To what extent can landscape be considered a cultural construction?

James Smillie, Mount Shasta, 1872



Stephen Shore, U.S. 97, Mount Shasta, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon. July 21, 1973.




«Landscape is a subjective formation…an ideological concept. It represents a way on which certain classes of people have signified themselves and their world through their imagined relationship with nature, and through which they have underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with respect to external nature.»1




A ‘distinctly modern phenomenon’2, landscape as the subject of painting and photography should properly be seen as more than aesthetic, a modernist concept of form, the singular emanations of artistic genius, or the ‘pastoral salve to lull us back to some primordial sense of our own significance’3. Questions of ‘who owns or uses the spaces, how they were created and how they change’4 have increasingly become integral to critical analysis of use and representations of landscape, the early work of J. B. Jackson paving the way for close scrutiny of the ways in which culture has collectively constructed meaning5.




Photography, in both its ‘art’ and ‘vernacular’ contexts, has played a particularly important role the construction of the various meanings now embedded in the West American landscape, which reflect a search for the ‘American’ identity, essentially an extension of the conservative Christian and capitalist ideology that has characterised America since the New World settlers first arrived on its eastern shores.




This essay makes some observations on the innate verisimilitude of the photographic image as a partcularly suitable medium for conveying ideological messages, and using the examples of the deification of nature and the commoditisation of nature as experience, demonstrates that these have been assimilated into the dominant utilitarian ideology in America. Consideration is given to how these function symbolically and combine to form an American ‘identity’, before detailing some more recent American landscapes which seek to expose the complexly embedded ideologies.




The photograph and Utilitarian Origins of the American Myth of landscape




From America’s outset, a myth emerged, distilled through the protestant sensibilities of the New World settlers, of the American landscape as ‘lawless, unredeemed, or satanic’6, and reflected a ‘utilitarian bias’, an ideology that the wilderness was subservient to man, to be conquered, both in a commercial and moral sense. This utilitarianism remains the dominant ideology present in representations of the American landscape7.




Joel Snyder makes an important observation on the specifically mechanistic nature of the photograph and its ability to carry ideological messages. For Snyder, the shift in photographic practice from synthesis of a painterly pictorial aesthetic to ‘a highly glossed, glasslike surface that looked as if it had been machined on a production line…a technologically or industrially controlled mechanism’8 moves to naturalise Carleton Watkins’ statuesque images of Yosemite and the Pacific Coast within a specific representation of the American landscape as a harmonious co-existence of unspoiled scenery and rapid industrialisation. Watkins’ images were accepted as a ‘real’ visions of landscape, as themselves products of progress, conveniently failing to make reference to the ravaging of land, and the displacement of the native peoples, in the name of 'progress'. The railroad that passes through Cape Horn near Celilo, Oregan (1867) ‘disappear[s] into the land, without a trace…The appearance of the land is left undisturbed by the rails, unscarred, in its original condition’9. But his images are savvy to the pictorial traditions of painting, beautiful in the popular aesthetical (and commerical) sense. They are highly selective, and cannot be considered as separate from their intended audience – the growing ‘middle class...that allied itself with the culture of technological progress’ – who demanded pleasing, aesthetic (and photographically ‘real’) renderings of the harmonious morality of progress.






Carleton Watkins, Cape Horn near Celilo, Oregan (1867)

Deification of nature




Religious overtones are prevalent in representations of American landscape. The early writing of Timothy Dwight demonstrates the protestant appreciation for the natural beauty of the American landscape, ‘no matter how untamed’10. J. B. Jackson identifies the connection as ‘essentially religious’:

…he expresses an awareness of having glimpsed completeness, of having glimpsed the highest form of perfection [emphasis added]11




The inception and huge popularity of the national parks amply demonstrate this reverence:

…these landscapes were and still are truly ceremonial in nature, requiring both a code or personal conduct (park rules and regulations) as well as ritualised expressions of devotion (“pilgrimages” made on certain holidays and the compulsion to take snapshots of the conventional shrines of Nature).12

and this connection between God and ‘American’ nature complemented the advancement of the utilitarian ideology.




