The Old Toponymy and New Topography of Zion: Utah, Photography, and Daniel George's Series God to Go West
2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/26428652.90.3.04
ISSN2642-8652
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeology and Natural History
ResumoFrom 2017 to 2019 the photographer Daniel George traveled across the state of Utah exploring the rich connections between name and place. The result of this investigation, a photographic series titled God to Go West, represents a significant addition to the understanding and representation of this place once called Deseret. While George's series provides insight into the scriptural names, both Biblical and from LDS scripture, found across the Intermountain West, its most significant contribution is how it provides a much-needed photographic investigation into the “Mormon Landscape” and its ongoing evolution since the nineteenth century. By analyzing George's work throughout Utah, this essay situates the series within a photographic documentary tradition and explores what the photographs reveal about this distinctive place in the American West. Moreover, it investigates the aesthetic that the photographer employed in the documentation of this landscape that highlights more pedestrian elements yet strives to find visual passages of interest, irony, and even beauty. Ultimately, it seeks to offer insight into the deep connections and meanings that exist between place, name, and image.Utah place names are rich and varied, but for his study George limited his investigation to photographing landmarks and towns with biblical names or nomenclature derived from the distinctive scripture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Rather than pursuing commemorative names honoring early LDS church leaders like Brigham Young or George A. Smith, the namesakes of Brigham City and St. George, respectively, he chose to focus his attention on what are termed inspiration names or, as the historian Jared Farmer explained, “names that invoke the greatness of a place or celebrate the promise of a place.”1 These include names derived from scripture, either from the Bible or LDS scripture like the Book of Mormon or the Pearl of Great Price. To help him with his project he consulted maps, as well as John Van Cott's Utah Place Names (1990), a significant inventory that proved invaluable to George's research.2For two years he visited more than sixty sites across Utah, which not only enabled him to see how earlier citizens of Zion employed names but also to read these places and what they have become in the hundred and seventy years since the Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, came west (fig. 1). Through this process George encountered a multivalent landscape that formed, as he wrote, a “vital part of [the] individual and collective memory and identity” of the Intermountain West.3An investigation of place names is only one of the important results of George's project. Crafting a list of place names provided the parameters of the project and, as so often happens with good photographic projects, presented limitations that opened up new possibilities. “Creation within the strict limitations of the medium,” Ansel Adams once argued, “is the basic law of pure photography.”4 The pursuit of places with scriptural names brought him to locales not necessarily of his choosing and put the photographer into contact with a broad swath of the state, providing an opportunity to visually explore urban areas, small rural towns, and places that seem to exist in name only. For this series George needed to embrace chance, never knowing exactly what he would find once he arrived on site. It also took him to places that would not normally be photographed. He did not retrace the footsteps of earlier photographers like William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan as the Rephotographic Survey Project did in the late 1970s.5 Rather, by following place names he often worked in locales that did not have a significant photographic history. Furthermore, his travels offered a direct encounter with ever-changing landscapes, which he recorded through a distinctive style that adroitly balances documentary and art photography.Daniel George was born in Omaha and attended college in Idaho and Georgia. Prior to this series he had never lived in Utah, although he maintained deep ties to the state and its dominant culture. The photographer, like most Mormons, has connections to something or someone in Utah, yet he was leery of his work being typecast. “I didn't want to make religious art,” he insisted, “but I was interested in making art about my religion.”6 Being both insider and outsider, he was able to document a landscape that was both foreign and instinctively familiar. Together this enabled him to see and embrace the particular and peculiar elements of the state, while creating a portrait that resonates with the history and places of the Mormon world.For more than seventy-five years historians and geographers have labored to