There are at least two major discursive formations concerning the natural world. There is "Nature," which stands for a primordial force, a generative, creative energy: God as First Mover. Then there is `nature' denoting daisies, rocks, marshes, waterfalls, mountains, rainstorms: all specific phenomena including the flora and fauna of the world. Each con- cept interconnects with other fundamental philosophies which, taken together, constitute the reigning ideologies of an era. These ideologies compete for validation.
Estelle Jussim 1
Landscape has always been a subject compatible with the medium of photography. The medium distinguished itself early as an important chronicler of the American myth of the land. It could picture the land one struggled to reach and prepare for future generations, the land that promised a better life. The counterpart truth is too often forgotten: that land corrupts as well as inspires, that the burden of land ownership can soon interfere with earlier ideals. It is this recognition of the complex, paradoxical relationship between humankind and the land that has finally allowed artists the freedom to move forward.
Merry A. Foresta 2
Luther Smith photographs landscapes. This is not such a simple declaration as a simple declarative sentence may make it seem, for both photographs and landscapes are complex cultural constructions. To say that both photographs and landscapes are cultural constructions is to say that neither photographs nor landscapes are natural, that is, having their being independent of human agency. To say this would belabor the obvious, were it not for the common obviation of the constructedness of both photographs and landscapes. Yet to situate these (or any works) in the dualism of a dichotomy of nature versus culture is problematical, for nature as a concept itself is a cultural construction.
I shall first rehearse some of the some of the context of antecedent practices of representations of the landscape, in order to situate Luther Smith's photographs within a larger perspective. I shall then turn to some aspects of Smith's work itself. The matter of representation of the landscape is not simply a matter of technique, or of aesthetics, but is also a matter of responsibility. This is of some consequence for contemporary practice, to the consideration of which I shall return in the end.
Before terrain can be photographed as a landscape, it must be regarded as a landscape.
Before terrain can be regarded as landscape, the notion of landscape must be conceived. Conceived, for though we encounter the concept of landscape as a traditional category, it was not always thus pregiven though it is commonly taken as such, as Sir Kenneth Clark notes:
People who have given the matter no thought are apt to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity. 3
Petrarch's account 4 of his ascent of Mount Ventoux is evidence that the concept of landscape is not natural but rather a matter framed in the historicity of a cultural horizon: an old herdsman urges Petrarch not to ascend, having himself attempted the climb fifty years before and received only toil, torn clothing and repentance for his trouble; none before or since had attempted the climb. Having climbed this elevation of some 6,000 feet beyond Vaucluse in Provence, enjoying
the air and sunlight, the panorama of the topography from the distant Alps to the Rhône and the
Mediterranean at the bay of Marseilles, Petrarch opens at random 5 his copy of Augustine's Confessions, his eyes falling on the passage:
And men go about to wonder at the height of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not. 6This was sufficient remonstrance for Petrarch to immediately descend. For Petrarch and his contemporaries, poised between the medieval and the modern, landscape was an incipient category beyond the safety of the walled city, a region filled with dread and filling the mind with disturbing thoughts. As Stephen Jay Gould notes:
I see much fear in many medieval paintings. Walled cities are rich, familiar, and full of detail. The spaces between are bleak, empty, foreboding, full of danger. Even the rocks look hostile; vegetation is rendered without any loving detail, and includes, here and there, only a blob for a tree. Nature, evidently, was a realm to be traversed as quickly as possible in order to reach the safety of the next town . . . . 7To be sure, within this disturbing place, a precinct more congenial to the human might be located, a garden amid wildness, as the Avignon frescoes datable to 1343 demonstrate. 8 The garden, an ordered and cultivated space, defined in contrast to the undefined, cosmos in contrast to chaos, 9 is a space set apart from the surrounding terrain by human intervention. In the action of human agency in its construction, the garden is analogous to the city, set apart from the surrounding terrain by its enclosure within a spatial demarcation. Both garden and city are instances of an imago mundi: locus of habitation as microcosm. 10 The medieval city, like its ancient predecessors, was separated from surrounding nature by a wall. By the early Renaissance, Ambrogio Lorenzetti's The Effects of Good Government 1338-1340 fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, the first true landscape since ancient Rome, juxtaposes walled city and domesticated landscape; the prominent city wall separates city from a landscape no less ordered, if differently structured, than the city from which its governance emanates. Compare Smith's Mine, Houses, Auckland, New Zealand: the foreground drops away to a middle distance with an open pit mine on the left, separated as represented from the camera position by a wall of trees growing from the foreground slope from the houses arrayed in a semicircle on the right. A more densely built residential area is visible at he upper left corner, immediately beyond the mine excavation. Here, nature and industrial and residential development are intimately intermingled.