Tourism and commoditisation of the landscape as experience




After the frontier had ceased to exist, a new market for tourism rapidly grew in its place, fuelled by the commercial interests of the railroad and automotive industries, allied to the ‘Progressive Movement’s precept that the “nature experience” was a desirable antidote to the unhealthy urban life’13. Photography went hand in hand with the commercialisation of the ‘nature experience; playing the double role of promoting the landscape to the prospective visitors; and providing the mechanism, through personal snapshots and souvenir picture cards, for capturing the ‘memory’ of the visit:

They were not impressed by the 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 [emphasis added]14




Indeed, the ‘natural’ landscape was sculpted to provide an exact preconditioned experience. The automotive industry, so intrinsically part of America’s history, provided the incentive for the parks to construct new scenic roads, with ‘numbered scenic turnoffs, sited and designed to conform to conventional pictorial standards.

Nature was designed, we might say, for middle-class convenience and efficiency’15.






Unknown photographer, scenic view over the American West







Landscape and identity




The West American landscape has been used as a site for the construction of an American identity. A neat parallel can be drawn between the uses of landscape in painting in the Netherlands in the 17th century16, and representations of American landscape. Ann Jensen Adams draws attention to the historical, religious and political heritage of Holland, sketching a portrait of the Netherlands as a nation historically lacking a cultural figurehead; exhibiting widespread peasant land ownership (in contradistinction to the more prevalent European feudal model of land ownership); the importance of the extensive land reclamation projects, which through elaborate drainage systems brought hundreds of square miles of land into use; and the newly wealthy middle classes, early merchants and capitalists, enjoying new freedoms due to less control by the Church. Consequently, ‘when faced with the problem of the creation of a communal identity, the Dutch turned to their land’17. The paintings of Vermeer, van Ruisdael, Cuyp and van Goyen, symbolised a Dutch pride for the relationship they held with their land, from which they enjoyed a shared national identity. One can immediately see the connections with American attitudes to landscape: a near-deified reverence for the ‘wonders’ of 'American' sites/sights, representing something that could be claimed as uniquely ‘American’. Indeed Albert Bierstadt’s enormous canvases from the 1830s onwards were hailed (by Americans) as a ‘truly American Art’: the fact that the conventions and even subject matter of Bierstadt’s paintings belong to European traditions were neatly side-stepped in favour of fervour for a symbol within which a unique American identity could be constructed18.



Albert Bierstadt, Looking down Yosesmite Valley, 1865




For Jensen Adams, Dutch landscape painting was an entirely subjective medium, ‘a site for the working out, not of rural issues, but of urban ones’19. The important observation to make is that as a nation, based in relatively insular, nationalistic, conservative roots, America sought a collective symbolic representation through which could be mobilised the ‘intimidating social power, the virtual hegemony, exercised by the national faith in progress’20.21




Modern landscapes – Weston to New Topographics




The turn of the last century created interesting questions for the role of photography in representing the American landscape. The brief but influential American purist/precisionist movement in the 1920s and 1930s notably including Edward Weston, Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams is heavily implicated in the ideology in landscapes. Their work borrowed freely from the conventions of the picturesque and sublime, and of American Transcendentalist authors. As photographs, they adopted the acceptable and accessible fallacy that photographic images are democratic, transparent, visual experiences available to all. They reinforced the higher nature of the landscape as touched by God (and importantly, tamed by (American) man), and in doing so the ideological message of their forebears: the American landscape as rugged, powerful, awe inspiring, transcends its mere form, but an attainable vision, a commodity in itself and part of the tourist market for what it depicts. That their work was presented as high art is important. Weston and Adams’ work demonstrated that photographic representation, naturalising the myth of American identity, has achieved its complete cultural infiltration – from the highest echelons of the Art Institution, to the commonplace vernacular of the snapshot.




The New Topographics: Photographs of man altered landscapes exhibition, organised by William Jenkins in 1975 presented the American landscape by dispassionate, supposedly detached artists that ‘shun all the conventional norms of beauty and sentiment to which art and kitsch landscape photography appeal'22. These images of bleak damaged landscapes ‘returned a chill American gaze to the landscape, and in particular to the American West23, and in doing so began to speak against the prevailing American hegemony, both in broad political terms and in terms of the rhetoric that drenched photographic records of American landscape. These images have often been damagingly critiqued in line with Szarkowski’s influential analysis that the photograph 'describes everything but explaining nothing’24; but Deborah Bright usefully reminds us that although individual photographs ‘of themselves may explain nothing, the contexts in which they are produced, distributed, and consumed explain much about how we are to interpret them, including the knotty questions of their relationships to the subjects which they describe’25.




