Adams, Baltz, Burtynsky: The Role of Landscape in North American Photography

Changes in the American landscape photography

Words by

Urs Stahel

© Ansel Adams | The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. (Wikimedia Commons)

Around 1970, photography, particularly in America, underwent a major transformation. The role of landscape in photography had begun to change radically. If we compare, for instance, The Tetons and the Snake River taken by Ansel Adams in 1942 in the Grand Teton National Park just south of Yellowstone National Park, with Tract Houses, Colorado Springs or Pikes Peak Park, Colorado Springs, both by Robert Adams, taken in 1968 and 1970 respectively, we instantly notice two or three striking differences. In the photograph by Ansel Adams, the mountain stands majestically in the centre of the image, commanding the perspectival vanishing point, while the river, in keeping with its name, seems to snake towards the viewer in the foreground. The image is dark and almost menacingly gloomy, with only occasional flashes of light appearing among the clouds above the mountain, and a glittering channel of water that seems to meander through the landscape like molten steel, breaking brightly through the shadows with a gleam such as black-and-white photography so ably captures. No trace of civilisation is visible in the picture. What we see spread out before us is evidently landscape at its purest – enhanced, at most, by the light, the aperture and shutter speed, and perhaps by a yellow or red filter – its romanticism dramatically heightened by subtle darkroom techniques.

The images created by Robert Adams are entirely different. They are not based on the principle of central perspective. Nor do they aim to create a centre that is filled, or even, for that matter, fulfilled. Instead, the houses sprawl unchecked into the background and seem almost to spill over the edges of the picture at both left and right. Unlike the work of Ansel Adams, these images are conspicuously, indeed almost glaringly, bright. We are not looking here at dark and dramatic atmospheric conditions in which the compositional approach and the play of light and shadow guide our mood and our emotions, but at a sunlit, brightly illuminated landscape in which the only contrast and visual structuring lies in the shadows cast by the houses themselves – the photographs having probably been taken around 4 or 5 in the afternoon. In contrast to the emptiness and solitude portrayed by Ansel Adams, what Robert Adams depicts, first and foremost, is civilisation. We find ourselves looking at a landscape and glimpsing a view of a natural world in which groups of houses or even entire settlements spread out across the plain, occupying it and taking over, as it were.

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We can well imagine how turning 180 degrees upon our own axis could shift the gaze away from pristine, unspoiled nature towards the ever-growing suburbs and the encroachment of the tract houses onto the plains. We can also see how this shift might trigger a sudden insight, and an awareness that the previously prevailing notion of nature in photography might not, or at least no longer, coincide with the actual reality of the American landscape. That same sudden insight, as it were, might even have been what turned an Ansel into a Robert, 25 years down the line. Yet this same abrupt transformation was also what inspired the work of Lewis Baltz, as well as that of Joe Deal, Henry Wessel jr., Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore and many others besides who we associate with the iconic 1975 New Topographics exhibition that has since come to be regarded as a veritable milestone in photographic history, even though few people took note of it at the time, and fewer still found it appealing. What took place in those years was truly a double reality shift; a leap of consciousness triggered by a crack in the mirror of reality and a corresponding breach in its perception. It was akin to scales falling from the eyes, first of the photographers themselves, and then, some time later, from the eyes of those who look at photographs. A paradigm shift. On reprising the exhibition at the Creative Center of Photography in Tuscon Arizona in 2009, Britt Salvesen noted how dry and unexciting some visitors had found this objective style of photography at the time.[1]

Ansel Adams was one of the last towering giants of a landscape photography that idealised and romanticised nature and whose images depicted far more than just nature itself, by portraying beauty, the sacred and even the godlike, as described by Estelle Jussim in Landscape as Photograph.[2] In their photographs, nature was transformed into a symbol. Around 1865, in a poem called Give me the Splendid Sun, included in his famous Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman wrote:

GIVE me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling;        

Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;

Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;

Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape;

Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching  content;

Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the  Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars; [3]

 

