of landscape photography with an-Other, equally limited and ahistorical, may have the short-term effect of populating the walls of “women’s spaces” with a certain easily identifiable style of work, but as was the case with the first phase of feminist painting in the early 70s, it will only serve to create new sexist stereotypes or entrench old ones more deeply.
Rather than accepting established art-historical models of landscape photography or looking for alternative, but equally universalized “norms” to replace them, it seems worthwhile to examine instead other disciplines such as urban planning, landscape architecture, and geography. In these disciplines, the environment is approached analytically; photographic evidence is used to make focused cultural statements. Such work, most notably the writings of geographer J.B. Jackson, has already exerted some influence within the photographic community, particularly in the Southwest, his base of operations. The inventive approaches of urban planners such as Kevin Lynch and Robert Venturi, who consider the city as primarily a visual space, or the probing essays of cultural geographer David Lowenthal on the significance of cultural memorials, or the extensive use of photographs and visual material by Grady Clay in his book Close Up: How to Read The American City — all of these can stimulate reflection on how the landscape is a human organization of space, an historical construction rather than an immutable essence.
Art photographers fear that in such ‘analytical’ approaches, the photograph might lose its primacy of place to a written text, should the two ever be joined. It seems as though part of the Faustian bargain to elevate photography to status of “art” has exacted a decree that written texts be forever banished from the vicinity of the visual image — that photographs present themselves in the same contentless depoliticized way as modernist paintings have embraced since the 1930s. Ironically, such concessions were instituted in the name of preserving “the integrity of the image,” the price being the integrity of history! As was pointed out earlier, recent art-historical scholarship has engaged in a wholesale effort to rid historical photographs of their historical functions (has ripped them out of the books and magazines) and presented them instead as autonomous works of art by original geniuses.³⁷
It follows, too, that most college-level art photography programs do not include theory³⁸ and history courses that would require students (1) to formulate coherent statements about what they are doing and why and (2) to write around their photograph(ing). Rather, the student is taught to conceive of him/herself as, in effect, a post-literate Eye that makes photographs “to see what things look like photographed,” to paraphrase modernism’s most-lionized master, the late Garry Winogrand. Small wonder, then, that most art photography teachers and students are unprepared for and hostile toward any methodology which demands accountability for what is being shown in their photographs in terms of discourses other than that of a disinterested formalism.
If we are to make photographs that raise questions or make assertions about what is in and around the picture, we must first be aware of what the ideological premises are that underlie our chosen mode(s) of representation. Such awareness will structure the aesthetic, editorial, and technical decisions that are made with the goal of communicating ideas in a provocative (and yes, creative!) way. As part of this program, a reassessment of the museum/gallery system is in order. Many artists have found it necessary to seek other venues for their work. Should the rare fate of “art fashionability” befall the photographer engaged in socially-committed work, s/he must be vigilant about protecting the work from being removed from its own history — from having its captions removed, its tape-recorder unplugged, or its sequence jumbled. It goes without saying that any issue-oriented work becomes transformed by history and loses its immediacy with time, but this is no justification for abandoning the work’s current cultural task to the first (or highest) bidder.
Landscape art is the last preserve of American myths about Nature, Culture, and Beauty. It is no accident that its resurgence in popular and highbrow art is taking place during a right-wing political period in which big business has virtually free rein over the social and physical environment. Photographs of the strong forms of a Chicago or Pittsburgh blast furnace say nothing about the tragedy of massive unemployment in the Rust Belt or the profit-motive of a corporation that rends the social fabric of a company town. How shocking would it be for U.S. Steel chairman David M. Roderick to have a Weston, a Sheeler, or a Plowden hanging on the wall of his corporate headquarters? Or Interior Secretary William Clark an Eliot Porter? The regrettable truth is that most “art-lovers” wouldn’t bat an eye, but instead congratulate the CEO and the Secretary on their good taste, their support of the arts — confident that art was doing its cultural work, “beautifying and elevating” our personal lives!
Landscape has been appropriated by our cultural establishment as “proof” of the timeless virtues of a Nature that transcends history — which is to say, collective human action. For most photographer-artists, landscape has been reduced to a locus for the experience of the isolated individual. In the words of Lewis Baltz:
the landscape … seems more a set of conditions, a location where things and events might transpire rather than a given thing or event in itself; an arena or circumstance within which an open set of possibilities might be induced to play themselves out.³⁹
But landscape needn’t serve either of these dominant constructions. If we are to redeem landscape photography from its narrow, self-reflexive project, why not openly question the assumptions about nature and culture that it has traditionally served and use our practice instead to criticize them? Landscape is not the open field of ideological neutrality that Baltz fancies it to be. Rather, it is an historical construction that can be viewed as a record of the material facts of our social reality and what we have made of them.