So these collected images present the American landscape not as a stage of the harmonious co-existence of man and nature in the mutual pursuit of the utilitarian dream, but rather as the reflective statement of the effect of man’s relationship with landscape. And the most eloquent of these images cleverly use or interrogate the historical conventions representation of landscape in order to expose these as mere conventions:




John Pfahl obliquely appropriated conventions of the “sublime” and the “beautiful” in his images of power stations in Power Places26 to comment on the polar extreme of the pastoral notion of peaceful coexistance, ‘the arena where the needs and ambitions of an ever-expanding population collide most forcefully with the finite resources of nature’27.






John Pfahl, Trojan Nuclear Plant, Columbia River, Oregon, October 1982




Ed Burtynsky’s body of work serves to catalogue in part the pinnacles of human ‘achievement’ and ‘progress’, for example mineral extraction works and huge oil tankers, but within a critical and reflective mode: the open cast mines striated and bare, all nature purged from the landscape; and the oil tankers at the end of their useful life, run aground and in the process of being dismantled by hand in developing countries.






Ed Burtynsky, Kennecott Copper Mine No. 22, Bingham Valley, Utah, 1983




Robert Adams’ work, accompanied by his prolific writing, attests to an oppositional political stance. His work, which presents the bleak, man-altered spaces of America, draws attention to the inconsistencies in the representation of land and nature as both harmonious to man’s existence; and the reality of man’s self-pronounced dominion over nature.






Robert Adams, Untitled, Denver, 1970-74




And Lisa Lewenz’ 1984: A View from Three Mile Island28 wittily appropriates the vernacular picture postcard / souvenir aesthetic by using a calendar format with images of the interior of houses in the vicinity of Three Mile Island nuclear power station, with the station present in the windows, in order to stimulate a debate about the place of nuclear power in society. The calendar includes various dates of nuclear-related events, like “Radioactive iodine released by Dreseden-2 reactor, Chicago, 1983”, ‘as daily reminders of the proximity of its frequently suppressed dangers’29, in order to open debates about power generation.




So we can see that from it’s earliest origins with New World settlers casting their conservative Christian gaze over the wild and untamed land, a dominant utilitarian ideology of 'progress' was constructed in American representations of landscape. Viewed as part of the search for a collective identity, this ideology utilised photography’s innate verisimilitude, in order to complete a top-down domination of the aesthetic and moral connection the average American had with the ‘American’ landscape, from the immensely popular images of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams; to the wholesale commoditisation of nature as acquirable (and tradable) experience. That these representations were on the face of it highly selective, and that a myriad of different permutations on the endlessly differing American landscape were present and seen on a daily basis by all Americans, is testament to the success of the naturalisation of the utilitarian ideology, and as an indicator of the importance of a nation’s desire to acquire a collective identity. Opposition to the ideology of progress came in the form of the dubiously objective, but certainly emotionally and commercially distant New Topographics exhibition, which developed a cogent argument for the ability of the photograph to re-consider it’s own role in constructing the prevalent ideology, and raised questions about the suitability of a rhetoric and ideology that places man at the centre of the landscape, as powerful, yet tautologically co-existent, over nature, without thought for consequence.







Bibliography




Jensen Adams, A, 'Competing communities in the “Great bog of Europe”: Identity and seventeenth century Dutch landscape painting', in Mitchell, W. T. J., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2002




Bright, D, 'Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An inquiry into the cultural meanings of landscape photography', in Bolton, R., (ed.), The contest of meaning, MIT Press, 1994




Buscombe, E, 'Inventing Monument Valley: Nineteenth century landcape photography and the Western film', in Petro, P, Fugitive Images, Indiana University Press, 1995




Hodgson, F., Primary Colours, Art Review (London, England) v. 2 no. 3 International Ed., March 2004, p. 44




Jackson, J. B., Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, 1984




Lewenz, L., quoted in Chris, C., Is the personal political? http://printedmatter.org/researchroom/essays/political.cfm




Marx, L., ‘The American Ideology of Space’, in Denatured Visions: Landscape and culture in the twentieth century (exh. Cat.), MOMA, New York, 1991




Pfahl, J., Power Places (artists statement), http://johnpfahl.com/pages/extras/ArtStatement.html#powerpalces




Snyder, J, 'Territorial Photography', in Mitchell, W. T. J., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2002

