Whitman was the poetic voice of a movement that was embraced, each in their own way, by such photographers as Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Jackson in the nineteenth century and by Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Brett Weston in the twentieth century. What their photographs have in common is that they articulate a notion of the American landscape as Nature writ large: grandiose, unspoiled, beatific. Nature is idealised and stylised as the embodiment of the eternal, the enduring, the divine, challenged only by its own forces – sun, rain, snow and storm. Landscape thus becomes a natural body that is sacrosanct and pure, in contrast to the accursed besmirchment that is the urban body. With that, the psyche of the American subject created, as it were, a means of escape, a refuge in the primordial, a surrogate for the divine, envisioning godliness in the natural landscape and at the same time turning away from the gradual occupation and increasing exploitation of the land. Photography, that most fastidious instrument of truth, as it has so often been described, was deployed here not so much to reveal previously hidden truths, but rather as a form of realism that verified a poetic, pantheistic, conservationist – or even at its most extreme, political and ideological –form of whitewashing. These were symbolic exaltations sanctified by truth, because they were mechanically, technically, and chemically produced. The transcendence of any actual reality by and in photography is stated by Ansel Adams: “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”[4]

Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke and their ilk[5] took this ideal of an America that had so long been portrayed as rugged, empty, serenely beautiful and self-fulfilled, and they quite simply populated it. The heroic notion of Self and Nature was transformed into Us and our Public Park, and eventually morphed into Them and their Picket Fenced Gardens. Where once there was an unsullied haven of nature, there was now a row of suburban family homes, with cast-off car tyres and other debris scattered around as a sign indicating the presence of somebody who had already been there. Landscape thus became territory; bounded, defended, and above all occupied. Landscape became an economic entitity, to be conquered and commercialised. Lewis Baltz, in particular, turned the new image of landscape into the very antithesis of the traditionally romantic notion of nature and, in doing so, completely transformed the previously prevailing romanticism in the way images were perceived.

One notable apex in this re-appropriation of nature and landscape was the series shot by Lewis Baltz in Park City, in 1979. His detailed documentation of a huge building project that involved developing a garden city and commuter hub just 45 minutes from Salt Lake City on the polluted grounds of a former silver mining area, marked a high point in his astute and precise observations of landscape. Park City was a large-scale construction project that the developers hoped would turn an enormous profit. It was a project of the kind that Baltz described as no longer building for people, but aimed solely at maximising profits for the consortium. Over the course of two or three years, Baltz produced a portfolio of 102 photographs. It was a comprehensive and exacting visual research project, culminating in a series of small-format prints pinned to the wall documenting the construction of this gigantic hybrid in which marketing messages projecting a fictitious romantic landscape were merged with hard-nosed financial interests. Outwardly framed by supertotal views panning from the hills down towards the plain, the photos approach the camp of the modern age step by step, encircling it and capturing it according to a prepared and prescribed raster system that takes in first the material stocks, then, increasingly, the actual construction phases and, finally, the houses themselves, whereby the interiors of the gradually completed homes represent the inner promise of this complex intended as a luxury development. Baltz took on the challenge with all the precision of a surveyor, noting the location and viewpoint of each photograph, e.g.: Park Meadows, Subdivision 2, Lot 64, looking West. His photographs inside the buildings are charged with ambiguity. We can never quite discern whether they are being fitted out or dismantled, erected or demolished.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the predominant photographic attitude in art was one that sought to show things just as they were, warts and all, unromanticised, as neutral and objective as possible, viewed through an almost scientifically precise lens. These photographs have a deliberate air of cool detachment that eschews all human pathos and sentiment. Very much in the vein of conceptualism and structuralism, they chart structures and morphemes, exploring the typological and systematic properties of rampant urbanism, while at the same time demonstrating the geometric and economic exploitation of nature on a broad scale as an expansive functional landscape. This kind of photography could, potentially, invoke some of its predecessors of the 1920s and 1930s by referencing the works of, say, Eugène Atget, Albert Renger-Patzsch or Walker Evans. Only the times and the signs had changed. The landscape as a whole was transformed into a vast, finite periphery – from nature to periphery, from prairie to periphery – so that photography itself has increasingly become an instrument of research.

In the past two or three decades, rural and urban structures have been thoroughly shaken up once more. While the early twentieth century saw the emergence of a dynamically future-oriented vision of the city, the changes taking place today are even more fundamental. Following the conquest of space, came the conquest of time – summarised by Paul Virilio as “speed”[6] – and following the conquest of time came the dissolution of place. We are here, but we work for there, and we are all connected online. What first became possible with the advent of the telephone – communicating across locations – has now become an integral part of daily life, both private and professional, through mobile networking. The relationship between the centre and the periphery has slewed 180 degrees in the opposite direction. The centres are being decanted and repurposed, while the periphery has become central to the economy. Suddenly, the periphery is everywhere, reaching all the way to the deserts, the seas and the mountains. These are the new investment hubs and economic hotspots, cast adrift from long-developed historicity, tradition, meaning and symbolism to become purely functional. They are zoned, sold and used. The handling of landscape, the exploitation of nature, its economic usage and industrialisation, continue apace, radicalising at speed.