identify and categorize the distinctive elements of what is called “the Mormon Landscape.” Foremost among scholars are the geographers D. W. Meinig and Richard Francaviglia who outlined the characteristic markers of the Mormon West, including its wide streets, grid system, “Mormon” hay derricks, and exposed irrigation ditches running through towns and villages.7 Other, albeit less common, markers of this landscape are its distinctive Mormon names.8 Indeed, towns like Moroni, Manti, Nephi, and Enoch represent what Wallace Stegner called “the nomenclature of Mormondon” and are not found anywhere else.9 More recently scholars like Paul F. Starrs and Richard Jackson have continued to explore the ways in which the “Mormon cultural region” has evolved while remaining a distinctive entity in the American West.10Photographers have played an important role in documenting the “Mormon Landscape” and its changes. George's series links him with others like Dorothea Lange, who created a dynamic and extensive portrait of Mormon Utah during the Great Depression and again, in 1953 with her friend Ansel Adams, as part of their Three Mormon Towns collaboration.11 It also connects George to other contemporary photographers like Vicky Sambunaris, a keen observer of the state, and Steven B. Smith, a native of Utah who for two decades has insightfully documented the subtleties and contradictions of urban sprawl along the Wasatch Front and throughout southern Utah.12The sense of place has always played an important role in Mormon history. According to William Mulder, “While other millennialists set a time, the Mormons appointed a place.”13 Locations like Jackson County, Missouri, Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois, became their places of aspiration, hope, and refuge. Even before their mass migration to the West, Mormons envisioned a place that they could possess and where they could grow. According to early leader Parley Pratt, “We want a country where we have room to expand, and to put into requisition all our energies and the enterprise and talents of a numerous, and intelligent, and increasing people.”14 When Mormon pioneers began their westward journey they saw their actions in biblical terms and themselves as the new children of Israel in search of their new promised land.15 The prolonged drive of a people to the Great Basin was their exodus guided by Brigham Young, their “modern Moses.”16 Their epic migration, however, was also seen through the lens of their scripture, namely the Book of Mormon, which furthered their understanding that their land of promise would have to be created out of a “wilderness of . . . affliction.”17One of the key places in the process of Mormon expansion is Ensign Peak. More rocky hill than mountain peak, it is located along the foothills north of Salt Lake City. From its summit one can look south and take in the full length of the Salt Lake Valley. To the West one looks over the southern breadth of the Great Salt Lake and the first hints of the Western Desert. It is, both physically and spiritually, the epicenter of the Mormon West. It was here, two days after the arrival of the vanguard party, that a group Mormon elders including Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff hiked to its summit and placed a banner, or ensign, to the world. For them this was a fulfillment of the prophecy. The biblical prophet Isaiah wrote of lifting an “ensign on the mountains” that would call to all nations.18 The word ensign appears throughout the writings of Isaiah and was later adopted by the church and used across its platforms and activities.It was this name, or term, that lured George to this site (fig. 2). His photograph, taken with a large format camera near the last gentle push to the summit, shows the rocky trail leading to the large stone monument marking the place where more than a century “a banner was unfurled.”19 George's view does not place the peak in connection with the lofty mountains that surround it. Nor does he show the spectacular view from its summit. Rather, he shows a place void of romance, where, on any given night, a visitor is just as likely to find church youth groups on its summit as marijuana smoke wafting through the air. For early Latter-day Saints, Ensign Peak signaled their expansionist impulses to create a “refuge for the good”20 and to make the desert “blossom as the rose” through labor and divine assistance.21Naming formed an important part of the blossoming desert. “Church chronology,” Farmer wrote, runs “through a canonized set of place names: The Sacred Grove, Hill Cumorah, Kirtland, Independence, Hahn's Mill, Nauvoo, Carthage Jail, Winter Quarters, Emigration Canyon.” Yet, he argues, “sacred narrative-by-names advances to the Great Basin, then stops.”22 This is not entirely accurate. Once Mormons arrived in the West, the “narrative by name” only expanded, fanning out like a “starburst” across the Great Basin and creating a new and peculiar geography for a new Zion.23Few groups in American history employed the levers of