1 Cosgrove, Social Formation; quoted in Jensen Adams, A, 'Competing communities in the “Great bog of Europe”: Identity and seventeenth century Dutch landscape painting', in Mitchell, W. T. J., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2002, p.66


2 Bright, D, 'Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An inquiry into the cultural meanings of landscape photography', in Bolton, R., (ed.), The contest of meaning, MIT Press, 1994, p.125


3 ibid., p.125


4 Jackson, J. B., Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, 1984, p.150


5 J. B. Jackson’s Discovering the Vernacular Landscape has been exceedingly influential in this more expansive analysis; indeed, most of the authors of the other sources in this essay refer to Jackson’s work as the precursor to their own.


6 Marx, L, ‘The American Ideology of Space’, in Denatured Visions: Landscape and culture in the twentieth century (exh. Cat.), MOMA, New York, 1991, p.64


7 Marx identifies two further, marginalised views of American space, the ‘primitivist’ – the conscious distancing of ‘the negative attributes of civilisation – political tyranny, economic oppression, war, injustice, constraint’; and the ‘pastoral’ – the conceptual reconciliation of nature and industrialisation; which have important roles to play in the development of the aesthetic attitudes towards American space, and more practically to the establishment of national parks, always are subservient to the dominant utilitarian model, through is it’s nationalist reformulation of ‘progress’, the ‘ideological support for the rapidly expanding capitalist economy’.


8 Snyder, J, 'Territorial Photography', in Mitchell, W. T. J., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2002, p.181


9 ibid., p.188


10 Jackson, J. B., Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, p.59


11 ibid., p.60


12 Bright, D., 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.127


13 ibid., p.126-7


14 Schmitt, P. J., Back to nature: the Arcadian myth in urban America, New York, OUP, 1969, p.155; quoted in Bright, D, p.127


15 Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.128


16 The taxonomic term ‘landscape’ itself derives from landskip and refers to a popular genre of painting from that time, characterised by earth-toned ‘dunescapes’ of pastoral scenes, ferry boats and the use of iconic historical landmarks. As a genre it was adopted and developed into ‘elaborate theoretical distinctions among beautiful, sublime, and picturesque landscapes and representations thereof’ by other European painters: Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.126, Marx, L, p.62


17 Jensen Adams, A, 'Competing communities in the “Great bog of Europe”', p.44


18 A second parallel between Dutch landscape painting practices and the American use of landscape is in the seemingly contradictory or perverse depictions of land unravaged by man, or of land in harmonious co-existence with industry. Perverse in the Dutch experience because although the commercial market for the painting was the newly rich merchant middle class, the imagery in demand was nostalgic in nature: outdated ferry boats were preferred to the modern shipping canal boats; quaint and improbably old farmsteads are placed within the dunescapes, with no reference to the systematised and uniform segmented appearance, caused by the drainage systems, of the actual landscape. And so perverse in the American representations for same reasons – the selective imagery, on the basis of commercial demand, was for a landscape in which man was master, or at least getting on with nature.


19 Jensen Adams, A, 'Competing communities in the “Great bog of Europe”', p.66


20 Marx, L, ‘The American Ideology of Space’, p.70


21 Interestingly, Edward Buscombe suggests that the noticeable shift in the settings for Western films from mountainous regions to the desert plains is due to the realisation that mountains were present in the visual imagery of other countries, especially Europe; the desert was a more specifically ‘American’ backdrop to the films. Whether you agree with this connection or not, it cannot be doubted that ‘the celebration of America’s natural wonders was held to be an eminently patriotic activity’; Buscombe, E, 'Inventing Monument Valley: Nineteenth century landcape photography and the Western film', in Petro, P, Fugitive Images, Indiana University Press, 1995, p.89


22 Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.131


23 Hodgson, F, Primary Colours, Art Review (London, England) v. 2 no. 3 International Ed., March 2004, p. 44


24 Szarkowski, J., Looking at Photographs, Kew York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1973, p. 72; quoted in Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.133


25 Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.133


26 discussed in Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.135-136


27 Pfahl, J., Power Places (artists statement), http://johnpfahl.com/pages/extras/ArtStatement.html#powerpalces








28 discussed in Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.136-137


29 Lewenz, L., quoted in Chris, C., Is the personal political? http://printedmatter.org/researchroom/essays/political.cfm




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