Once more, albeit from a different perspective: just as a cultural revolution swept through society in the 1960s and 1970s, today’s western industrial society is now in the throes of an ongoing high-tech revolution, in which new partnerships are forged. “It was not the production factors of labour and capital, nor the productivity of material and energy resources, nor even resource information as such, that were key to social and economic structural change, but the productive factors of knowledge and technology.”.[7] Society and the economy is changing even faster due to the development of information and communications technology, via the internet. The revolution in information technology has recalibrated the relationships between space and time, materials and data, starkly altering spatial and temporal connections in the post-industrial era.. “Past societies [...] were primarily space-bound or time-bound. They were held together by territorially-based political and bureaucratic authorities and/or by history and tradition. Industrialism confirmed space in the nation state while replacing the rhythms and tempo of nature with the pacing of machine. [...] The computer, the symbol of the information age, thinks in nanoseconds, in thousandths of microseconds. Its conjunction with the new communications technology thus brings in a radically new space-time framework for modern society.”[8]

It is into the reality of this new, radicalised world that Edward Burtynsky inserts his photography, as he has being doing for many years. In the meantime, we ourselves are changing the world we live in and the environment we inhabit, not just locally, but globally. We are impacting our natural resources with unprecedented intensity and speed in an era already labelled the Anthropocene. We are doing so according to the concept of an epoch shaped by humans, beginning with the 1800-1945 phase of industrialisation and followed by the great acceleration of the postwar era, then further compounded by a global population explosion in combination with widespread sealing of our landscapes through megacities, economic globalisation and the rise of an excessively consumerist society. There is now a growing awareness of the consequences of our impact on the global ecosystem.[9] Sahel Syndrome, Overexploitation Syndrome, Dustbowl Syndrome, Burnt Earth Syndrome, Aralsee Syndrome, Favela Syndrome, Disaster Syndrome, Smokestack Syndrome, Landfill Syndrome: these are just a few of the terms used to describe some of the typically undesirable side-effects and environmentally damaging patterns of the natural and civilisational trends that form part of the great shadow being cast by humankind over the face of the earth’s ecosystem.[10]

Like all contemporary photographers, Edward Burtynsky is up against the increasing invisibility and disappearance of essential elements, the interplay of cause and effect; cables, black boxes, data banks, abstractions. His strategy must necessarily diverge from that of the New Topographics. Both the idea and the reality of the man-altered landscape have now progressed so far that it is no longer possible to approach these problems by way of visual fieldwork alone. Instead, a symphonic visual world needs to be composed and presented in a way that will seduce and shock the viewers and jolt them into awareness, leaving them tormented by a guilty conscience. Burtynsky does this in several ways. For instance, he may elevate an image into the realms of heraldic syntax by documenting a theme visually while at the same time heightening it into a symbol. Often, Burtynsky will clamber into a helicopter, or fly a drone, in order to capture and show broad swathes of landscape from above, like some animated map that can render the increasing appropriation of nature. The landscapes in his photographs often look like rolled-out sheets of reptile skins onto which their human usage has been stamped or etched. We humans seem to plough over the skin of the earth, tattooing it and gradually, bit by bit, at times even explosively, throwing it out of kilter. Burtynsky counters this entwined network of ever more dense and constantly proliferating interventions into nature by means of the sheer power of his images and his focus on symmetries, circles, grids, and sharply drawn geometric lines. He unleashes a crescendo of colours and forms in large-scale images, which, together with the filmic input of Nick de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal – in their carefully chosen angles and cuts, combined with searing, compelling slow motion – present us with a visual array that is as potently impossible for the viewer to resist as it would be for the listener to resist Beethoven’s 5th symphony. He conjures visual worlds that meld inside with outside, here with there, the up-close with the beyond, churning up our thoughts and emotions. The effect is further heightened by starkly contrasting the wonders, origins and indescribable beauty of nature with the augmented reality (AR) technique of reconstituting a lost world, as in the images of burning elephant tusks that send a message of protests against poachers.

As before: all these events, influences, impacts, interventions, transformations and imprints are addressed in scientific and political discourse under the heading Anthropocene, by which we acknowledge that, following the Holocene era, we have now entered an epoch – albeit very recently in terms of overall time – in which humankind is changing the world and shaping it in ways that are accelerating the extinction of species, the pollution of the food chain with microplastics, and the radioactive contamination of substances and the air that we breathe, such that we are truly “consuming the planet to excess”[11] to an extent that was previously achieved only by geological phenomena occurring over the course of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

There is, however, one important caveat: it is not some value-neutral “humankind” that is pushing this exploitation and destruction. “Neither the individual nor humankind in general has become a geohistorical power, but very specific individuals who have inserted themselves into the social and economic structures of the OECD world and who have lumbered the entire world populace with a kind of guilt by association for problems such as climate change, which are, in truth, caused by a minority in the capitalist western world.”[12] The Anthropocene era, according to critics of the term, is a result of the actions of powerful protagonists in the global economy and politics of both “old” and “new” imperialism”.[13]

While the term itself may be debatable[14], the impact of human intervention is not. Photographic, artistic, literary and cultural works have become just as central to raising awareness and fostering discussion regarding this difficult situation as any statistics and reports. Nick de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky do incredibly important work in this field. Landscape may have lost its innocence and the sacredness ascribed to it, but on the other hand it is our own actions and exploitation that have overstepped all previously imaginable bounds.

Urs Stahel is a freelance writer, curator, lecturer and consultant. Curator of MAST – Manifattura di Arti, Sperimentazione e Tecnologia – in Bologna, consultant of the MAST collection of industrial photography, Advisor to Foto Colectania, Barcelona,and to the Collection of Art Vontobel, Zürich. He is the co-founder of Fotomuseum Winterthur and was its director and curator from 1993 to 2013. He lives and works in Zurich. Urs Stahel studied German Literature and Linguistics, History and Philosophy at the University of Zurich. 
Since 2013 he has worked independently as a curator, author, lecturer and consultant - as curator mainly for the Fondazione MAST in Bologna, for which he is also building up the collection of industrial and work related photography. 

 

The MAST Foundation is an international, cultural and philanthropic institution based on Technology, Art and Innovation.

notes
[1] Anthony Bannon, director of the George Eastman House until 2012, previously a filmmaker and journalist for Buffalo News, recalls having found the show uninspiring, as reported by Alison Nordström in her contribution to the history of the reception of New Topographics, in the exhibition catalogue issued by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona under the auspices of then director Britt Salvesen, and published by Steidl. Landscape photographer Mark Klett, who was enrolled at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester at the time, said that the photos seemed “intentionally boring” to him and that he did not like how the photographers detached themselves from their motifs in an apparently cold way. He considered that the show’s underlying concept of objectivity had not been achieved. See Britt Salvesen, New Topographics (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009)
[2] See Estelle Jussim/Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, Landscape as Photograph (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1985)
[3] Cited in Walt Whitman Archive at https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1867/poems/184
[4] In AB bookman's weekly: for the specialist book world (1985) Vol. 76, No. 19-27; p. 3326
[5] See: Britt Salvesen, New Topographics (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009)
[6] Paul Virlio, Speed and Politics, transl. Mark Polizotti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006). Originally published as Vitesse et Politique, (Paris:  Edition Galilee, 1977)
[7] Rolf Kreibich, Die Wissensgesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986)
[8] Krishan Kumar, From post-industrial to post-modern society. New theories of the contemporary world. (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005)
[9] Hans Gebhardt, “Das Anthropozän – zur Konjunktur eines Begriffs” in HDJBO 2016, Article 3, Vol. 1, p, 28
[10] Gebhardt, ibid., pp. 33- 34
[11] John Urry. “Consuming the Planet to Excess”, in Theory, Culture & Society (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi & Singapore: SAGE 2010), Vol. 27 (2–3) pp. 191–212
[12] Schwägerl, C. & Leinfelder, R. (2014), “Die menschengemachte Erde” in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 5 (2), pp. 233–240
[13] Harvey, D., The new imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003
[14] Diskussion des Begriffs siehe auch Jürgen Manemann: Kritik des Anthropozäns – Plädoyer für eine neue Humanökologie. Transcript, Bielefeld 2014. Manemann, Direktor des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, diskutiert darin das Verhältnis der Menschen zu ihrer Umwelt: „Der Mensch formt die Natur. Das ist der Kern der Anthropozän‑These.“ Er kritisiert die Extropianer und Transhumantisten, für die es gelte, die „Menschheit zu überwinden“, und formuliert, dass die gegenwärtigen Herausforderungen pragmatischer, praktischer, gar politisch greifbarer sein könne, dass wir der Welt demütiger begegnen sollten.

