The Photographer and the American Landscape [antikvár]

Introduction After the Civil War, Americans turned again to the explora- tion of their continent, especially of the exciting and little- known West. One of the tools of their exploration was pho- tography, which was still new. The photographer-as-explorcr was a new kind of picture maker : part scientist, part reporter, and part artist. He was chal- lenged by a wild and incredible landscape, inaccessible to the anthropocentric tradition of landscape paintin g, and by a diffi- cult and refractory craft. He was protected from academic theories and artistic postures by his isolation, and by the diffi- culty of his labors. Simultaneously exploring a new subject and a new medium, he made new pictures, which were objective, non-anccdotal, and radically photographic. This work was the beginning of a continuing, inventive, in- digenous tradition, a tradition motivated by the desire to ex- plore and understand the natural site. The nineteenth century believed—as perhaps at bottom we still believe—that the photograph did not lie. The photogra- phers themselves, struggling to overcome the inherent distor- tions of their medium, knew that the claim, strictly speaking, was false; yet, with skill and patience and some luck the camera could be made to tell the truth, a kind of truth that seemed— rightly or not—to transcend personal opinion. What was new in the work of the frontier photographers grew in part from this faith that what a good photograph said was true, and that what was true was both relevant and interest- ing. It is difficult to imagine a painter of the period being satis- fied with a picture quite so starkly simple in concept and image as Timothy O'Sullivan's Soda Lake. But we are convinced that this is the way the place was. Sharing O'Sullivan's faith in the magic of the camera, we find the picture's emptiness eloquent; this minimal image hints of a new sense of scale between man and the earth. Mark Twain had crossed the same country six years ealicr, in t86r, and he saw a similar picture: ". . . there is not a sound—not a sigh—not a whisper—not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or a distant pipe of bird—not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air."1 Of the half-dozen photographers who worked with the Government Surveys (geographical and geological) of 1867 to 1879, T. H. O'Sullivan was perhaps the one with the purest, the most consistent, and the most inventive vision. Nevertheless, the general level of the Surveys' photography was remarkably high. With no academic authority looking over his shoulder, the photographer was free to give his camera its head, free to discover how it could see most clearly. At best, his solutions were original, functional, and uncomplicated by concern for artistic fashions. He was true to the essential character of his medium, and true also to the requirements of his job. His pri- mary aim was not to philosophize about nature, but to describe the terrain. The West was a place to span with railroads, to dig for gold and silver, to graze cattle, or perhaps sell groceries and whiskey. Occasionally—and remarkably—an especially ex- travagant sample of spectacular landscape would be set aside, sacrosanct, for the amazement of posterity, but this was neither the first function, nor the first interest, of the Surveys. The philosophical values of wild landscape had in fact only recently, and tentatively, been discovered. The picnic of the eighteenth century had been an intellectual amusement of the aristocracy—a symbolic paying of homage to the supposed virtues of Rousseau's Noble Savage—and it was held on the manicured lawns of formal gardens. The Romantic era dis- covered a wilder landscape, and made it an appropriate back- ground for the soliloquies of its poets, but its poets were by na- ture individualists escaping their fellows: the wilderness was of value only while they were alone there. The common man, who knew nature well as a constant and often cruel adversary, was not often captivated by her charm. Only after he had gained the upper hand, after the site had become something a little less