manifest destiny more than the Latter-day Saints. They believed that they were a promised people given a divinely ordained promised land. Like other Americans, they believed that subduing the West was practically a “providential ordinance,” a religious act sanctioned by deity.24 When Mormons came to the West, they believed that it was virtually a blank spot on the map. In reality, the region was not void of place-names. Rather, a rich complex of Native names given by the Shoshone, Ute, Paiute, Navajo, and other Indigenous peoples were already connected to the land, and often brushed aside by newcomers. Spanish names from the distant echoes of a different colonialist past were also found.25 “There is a cultural imprint in naming,” photographer Mark Ruwedel observed. It is “an agent of imperialism,” and the “first thing conquering people do is rename all the places and redraw all the maps.”26 While some names remained, most did not, as Mormons enthusiastically employed an Adamic right in renaming their new home in the West.27 This was a place where they could construct a symbolic landscape of their own, newly won country.28 In their eyes, God had truly come west with them.The Mormon's lofty zeal to name, however, often encountered difficulties when applied to the land. Like other religious groups across the United States, Mormons saw nature as second scripture.29 And like any scriptural text, the landscape was filled with features both angelic and demonic. When the Latter-day Saints arrived, they found that their heaven-on-earth was more akin to a wilderness that was dark, gloomy, and nightmarish.30 Satan and his lair became the inspiration for places that Mormons could not use or explain.31 Thus, names like Devil's Slide, the Witches, Hell's Backbone, and Devil's Gate were common.32 Making the desert bloom was to be a struggle between good and evil. “We are pilgrims in a strange land, among strangers,” the pioneer Levi Savage recorded in his journal.33 Yet, this contact with a wild and savage West only sharpened Mormons’ connections to the divine. Soon they employed loftier names for their towns and geological features. LDS scripture gave these early settlers a “treasure-trove” of new names, and, as Van Cott noted, they applied biblical names as often or even more than other “tradition-bound” Christian communities.34 Through naming they found irresistible parallels with other sacred landscapes, especially Palestine, as reflected by the naming of the Jordan River and the dirt road to Jericho.35 It would possess, moreover, a dirt road to Jericho, which seems in George's photograph to be just as isolated and desolate as the one described in the New Testament (fig. 3).The road to Jericho began in Jerusalem, the symbolic center of Christianity. Mormons, too, as Francaviglia has pointed out, embraced “Jerusalem in both memory and imagination” and, more than most religions, strongly connected to it “as both a real and abstract place called ‘Zion.’”36 Nineteenth-century visitors to Salt Lake City like Sir Richard Burton were quick to mark it as the “New Jerusalem”—a “Latter-day Jerusalem” in the West.37 Almost as soon as they entered the Great Salt Lake Valley, however, the new settlers decided to give their capitol its more prosaic name.38 The earlier practice of applying pretentious names to their places had gotten Mormons in trouble in Missouri and elsewhere, which they did not want to repeat.39 As the desert began to yield fruits, however, they increasingly saw a promised land and named it accordingly.While names can cause friction, they can also create connections. Utah has its Jerusalem, just as Arkansas and New York have theirs. LDS settlers felt it important to connect with a larger Christian world even if the name Jerusalem was not given to its largest city. Rather, Jerusalem, Utah, is a small agricultural community located in the center of the state. No longer on official maps, the former town, as one resident noted, now consists of around six homes (four occupied) and ten denizens.40 The town exists, as George found, as little more than a name on a sign (fig. 4). It represents, however, yet another example of the desire to conflate, in the words of Francaviglia, “Mormon's Zion with its Old World inspiration.”41Utah's nomenclature also reflects an ongoing struggle. Not all of the names that George traced were given by early pioneers. Jerusalem, for example, was founded in 1871. Indeed, the process of naming Utah continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is especially true decades after 1847 when many Mormon communities zealously sought to create an even more consecrated Zion. Located six miles north of Cedar City, the town was originally called Elk Horn Spring and then Johnson's Ranch.42 Following skirmishes with local Native tribes it became Fort Johnson in 1854. Thirty years later it received the name of Enoch when local membership united to form a United Order that required them to have “all things in common,” following the pattern, it was believed, of Enoch's ancient