Adams, Baltz, Burtynsky: The Role of Landscape in North American Photography

Changes in the American landscape photography

Words by

Urs Stahel

Changes in the American landscape photography
© Ansel Adams | The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. (Wikimedia Commons)

Around 1970, photography, particularly in America, underwent a major transformation. The role of landscape in photography had begun to change radically. If we compare, for instance, The Tetons and the Snake River taken by Ansel Adams in 1942 in the Grand Teton National Park just south of Yellowstone National Park, with Tract Houses, Colorado Springs or Pikes Peak Park, Colorado Springs, both by Robert Adams, taken in 1968 and 1970 respectively, we instantly notice two or three striking differences. In the photograph by Ansel Adams, the mountain stands majestically in the centre of the image, commanding the perspectival vanishing point, while the river, in keeping with its name, seems to snake towards the viewer in the foreground. The image is dark and almost menacingly gloomy, with only occasional flashes of light appearing among the clouds above the mountain, and a glittering channel of water that seems to meander through the landscape like molten steel, breaking brightly through the shadows with a gleam such as black-and-white photography so ably captures. No trace of civilisation is visible in the picture. What we see spread out before us is evidently landscape at its purest – enhanced, at most, by the light, the aperture and shutter speed, and perhaps by a yellow or red filter – its romanticism dramatically heightened by subtle darkroom techniques.

The images created by Robert Adams are entirely different. They are not based on the principle of central perspective. Nor do they aim to create a centre that is filled, or even, for that matter, fulfilled. Instead, the houses sprawl unchecked into the background and seem almost to spill over the edges of the picture at both left and right. Unlike the work of Ansel Adams, these images are conspicuously, indeed almost glaringly, bright. We are not looking here at dark and dramatic atmospheric conditions in which the compositional approach and the play of light and shadow guide our mood and our emotions, but at a sunlit, brightly illuminated landscape in which the only contrast and visual structuring lies in the shadows cast by the houses themselves – the photographs having probably been taken around 4 or 5 in the afternoon. In contrast to the emptiness and solitude portrayed by Ansel Adams, what Robert Adams depicts, first and foremost, is civilisation. We find ourselves looking at a landscape and glimpsing a view of a natural world in which groups of houses or even entire settlements spread out across the plain, occupying it and taking over, as it were.

We can well imagine how turning 180 degrees upon our own axis could shift the gaze away from pristine, unspoiled nature towards the ever-growing suburbs and the encroachment of the tract houses onto the plains. We can also see how this shift might trigger a sudden insight, and an awareness that the previously prevailing notion of nature in photography might not, or at least no longer, coincide with the actual reality of the American landscape. That same sudden insight, as it were, might even have been what turned an Ansel into a Robert, 25 years down the line. Yet this same abrupt transformation was also what inspired the work of Lewis Baltz, as well as that of Joe Deal, Henry Wessel jr., Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore and many others besides who we associate with the iconic 1975 New Topographics exhibition that has since come to be regarded as a veritable milestone in photographic history, even though few people took note of it at the time, and fewer still found it appealing. What took place in those years was truly a double reality shift; a leap of consciousness triggered by a crack in the mirror of reality and a corresponding breach in its perception. It was akin to scales falling from the eyes, first of the photographers themselves, and then, some time later, from the eyes of those who look at photographs. A paradigm shift. On reprising the exhibition at the Creative Center of Photography in Tuscon Arizona in 2009, Britt Salvesen noted how dry and unexciting some visitors had found this objective style of photography at the time.[1]

Ansel Adams was one of the last towering giants of a landscape photography that idealised and romanticised nature and whose images depicted far more than just nature itself, by portraying beauty, the sacred and even the godlike, as described by Estelle Jussim in Landscape as Photograph.[2] In their photographs, nature was transformed into a symbol. Around 1865, in a poem called Give me the Splendid Sun, included in his famous Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman wrote:

GIVE me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling;        

Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;

Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;

Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape;

Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching  content;

Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the  Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars; [3]

 

Whitman was the poetic voice of a movement that was embraced, each in their own way, by such photographers as Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Jackson in the nineteenth century and by Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Brett Weston in the twentieth century. What their photographs have in common is that they articulate a notion of the American landscape as Nature writ large: grandiose, unspoiled, beatific. Nature is idealised and stylised as the embodiment of the eternal, the enduring, the divine, challenged only by its own forces – sun, rain, snow and storm. Landscape thus becomes a natural body that is sacrosanct and pure, in contrast to the accursed besmirchment that is the urban body. With that, the psyche of the American subject created, as it were, a means of escape, a refuge in the primordial, a surrogate for the divine, envisioning godliness in the natural landscape and at the same time turning away from the gradual occupation and increasing exploitation of the land. Photography, that most fastidious instrument of truth, as it has so often been described, was deployed here not so much to reveal previously hidden truths, but rather as a form of realism that verified a poetic, pantheistic, conservationist – or even at its most extreme, political and ideological –form of whitewashing. These were symbolic exaltations sanctified by truth, because they were mechanically, technically, and chemically produced. The transcendence of any actual reality by and in photography is stated by Ansel Adams: “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”[4]

Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke and their ilk[5] took this ideal of an America that had so long been portrayed as rugged, empty, serenely beautiful and self-fulfilled, and they quite simply populated it. The heroic notion of Self and Nature was transformed into Us and our Public Park, and eventually morphed into Them and their Picket Fenced Gardens. Where once there was an unsullied haven of nature, there was now a row of suburban family homes, with cast-off car tyres and other debris scattered around as a sign indicating the presence of somebody who had already been there. Landscape thus became territory; bounded, defended, and above all occupied. Landscape became an economic entitity, to be conquered and commercialised. Lewis Baltz, in particular, turned the new image of landscape into the very antithesis of the traditionally romantic notion of nature and, in doing so, completely transformed the previously prevailing romanticism in the way images were perceived.

One notable apex in this re-appropriation of nature and landscape was the series shot by Lewis Baltz in Park City, in 1979. His detailed documentation of a huge building project that involved developing a garden city and commuter hub just 45 minutes from Salt Lake City on the polluted grounds of a former silver mining area, marked a high point in his astute and precise observations of landscape. Park City was a large-scale construction project that the developers hoped would turn an enormous profit. It was a project of the kind that Baltz described as no longer building for people, but aimed solely at maximising profits for the consortium. Over the course of two or three years, Baltz produced a portfolio of 102 photographs. It was a comprehensive and exacting visual research project, culminating in a series of small-format prints pinned to the wall documenting the construction of this gigantic hybrid in which marketing messages projecting a fictitious romantic landscape were merged with hard-nosed financial interests. Outwardly framed by supertotal views panning from the hills down towards the plain, the photos approach the camp of the modern age step by step, encircling it and capturing it according to a prepared and prescribed raster system that takes in first the material stocks, then, increasingly, the actual construction phases and, finally, the houses themselves, whereby the interiors of the gradually completed homes represent the inner promise of this complex intended as a luxury development. Baltz took on the challenge with all the precision of a surveyor, noting the location and viewpoint of each photograph, e.g.: Park Meadows, Subdivision 2, Lot 64, looking West. His photographs inside the buildings are charged with ambiguity. We can never quite discern whether they are being fitted out or dismantled, erected or demolished.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the predominant photographic attitude in art was one that sought to show things just as they were, warts and all, unromanticised, as neutral and objective as possible, viewed through an almost scientifically precise lens. These photographs have a deliberate air of cool detachment that eschews all human pathos and sentiment. Very much in the vein of conceptualism and structuralism, they chart structures and morphemes, exploring the typological and systematic properties of rampant urbanism, while at the same time demonstrating the geometric and economic exploitation of nature on a broad scale as an expansive functional landscape. This kind of photography could, potentially, invoke some of its predecessors of the 1920s and 1930s by referencing the works of, say, Eugène Atget, Albert Renger-Patzsch or Walker Evans. Only the times and the signs had changed. The landscape as a whole was transformed into a vast, finite periphery – from nature to periphery, from prairie to periphery – so that photography itself has increasingly become an instrument of research.