The gradual development of landscape as a genre entails both a shift in the conceptualization of the relation between the human and the environment and the development of a set of conventions of representation of that relationship. Landscape photography is the heir of the conventions developed in the representation of landscape in antecedent media. Indeed, as Estelle Jussim
and Elisabeth Lindquist-Cock note, the development of paper-based photography has its inception in William Henry Fox Talbot's failed attempt to draw, using a camera obscura and camera lucida, a picturesque Italian landscape seen from a mountain while on his honeymoon. 11
Realistic depictions, including photographic representations, entail a conceptual horizon in which both the maker and the viewer of the image deemed `realistic' locate in the image a commensurability with its referent. Thus Joel Snyder:
Realistic depiction is conceptually and historically based upon the adoption of a model that permits both picture maker and viewer to demand, and indeed, to find systematic relations between picture and object of depiction. But this "object" is not simply "the way the world is," "the way the world looks," nor even "the ways we use our vision," it is rather a standardized, or characterized, or defined notion of vision itself. 12The camera image is the result of the instrumentality of the camera as "corroboration of the schemata or rules invented by painters to make realistic pictures." 13 As Talbot's attempt to render the Italian landscape reminds us, the camera obscura and camera lucida was developed to aid in the facture of images conceived as 'realistic'. As with the camera obscura 14 and camera lucida, so the photographic camera. One of the developments of the photographic camera in service of the production of `realistic' images is the panoramic camera in its various permutations and manufactures. Given the horizontal disposition of human binocular vision and the angle subtended by the visual field, the panoramic format might seem simply a direct accommodation of the characteristics of the biological ground of sight. The matter is rather more complicated: the panoramic photograph transposes some but not all of the conventions of projective geometry of the panoramic format of landscape painting into another medium. This selective transposition has consequences of the representation of the landscape, inflecting the depiction of the space. Along with this basis in optics and the projective geometry of linear perspective 15 comes a set of conventions, all rendered seemingly unconventional by virtue of the indexical 16 character of the photographic image.
The photography of the landscape perdures through the history of the medium. Six years after the disclosure of the daguerreotype process in 1839, the Langenheim brothers produced a five panel photographic panorama of Niagara Falls; already a landscape where nature and industry
are juxtaposed. Through the nineteenth century, photographs of the landscape brought views of the land into the Victorian parlor and surveyed the land for geological surveys and developers of railroads, mining interests and real estate . In twentieth century modernist practice of photography, landscape was an available motif, not only in the popularized work of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, but in the work of Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Capanigro, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, and many others. 17 Whle the work of Ansel Adams exemplified a popular vision of nature as wilderness possessing a transcendent and redemptive beauty, a subsequent generation of photographers engaged the motif of the landscape as encompassing the traces of human presence. Particularly significant was the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a ManAltered Landscape at the International Museum of Photography. 18 The photographs of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilda Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Goelke, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, John Scott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel represent the landscape as consisting not only in a pristine absence of human presence, but in the telephone poles, tract houses, motels and malls and industrial sites with a seeming neutrality, in contrast to the epic magisterial technique of the modernist generation. The practice of the New Topographics group:
not only opened up the possibilities of a photographic critique of our culture's relationship to the environment, it also opened up a critique of landscape photography as well. 19Between 1977 and 1979, photographers Rick Dingus, Mark Klett and JoAnn Verburg, historian of photography Ellen Manchester, and mathematician Gordon Bushaw repeated more than 120 photographs by nineteenth century photographers of the landscape John Hillers, Alexander Gardner, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan and A. J. Russell. Making photographs as close as possible to their nineteenth century antecedents, the photographers of the Rephotographic Survey Project 20 manifested changes at the sites over the intervening century, but also the change in conceptualization of landscape photography as a practice. The reconceptualization of the practice of landscape photography is at once a loss of innocence and a grasp of complexity, a complexity that extends beyond the image to include attention to context and the rhetoric of representation. As Merry A. Foresta notes:
By the early 1980s it seemed unlikely that landscape photography could continue under the guise it had assumed for most of the twentieth century. . . . The methods introduced by the New Topographers and the RSP proposed aesthetic revelations that could sometimes reach beyond themselves toward areas of moral concern. The ordinary, simple act of describing the landscape suddenly became loaded with responsibility. 21
The majority of these photographs by Luther Smith entail placing the camera at an elevation relative to the landscape photographed; if less than Petrarch's Mount Ventoux, nevertheless the height of the camera in relation to the terrain is sufficient to open the ground plane to the survey of its extension in depth. While the depiction of depth often still employs overlapping planes (the principle means of depicting recession in Statue, Tree in Park, Auckland, New Zealand, and in Trees, Entry, North of Auckland, New Zealand), the elevated eye level in many of the photographs posits an implied position above the landscape. Like the verso of Matteo de' Pasti's portrait medallion of Leon Battista Alberti, the camera is posited as a flying eye. 22 Apart from the formal considerations entailed by the syntax of spatial description, the elevation of the camera engages a rhetoric of objectivity in which the landscape is posited as being over against the implied viewer, a distancing of object from implied subject, a trope of consciousness as overarching vision beholding and comprehending all it surveys. In this distancing, the elevated viewpoint reduces or eliminates the foreground from the frame. The viewer is thrust into and above the space of the terrain, as in Mount Eden, Auckland, New Zealand. Here, the immediate foreground falls away across a valley marked by grass covered depressions, to swell upward in the middle distance into a truncated, flat hill top, again with grass covered depressions. Are the depressions older open pit mines, now partly reclaimed by vegetation, or sites of early habitation, now an archeological site? From the intrinsic evidence of the photograph, the question is indeterminable: whatever has imposed this vestigial geometry on the sloping hillside is now a sweep of green, a truncated nature, beyond which the city lies in urban sprawl.
Where a vestigial foreground obtains, the reduced foreground acts as a proximal foil against which the more distal space recedes, as in Sheep, Pasture, South Island, New Zealand. The tops of tall grasses in the foreground just enter the image from the lower edge, a marker separating the location of the viewer from the landscape. A swelling of hillside steps back into the space, barely extending above the lower edge of the image; reiterated at a larger extension, the hill unfolds as a green expanse with sheep grazing. From the left of the lower edge, a fence extends back, intersecting a fence from the lower right corner running along the crest of the hill as represented from the camera position; the thrust of the latter fence is continued by a road running to the left beyond the hill, a visual integration ofnatural structure and cultural artifact. In the valley to the right, another herd of sheep graze; along the fences separating the pastures, more tall grasses grow and flower, beyond the reach of the sheep. The repetition with a diminution of scale of elements of the image proximally present both iterates the virtual distal extension of the image and connects proximal and distal regions. This relatedness also enables contrast: the ordered stepping back and down of the rolling terrain, subdivided into pastures by fencing, is a domesticated `nature' in contrast to the less hospitable nature of the steep, eroded hills in the background. Both regions are hills, both are parts of the whole of the same landscape, but in proximal domestication and distal wildness the two regions posit the human intervention in nature as presence and absence.
It is not a small matter whether one regards the human as within or apart from nature. That question is implicit in these works, where little is not transformed by human presence on the earth, even when the scale of human presence shrinks in the vastness of the landscape. Consider
Clearing Storm, Northland, New Zealand, where large electric transmission towers are dwarfed by the space they traverse, marked by a brightening sky at the left horizon, and a darkening sky at the right horizon.. Here, as in all of Smith's photographs of the landscape, the work is informed by a concern for the relations humans have with the earth: