This research is my notes on reading the article Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men (Bright, 1985) which reflects on the portrayal of the landscape in that area.
Bright’s document is essentially written in three parts. Firstly, Bright sets out the historical context of landscape photography, beginning with Dutch landscape painters and progressing to the early parts of the 20th century. She uses this context to highlight the purpose to which landscape artwork was produced in those eras. Secondly, Bright discusses the way in which landscape artwork went on to change in nature as it has been used for different purposes within the art world, and lastly, Bright discusses the use of photography in a landscape context to assess how we view the world, specifically contrasting different approaches to the same subject.
The Setup
Bright begins by reflecting that at the time of writing, there has been a resurgence of interest in the landscape and questions why. She wonders if this is because landscape is a suitable antidote to the politics of the time, images that could evoke a feeling of a more stable, perhaps traditional, past. Bright thinks not.
She begins by reminding the reader of the origins of landscape art and in particular, Dutch landscape paintings that were then copied in style by English painters. These are the style of painting I researched early in this course in Exercise 1.3 and which were usually commissioned by land owners. Bright points out that even these paintings are carefully selected choices of a scene, that would exclude more down-to-earth issues of the time and instead portray a more romantic idealised setting, to satisfy the landowners of course. Citing more recent examples of American landscape images that have excluded major portions of its population, Bright reflects on the fact that therefore every landscape image is in some way a record of the culture at the time it was created. If one accepts this fact, then one can use images to ascertain what those cultural and political realities existed in a given era.
Thinking of the late nineteenth century, a period when the ‘wild west’ had been conquered, Bright reflects that the mood at the time was to portray that land as rugged and to emphasise the “red-blooded rigors of the pioneer life” that had solved the “Indian problem”. Thus the image she selects at this point in the paper is one of a cowboy wielding an axe to chop logs. One does not know where the image is taken but, as so many images are like this, along with western films, a viewer one makes the immediate association almost irrespectively of where it was actually captured. For me this interesting, the inclusion of symbology within an image is sufficient to ‘place’ that image in a certain geographic location all by itself.
Bright goes on to discuss the way that this land was brought into cities through the use of parks or nearby forests, creating an aestheticized version of the what the countryside was really like and governed by rules to keep everything in order. This was expanded even further with the creation of national parks across the country where people would visit to see sublime sights and scenic beauty, attributes more important to the visitors than the reality of a harsh wilderness.
The tourism industry and the railroads competed for the money of the tourists and photography became a key part of attracting visitors by showing prospective visitors just how sublime these parks were; fuelling a style of photography targeted at portraying the most beautiful or sublime scenes possible. Bright states “These views became the established “standards” against which all future visual records of these landscape-spectacles would be measured.” I think she is right, this remains the case as one only has to look at landscape images shown in popular press or consumer photography magazines to see this.
As time has moved on, this body of work remains and Bright comments that it has become a body of work that represents the “romantic dream of a pure unsullied wildness” whilst at the same time, this very landscape has become commodified. These pictures are used to drive tourism which drives camping fees, Trail passes and the like. It is quite a contradiction and reminds me of Ingrid Pollard’s work that highlights these contradictions.
Bright assess this body of work commenting that the dominant aesthetic of this landscape seen in galleries and the like is driven by the Precisionist movements perhaps best known through the work of Ansel Adams who combined technical accuracy with the portrayal of the sublime.
Formal Assessment
Bright switches to discussing Minor White’s method of assessing photography, itself an approach evolved from that of Stieglitz. These methods attempt to focus on expression and intent, and in doing so raise the concept of equivalence. White wrote “when a photograph functions as an Equivalent, the photograph is at once a record of something in front of the camera and simultaneously a spontaneous symbol. (A ‘spontaneous symbol’ is one which develops automatically to fill the need of the moment. A photograph of the bark of a tree, for example, may suddenly touch off a corresponding feeling of roughness of character within an individual.)” (White, 1963). Bright herself stating “For Minor White, Ansel Adams, and their generation of art photographers, intuition and expression were the central issues, not visual form.” (Bright, 1985). Here Bright is explicitly claiming that the way a photograph looks is no longer the primary concern. I personally feel that this may be going too far. I still think that the aesthetic of an image is in itself likely to trigger an emotional response and this must at least be congruent with any other intent from the photographer.
Bright moves on to discuss Szarkowski who evolved a formal vocabulary to assess or describe an image, very much establishing a theory of form. Bright summarily dismisses these theories stating “In addition to its patronizing tone, such writing sheds no light on the historical circumstances in which O’Sullivan’s photographs were produced.” (Ibid.) pointing out that, in the case of O’Sullivan, the images were produced for commercial reasons and were entirely driven by the needs of the companies that commissioned his images rather than any theory of form.
Bright further lambasts, “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.” (Ibid.) Bright goes on to reflect on the fact that Szarkowski achieved wider recognition through his position as a curator within MoMA where, of note, he curated American Landscapes which Bright criticises for its lack of gender diversity in the chosen photographers.
Bright moves on to discuss New Topographies organised by William Jenkins, in which the photographers “shun all the conventional forms of beauty and sentiment”. Personally, having reviewed in particular Stephen Shore and his Uncommon Places, I think this is going too far as I found the images rigourous in terms of their technical precision but I would not have said that all of the images shunned beauty although perhaps some of Baltz’s work, also part of that collection, may support the claim.
Whilst not agreeing with the premise herself, Bright discusses that this is indeed the claimed intent of the photographers, to present their images “without style” going so far as to state the images were all about what is in front of the lens and conveying that information rather than attempt to convey some sort of meaning. John Scott is cited to sum up this idea with the words “ it was not a matter of making statements “about the world through art,” but making “statements about art through the world.” (Jenkins, 1982:52). In a way, deliberately eschewing what might be considered beautiful in common society.
Bright is sceptical of this idea, instead believing that this attempt at social commentary is more to do with the way in which the images are presented than the images themselves. Bright discusses Shore’s work where the same pictures can be seen in this collection with the simple captions associated with this approach, a location and date (“West Avenue, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, l 974”) , but then in other collections with a fuller, more detailed, description providing commentary in its own right (“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”). I can see how the different presentations does change the way in which I look at the image. That said, I do not think that it lessens the image in any way, this is just different contexts and different purposes in my view, Bright herself does state that images themselves are open ended and therefore open to interpretation, polysemic in other words, and so why should they not be used for different purposes.
Our view of the world
Bright uses two different photographers who captured the same landscape to contrast different approaches of how one might comment on, or construct a view of, the world or the landscape before us.
John Phahl has captured images of power generation sites. These images are captured in a way that shows the landscape in an aesthetically beautiful way. Some scenes include the nuclear power station on Three Mile Island and so Bright raises the idea that this could be set up as a deliberate dissonance however she also notes that as some scenes include hydro electric, she thinks it is more likely to do with the potential of art sales to the corporations that run these sites.
In direct contrast Lisa Lewenz’s Three Mile Island calendar is deliberately created with a sense of irony in order to make political comment, a typical scene being shot from within the bedroom of a local home with a huge cooling tower visible through the window outside. There is no doubt as to dissonance or satire used here and this is furthered in the way that Lewenz distributed her material as cheap calendars, congruent with other tourist calendars, rather than as expensive artwork as used by Phahl.
I see quite a direct comparison between Lewenz’s work and that of Ingrid Pollard who similarly uses direct juxtaposition or contrasts to make her point and this is an approach I hope to gain inspiration from.
Bibliography
Bright, D., 1985. Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men. Exposure, [online] 23(4), pp.5-18. Available at: <https://medium.com/exposure-magazine/re-exposure-of-mother-nature-and-marlboro-men-201dc897fc6c> [Accessed 22 July 2021].
White, M., 1963. Equivalence: The Perennial Trend.” PSA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 7, 17–21, 1963. Available at <http://www.jnevins.com/whitereading.htm>
Jenkins, W., 1982. ‘’Introduction to The New Topographics,” reprinted in Reading Into Photography, ed. Tom Barrow et. al. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), p. 52