[The following exchange was published in Letters to the Editor, exposure 24:2 Summer 1986 pp 51–53]
To the Editor:
When I received the Winter issue I skimmed Deborah Bright’s essay, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry Into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography” (Exposure 23:4). I determined that it was serious enough to require careful scrutiny, and put it on my “read when there’s time” shelf. The time came and I read carefully.
I guess everyone is a little angry with Szarkowski. Yes, his taste is narrow and he has occupied the MOMA throne with that point of view for a very long time. Yes, he’s a formalist and most of us are tired of hearing about photography’s inherent characteristics. But I would hate to try to teach at the introductory level without The Photographer’s Eye. Formalism is not the decadent, aesthetic-experience-at-the-expense-of-humanity, male-oriented undertaking that many current critics would have us believe. Szarkowski’s analysis, like Greenberg’s, has simply been a fundamental process we have all had to go through before really coming to terms with our medium. Photography actually does function differently from other picturing systems and Szarkowski outlined, with great clarity, what some of the differences looked like and how we could understand them. That he does not seem able to clearly see past a position he established in the mid-sixties is a legitimate topic for criticism, but that was not the source of Bright’s comments.
It is obvious that, though she has had a full decade to do it, Bright has not taken the time to give New Topographics a careful reading. She writes:
… Jenkins blithely claims that while their photographs convey “substantial amounts of visual information,” they are intentionally about what is in front of the lens, which he defines as above all an aesthetic arrangement, having nothing to do with the cultural meaning of those references.
Please observe where the quotation marks end in the above excerpt. The rest of the statement is Bright’s. Here is the complete sentence from my essay:
The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion.
Further, when I wrote this, I was not referring to any of the photographers in the exhibition but to Ed Ruscha. I was pointing out that, while Rushca was, perhaps, a stylistic antecedent to the photographers in the show, he was too much a formalist for inclusion.
Bright went on to quote John Schott, again displaying her gross misreading of my text. I wrote and quoted as follows:
Ruscha’s pictures of gasoline stations are not about gasoline stations but about a set of aesthetic issues. John Schott summarized the position neatly: … they [Ruscha’ s pictures] are not statements about the world through art, they are statements about art through the world.
Bright lifted this quote as though it referred to the exhibition when, in fact, it was used to delineate a position specifically and critically excluded from New Topographics.
I am fully aware that, in her discussion of New Topographics, Bright’s purpose was to condemn it as a formalism. Formalism is nothing more than a platform upon which we stand to critically examine the internal structure of our activity; as Szarkowski said, to see “what photographs look like and why they look that way.” To suggest that formalism and modernism are: ( a) the same thing and, (b) obsolete (a rather popular critical position of late), is to suggest that we fully understand everything about our medium and our activity as artists. I hardly think we can afford to be so arrogant.
Finally, I would like to address Bright’s repeated admonitions to curators for their failure to include women in exhibitions and publications on landscape photography. The fact is that, until very recently, there have not been many women making landscape photographs. If there have, Bright does not mention them. It seems to me that Bright, as a feminist, could be asking much more relevant questions. Have women not had access to the landscape? Why not? The first part of Bright’s essay eloquently sets forth a view of the history of landscape imagery as a process of acquisition through picturing; an aggressive, imperialistic, masculine process. This was the beginning of an essay which could have been very much to the point. Alas.
William Jenkins, Arizona State University
Deborah Bright responds:
While it is understandable that William Jenkins should scrutinize with particular interest that part of my essay that dealt directly with The New Topographics, it was only one component of my much broader historical critique of American approaches to landscape in vernacular, as well as fine art, contexts. Nonetheless, it is true that in art photography The New Topographics has exerted enormous influence on a whole generation of landscape photographers and therefore it merits particular attention for the claims that have been made for it as well as for what it actually delivers. It is also true that I make no bones about my feminist historical perspective in addressing these issues. My writing, like my art, is time-bound and culture-bound, but this is hardly cause for indictment — it is the fate, the limitation, of all critics.
