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Wilderness to wasteland in the photography of the American west

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10304310802570866

1469-3666

Rod Giblett,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

American landscape and wilderness photography has lived under the aegis of the aesthetic, and in particular under the sign of the sublime and the picturesque, for some time. Ansel Adams’ photographs of towering mountains and canyons are the obvious major expressions and exemplars of the sublime in photography. The sublime involves the formlessness of uplifting spectacles and produces feelings of awe and terror. By contrast, Carleton Watkins’s photographs of mountains reflected in still lakes express the picturesque in photography. The picturesque presents well-formed depictions of serene scenery and produces feelings of pleasure. Adams and Watkins reproduced from landscape painting the aesthetic categories of the sublime and picturesque with its capitalist politics of land use. Characterizing the work of these two photographers in these terms is not merely of taxonomic interest but has profound political import for the ways in which land and landscape are commodified. Whilst this tradition has been dominant, there have been some photographers who have deviated from it, such as Timothy O’Sullivan whose photography of chasms and fissures suggests the uncanny. This produces an anti- or counter-aesthetic of the uncanny in photography that threatens to engulf the capitalist enterprise in landscapes and lands that are not commodifiable. The uncanny has a vague form and is both fascinating and horrifying. The successors of all three photographers in the New Topographics and Atomic Photographers photograph wastelands across all three modes of the sublime, the picturesque and the uncanny (see Giblett 1996, chaps. 1, 2; 2004, chaps. 3, 4; 2006, 2007). Just as John Muir is ‘a monumental figure in the American conservation movement’ (Giblett 2004, 125), so for Weber (2002, 14) Adams is ‘a figure of towering stature in the history of photography’. He was what she goes on to call ‘America’s greatest landscape photographer of the twentieth century’. Besides sharing monumental status, Adams and Muir shared a common landscape aesthetic and conservation agenda, though there were some differences between them. Adams was a long-time member of the Sierra Club that Muir helped to found. The Sierra Club, for Solnit (2007, 235), ‘put the aesthetic to political use in a way no other environmental group had’. The Australian Wilderness Society followed suit with no regard for the politics of aesthetics (see Giblett 2007). Turnage (1990, 10) describes Adams in his introduction to a collection of Adams’ (1990) photographs of the American wilderness as ‘a kind of visual Muir’. This applies to Muir of the mountainous wilderness and not to Muir of the marsh and swamp wilderness. Weber (2002, 15) argues that Adams’ ‘underlying motivation’ for his Yosemite