people.43 The town eventually abandoned the United Order and, as George documented, embraced fences and private property as it grew (fig. 5). Even after Utahns struggled to gain statehood and the official practice of polygamy ended, place naming continued to be a way to maintain the state's unique character, as reflected on the state's current map.44George's photograph of Enoch, however, reveals another important element of this series. The view of a seemingly mundane location was made by careful design. Indeed, God to Go West reflects the sophistication and depth of an artist-photographer.45 At this stage in his career George's work may be characterized as “New Topographic”—a particular photographic style that seeks to capture the realities and complexities of place, especially in the “new” American West. The style coalesced in the highly influential exhibition “New Topographics and the Man-Altered Landscape,” which was curated by William Jenkins for the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in 1975. The exhibition featured a cadre of young photographers including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, and Frank Gohlke.46 Together they shared a different approach to landscape photography that was not interested in perpetuating an idealized view of the West but showed a region that was altered and even tarnished by habitation. Instead of pristine peaks and untrammeled nature, they photographed tract housing, pavement, and seemingly endless utility lines. Thus, they embraced a different view of the world than that of photographers like Ansel Adams and Elliott Porter, who projected a vision of western landscapes that was picturesque and pristine. Rebellious, New Topographic photographers even claimed to be “anti-Ansel.”47 These photographers were also influenced by nineteenth-century survey photographers like O'Sullivan who did not mask their presence or avoid signs of contemporary life in their work.48 The telephone lines, rulers, roads, and railroad tracks that appear in their work mirror details found in the same landscapes more than a century later.For those who have spent considerable time in the American West, however, the work of the New Topographic photographers should not come as a surprise. The West has always been a place of contradictions—a place where the real and ideal coexist. While their work may be closer to reality, it was not void of interest or form. Indeed, they embraced the incongruities and ironies present in the modern landscape and often found a subtle beauty in the New West.Within a few years the aesthetics of New Topographics became one of the most important and influential forces in landscape photography.49 Well into the twenty-first century it became a mainstay of university photography programs and was embraced by museums and galleries across the world. Yet, even as this style was applied to places all over the globe, an essential subject of this far-reaching style is still the American West where exploitation and encroachment are not easily hidden. It is a place of road trips and, seemingly, where vast regions are yet to be fully explored with a camera.50 While not exclusive, the West is still the center and the heart of New Topographics.George completed his bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University Idaho and a Master of Fine Arts from Savannah College in 2011. It was in college that he became enamored by the practice and potential of photography and decided to make it his career. Through his studies he was also introduced to the work of New Topographic photographers and taught to see and record the contradictions of the American landscape.51 A strong indebtedness to New Topographics is clearly evident in George's series and dominated his vision as he worked around the state.Although seemingly commonplace, George's photographs are not made at random. Rather they reflect a keen eye for organization and composition, as seen in George's photograph of Enoch's back yards. His elevated vantage point enables a detailed survey of this western place that is far more complex that it may appear. A central element of the composition is the riding mower that sits, lonely and still, in the foreground. Like everything else in the photograph, it maintains its form and holds its place. Raking shadows draw the viewer's eye to the left to a middle ground with a soccer net and trampoline and then to the distant street which link back to a series of interconnected fences and trees. Why can't a perfect picture be made of something prosaic? As Robert Adams posited, there is no such thing as simple space.52 Through George's lens, a real-world beauty can be found in back yards and vacant lots.53 This is especially true in locations like Enoch where a sense of order was central to the town planning and a Mormon ideal of how settlements should look and behave. It is also important to note how George made his photographs. Even as he uses similar tools—a large format camera and tripod—he does not make work that looks like mid-twentieth-century modernism; this is “definitely not Ansel Adams's high-contrast vision of the West.”54 Instead, George employs a full range of grayscale that treats everything within the photograph equally—a sort of visual democracy that does not privilege one object over another.God to Go West not only reflects the look of New Topographics, but it also employs its dead-pan humor. George was drawn to the town of Moroni, located just east of Jerusalem, because of its name derived from a Book of Mormon prophet. Like other Utah towns located in tranquil valleys, Moroni has a particular small-town charm. However, George's photograph does not present a view of picturesque mountains or photogenic fields (fig. 6). Rather, it presents a completely man-altered landscape of uniform lawns and property lines. Even in this “typical” view of a small Utah town, there is a delightful strangeness found in unexpected details like two lawn swans swimming along a chain-link fence paddling away from a painted saguaro cactus. This work, like the rest of George's series, requires viewers to be more circumspect of what an idealized landscape is, and what it leaves out.Although it was the pursuit of names that took George across Utah, he may be at his best when he employs New Topographic sensibilities to highlight the contradictions of particular places. In the various landscapes where he worked, he admits that one of the essential elements to his series is the pursuit of their “ironic relationships.”55 This pursuit is perfectly illustrated in his photograph of the idyllically named town of Eden. Few names are as bound to the notion of the idealized, perfected landscape as the Garden of Eden. When thrust out of Eden, Adam and Eve were resigned to a “real world” of thorns, thistles, and sorrow where they were to work and toil. Undoubtedly, they dreamt of their erstwhile garden, which became the embodiment of a perfect landscape—a place of beauty and harmony now only found in fragments.Early settlers were fortunate to end up in this Eden. Lush, green, and surrounded by mountains covered in scrub oak, Eden is located in Ogden Valley, one of the more idyllic valleys in Utah. An early surveyor suggested its name in the late 1850s.56 Over the next century and a half it began to move away from its agricultural past. A lot of the land is still farmed, but with the completion of Pineview Dam in 1937 and three ski resorts nearby, Eden increasingly became a recreational destination, a “quintessential western landscape.”57 Today it is filled with cabins and acts as a bedroom community for Ogden and other points along the Wasatch Front. These changes have come at a cost, as they have for places across the West where the “bargaining for Eden” continues.58 According to the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, “We lost Eden by staying in it, creating mines, timber mills, dams, highways, cities, suburbs, and parking lots.”59George knew that with a name like Eden it would be hard not to romanticize this site. As Deborah Bright pointed out, most photography in the “Ansel Adams/Sierra Club tradition” has been used to “convince us that Eden still exists.”60 Clearly not created using “a celebratory light,” George's photograph of Eden reveals another side of the community than the typically glossier depictions issued by the local chamber of commerce (fig. 7).61 Instead of snow or water skiers, it depicts a typical residence, a pile of refuse, and the ubiquitous utility pole that ties everything together visually with its wires. A sign protesting the always thorny issue of water rights suggests regional conflicts that are common to the West, and not, one can imagine, in the Garden of Eden.62 True to his aesthetic, George finds visual interest in the mundane. But it is the incompatibility of the photograph and the name that gives this work its power. It requires one to see, as George insists, “the incongruity of idealism and reality.”63 It forces viewers to contemplate what has actually happened to Eden.Once his work began, George continued to encounter contradictions across the state. Most scriptural place names originated during the pioneer settlement era when the state was primarily rural. Formerly rural places tend to retain scriptural names. Take the town of Lehi, located in Utah Valley and named after the Book of Mormon patriarch who lived a peripatetic life.64 When Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White visited Utah Valley in 1940, she found and photographed what she believed were typical American small towns.65 The once-rural farming community of Lehi has since become one of the fastest growing cities in the state and a center point of the state's tech industry, known as “Silicone Slopes.” Driving south along Interstate 15, past a disappearing “Point of the Mountain” that marks the boundary between the Salt Lake and Utah valleys, it is difficult to distinguish Lehi from the suburban sprawl of Bluffdale, American Fork, Lindon, and other cities. In the midst of this expanding suburban sprawl is Thanksgiving Point with its neon-clad water tower that greets a growing number of commuters. Built for local communities and tourists by Karen and Alan Ashton, the founder of WordPerfect, the site features a farm, gardens, and museums. During his investigation one of George's key pursuits was discovering the “distinct characteristics of [a] particular place.”66 In Lehi this took him from the city's traditional downtown to its new heart and center, Thanksgiving Point, which hugs the interstate. Instead of main street, he turned his camera toward the Museum of Ancient Life with the outline of a massive Tyrannosaurus Rex stretching across its façade (fig. 8). The art critic Lucy Lippard observed that the “ever-metastasizing metropolitan West is full of contradictions and geographical ironies.”67 This is certainly true in a place where a dinosaur and a Book of Mormon prophet can conceivably share the same space.68There are few words as distinctive to the Mormon West as “deseret.” The term, meaning “honeybee,” comes from the Book of Mormon (Ether 2:3) and was adopted by Brigham Young as the name of the 1849 proposed “State of Deseret.”69 Although Congress did not accept “deseret” as a place name, Utah became known as the “Beehive State” and its state motto became “Industry.” Traditional corbelled beehives, moreover, are found on its flag, seal, and signage. Unofficially, stylized hives are found everywhere in Utah from places of business to “every conceivable interior-decoration.”70As part of his investigation George traveled to Deseret, a small community located in western Utah and next to a place called Oasis (fig. 9). Founded in 1860 the town took its name from Fort Deseret, once a lonely adobe outpost in the desert.71 The region has been a center of beekeeping since the early twentieth century when Nephi Miller recognized its potential. By 1920 Millard County beehives were producing more than 13,000 pounds of honey.72 Deseret, and nearby Delta, at the center of the honey and bee industry in Utah, are home of the Utah Beekeepers Association and several local families like the Stoddards who have been in the apiarian business for generations. In George's photograph several box hives are scattered among sagebrush in the expansive landscape of western Utah. These are not the traditional-looking beehives like the one found on the state's flag. Rather, they are modern Langstroth hives designed to be practical, efficient, and easily stacked for transportation. These hives belong to the Dutsons, who have maintained hives and produced honey since 1935. In keeping with modern apiarian practice, much of their business comes not through the collection of honey but by shipping hives across America to pollinate fruit and nut crops like California's massive almond industry, which requires hundreds of beekeepers to truck in millions of bees to pollinate their arboreal blossoms. In George's view of Deseret, hives are in a state of use and disuse. Some are broken up while others sit neatly stacked on palates awaiting transport. Once again, George shows the realities of Utah places and practices. Industry may be the state's motto, and the sleek, yellow beehive its symbol, but this is what the modern industry of “deseret” looks like.Some of the most important changes to the Mormon Landscape over the past seventy-five years have come through tourism. Indeed, Utah has become a popular destination for travelers across the world, with its national parks and wide-open spaces attracting millions of visitors each year. In 1945 the Utah Department of Publicity and Industrial Development excited (or maybe warned) Utahns: “Here they come! . . . The tourist vanguard is already over the horizon!”73 To meet demand highways and interstates opened up across the state, and with them came a new host of hotels, motels, and restaurants. For some locals tourism offered new sources of needed revenue and expanded opportunities. Others, however, lamented the “devil's bargain” that tourism presented to communities—economic benefits come at a cost.74 Commenting on how tourism was transforming southwestern Utah, Lange, in 1953, bemoaned: “St. George becomes a highway town . . . Raucous, paved, treeless, harsh competitor, garish imitator of all the others. Its history buried. Its tradition silenced.”75Possibly no place in Utah has been as transformed by tourism as Moab, a name of biblical origin that implies “the land beyond the Jordan.”76 Permanently settled in 1878, Moab remained a sleepy frontier town in Utah's southeastern corner until a uranium boom woke it up in the 1950s. After the boom went bust, the town looked to tourism to help its sagging economy. With its proximity to some of the most stunning red-rock landscapes in the world, including Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, Moab quickly became a major draw for hikers, dirt and mountain bikers, and what Edward Abbey sardonically labeled the “mechanized tourists” and “Wheelchair Explorers” who never ha
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