Yet most of the established writing about art photography makes no such acknowledgement of its interests, instead basing its practices on supposedly universal and unimpeachable truths about the essential nature of photographs and the uniqueness of photography as a medium. How photographs are produced and used culturally is presumed to belong to some other discourse entirely. As Jenkins’ introduction to The New Topographics catalog makes abundantly dear, the photographers themselves were united almost to a man in their refusal to recognize their own ideological biases in making the kinds of “documents” they did. However, if some future cultural historian tries to determine what collective assumptions structured these bodies of work made a decade ago by Nixon, Deal, Baltz, Adams, et al., it is likely that the culturally-dominant white, educated, middle-class liberal humanism (which some critics would link to the larger context of late twentieth century capitalism and others would ascribe to other combinations of historical factors) will emerge as an important “structure of feeling” (to use Raymond Williams’ term) in these pictures of pre-fab housing, industrial parks, and the auto-motivated sprawl of the New West. These commercial strips and housing developments are made esthetically respectable, an act which, as William Stott points out in relation to Walker Evans, is tantamount to granting these subjects “full respectability … so highly do we value ‘art.’ ” The inhabitants and social relations that produce these subjects are made invisible to us while the material culture is reified and presented as part of a new “natural” order with its own inherent beauty — a beauty quite different from (and more “objective” than) the old “scenic wonder” beauty in western landscape photography. This new order requires a sophisticated sensibility to appreciate it — one schooled in the detached ironies of Pop and Minimalist Art, not in social theory.
But cultural analysis is not what we get in the writing surrounding The New Topographics. Instead, we get endless discussions of individual style and art-historical precedents which link this work to the geneology of photo-historical tradition of individual genius — going back to Timothy O’Sullivan. The invocation of O’Sullivan and Ruscha signifies that we are in the precincts of art, not political or historical analysis. While it is true that John Schott was referring expressly to Ruscha in the quotation I cited, Jenkins’ assertion that The New Topographics photographers were doing something essentially different from Ruscha (i.e., making meaning beyond art meaning) is not supportable from the evidence of his text or the photographer’s work. To me, Nicholas Nixon’s cryptic catalog utterance summarizes the fundamental contradiction of The New Topographics mythos: “The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions concerning it.” First, we have to ask what Nixon means by the word “interesting.” But the more problematic premise is one brought up by Jenkins: the notion that photographs can be objective statements about “the world” that transcend the artist’s own frames of reference (opinions) as well as the material realities of photographic production at a given historical moment — the agendas of the mid ’70s art world, for example.
The fact that these photographers reject political responsibility for their photographs doesn’t “universalize” them, it merely grants viewers more freedom to interpret the photographs according to their own lights, or — and I think this is more insidious — allows any interests (corporate managers, culture czars, the government, the military) to use these photographs for purposes of their own. My position, like that of Martha Rosier, Allan Sekula, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, John Tagg, Jan Grover, and others, is that photographers must begin to take responsibility for their part in producing and invoking cultural meanings for their images. They must learn to “read” their work, not as the formalists do — to savor their structures as if they were internally sufficient — but as citizens in the world — to discover how photographs reinforce, oppose, or reconstruct our notions and assumptions about ourselves.
This does not strike me as a particularly “arrogant” agenda. To me, the greater arrogance has been the relentless and overwhelmingly successful reinforcement in photographic discourse (through curatorship, mainstream exhibitions, funding, publications, and particularly through photographic education) of the notion that artworks are not products of people, institutions, and technologies, but instead are artifacts of a “higher order,” universally given, and thus not subject to historical determinations, historical meanings.
Let me reiterate the point I made in my essay, which has been made more eloquently by others: it is precisely this liberal humanist, “universalist” attitude that has been used to explain away the absence of women and other marginalized groups from surveys of the medium. How hard did Jenkins search for women landscape photographers in 1975? The fact that these photographers were/ are obscure and difficult to locate does not relieve curators and critics of the responsibility to find us — though it does confirm our marginality on two counts. It is not women’s access to landscape that is the problem. Rather, it is women’s access to the means of cultural production that has been lacking.
Notes
1. I am referencing the work of Diane Arbus, Les Krims and Garry Winogrand, respectively, that was quite celebrated in the 1970s. See Susan Sontag’s classic text, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), for a contemporary humanist critique of the cool modernist gaze.
2. “Theory” refers to the diverse critical filters that may be used to analyze how a photograph or archive of photographs has meaning as a visual object and as a text. These filters are selectively applied to a given problem raised for the viewer/critic by the text/photograph at hand. Such filters can include a photograph’s historical, cultural, and economic contexts; its semiotic maps; its gendered, sexual, racial, and class coding; and its psychoanalytic inferences.
3. The inclusion of “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men” in Richard Bolton’s important collection The Contest of Meaning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) was key to its wide dissemination and impact.
4. J.B. Jackson, “Concluding with Landscapes,” Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 150.
5. John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 24.
6. D. W. Meinig, “Symbolic Landscapes,” The lnterpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, ed. D.W. Meinig, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 167.
7. Kenneth A. Erickson, “Ceremonial Landscapes of the American West,” Landscape 22: 1, p. 39.
8. Peter J. Schmitt. Back To Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 155. “ Ibid .. p. 148.
9. Ibid., p. 148
10. See Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 45: “It is the mechanical reproduction phase of sacralization that is most responsible for setting the tourist in motion on his journey to find the true object.”
11. Schmitt, op. cit., p. 150.
12. Schmitt, p. 151.
13. J.B. Jackson, “A Puritan Looks at Scenery,”’ Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. p. 63.
14. Frederick Turner, “Cultivating the American Garden.” Harpers. August 1985, p. 50.
15. J.B. Jackson, op. cit., p. 148.
16. Andy Grundbcrg, “Ansel Adams: the Politics of Natural Space” The New Criterion, November 1984, p. 150.
17. Jonathan Green, “Aperture in the Fifties: The Word and the Way,” American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), p. 71.
18. John Szarkowski. American Landscapes (New York: The Museum of Modem An, 1981), p. 7.
19. For a succinct summary of the systematic discrimination against women by the photography establishment, see Catherine Lord. “A Thorn is a Thorn is a Thorn.” Exposure 22:2, Summer 1984, p. 40.
20. William Jenkins, ‘’Introduction to The New Topographics,” reprinted in Reading Into Photography, ed. Tom Barrow et. al. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), p. 51.
21. Ibid., p.52
22. John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs (New York: The Museum of Modem Art. 1973), p. 52.
23. Jenkins. op. cit., p. 53.
24. Robert Venturi. Signs of life: Symbols in the American City (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution, 1976).
25. See Martha Rosier, “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience,” Exposure 17:1, Spring 1979, pp. 10–25. Reprinted and revised in Brian Wallis. ed., Art After Modernism (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 311–339. [Editor’s note- “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience” by Martha Rosler was re-published by Exposure simultaneously with the re-publishing of this article]
26. Robert Adams. Beauty in Photography (New York: Aperture, 1981), p. 66.
27. For a trenchant review of Our Lives and Our Children, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Exposure 22:3, Fall 1984. p. 53.
28. See Marx and Engels, The German Ideology. 3rd revised edition (Moscow: Progress Printers, 1976), pp. 68–69. For the ruling class “is compelled … to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”
29. Michelle Bogre, ‘Robert Freidus,” American Photographer, November 1984, p. 72.
30. See Gwendolyn Wright, Building The Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981). Also, Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981), and Re-designing the American Dream (New York: Norton, 1984).
31. Peter Beard comes to mind as a contemporary figure who literally combines the personae of great-white-hunter and great-white-photographer.
32. Landscape:Theory (New York: Lustrum Press, 1980).
33. Charles Desmarais, “Linda Connor,” CMP Bulletin, 2:2, 1983. p. 12.
34. Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Women, Culture and Society, ed. Rosaldo and Lamphere (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 1974), p. 67.
35. Nancy Chodorow. “Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” Women, Culture and Society, p. 43.
36. See Christopher L. Salter, “The Cowboy and the City: Urban Affection for Wilderness,” Landscape. 27:3. 1983, p. 43.
37. See Douglas Crimp. “The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject,’’ Parachute, No. 22 (Spring 1981), pp. 32–37. and Griselda Pollock. “Artists Mythologies and Media — Genius, Madness. and Art History, Screen. 21 :3 (1980).
38. As Simon Watney points out, in the average art photography program “’theory’ is almost… invariably understood as a technical category, covering the study of sensitometry, photo-chemistry. and so on.” Simon Watney, “Photography — Education — Theory,’’ Screen, January-February 1984, p. 67.
39. Lewis Baltz. “Landscape Problems.” Aperture, No. 98, Spring 1985.