In the past two or three decades, rural and urban structures have been thoroughly shaken up once more. While the early twentieth century saw the emergence of a dynamically future-oriented vision of the city, the changes taking place today are even more fundamental. Following the conquest of space, came the conquest of time – summarised by Paul Virilio as “speed”[6] – and following the conquest of time came the dissolution of place. We are here, but we work for there, and we are all connected online. What first became possible with the advent of the telephone – communicating across locations – has now become an integral part of daily life, both private and professional, through mobile networking. The relationship between the centre and the periphery has slewed 180 degrees in the opposite direction. The centres are being decanted and repurposed, while the periphery has become central to the economy. Suddenly, the periphery is everywhere, reaching all the way to the deserts, the seas and the mountains. These are the new investment hubs and economic hotspots, cast adrift from long-developed historicity, tradition, meaning and symbolism to become purely functional. They are zoned, sold and used. The handling of landscape, the exploitation of nature, its economic usage and industrialisation, continue apace, radicalising at speed.

Once more, albeit from a different perspective: just as a cultural revolution swept through society in the 1960s and 1970s, today’s western industrial society is now in the throes of an ongoing high-tech revolution, in which new partnerships are forged. “It was not the production factors of labour and capital, nor the productivity of material and energy resources, nor even resource information as such, that were key to social and economic structural change, but the productive factors of knowledge and technology.”.[7] Society and the economy is changing even faster due to the development of information and communications technology, via the internet. The revolution in information technology has recalibrated the relationships between space and time, materials and data, starkly altering spatial and temporal connections in the post-industrial era.. “Past societies [...] were primarily space-bound or time-bound. They were held together by territorially-based political and bureaucratic authorities and/or by history and tradition. Industrialism confirmed space in the nation state while replacing the rhythms and tempo of nature with the pacing of machine. [...] The computer, the symbol of the information age, thinks in nanoseconds, in thousandths of microseconds. Its conjunction with the new communications technology thus brings in a radically new space-time framework for modern society.”[8]

It is into the reality of this new, radicalised world that Edward Burtynsky inserts his photography, as he has being doing for many years. In the meantime, we ourselves are changing the world we live in and the environment we inhabit, not just locally, but globally. We are impacting our natural resources with unprecedented intensity and speed in an era already labelled the Anthropocene. We are doing so according to the concept of an epoch shaped by humans, beginning with the 1800-1945 phase of industrialisation and followed by the great acceleration of the postwar era, then further compounded by a global population explosion in combination with widespread sealing of our landscapes through megacities, economic globalisation and the rise of an excessively consumerist society. There is now a growing awareness of the consequences of our impact on the global ecosystem.[9] Sahel Syndrome, Overexploitation Syndrome, Dustbowl Syndrome, Burnt Earth Syndrome, Aralsee Syndrome, Favela Syndrome, Disaster Syndrome, Smokestack Syndrome, Landfill Syndrome: these are just a few of the terms used to describe some of the typically undesirable side-effects and environmentally damaging patterns of the natural and civilisational trends that form part of the great shadow being cast by humankind over the face of the earth’s ecosystem.[10]

Like all contemporary photographers, Edward Burtynsky is up against the increasing invisibility and disappearance of essential elements, the interplay of cause and effect; cables, black boxes, data banks, abstractions. His strategy must necessarily diverge from that of the New Topographics. Both the idea and the reality of the man-altered landscape have now progressed so far that it is no longer possible to approach these problems by way of visual fieldwork alone. Instead, a symphonic visual world needs to be composed and presented in a way that will seduce and shock the viewers and jolt them into awareness, leaving them tormented by a guilty conscience. Burtynsky does this in several ways. For instance, he may elevate an image into the realms of heraldic syntax by documenting a theme visually while at the same time heightening it into a symbol. Often, Burtynsky will clamber into a helicopter, or fly a drone, in order to capture and show broad swathes of landscape from above, like some animated map that can render the increasing appropriation of nature. The landscapes in his photographs often look like rolled-out sheets of reptile skins onto which their human usage has been stamped or etched. We humans seem to plough over the skin of the earth, tattooing it and gradually, bit by bit, at times even explosively, throwing it out of kilter. Burtynsky counters this entwined network of ever more dense and constantly proliferating interventions into nature by means of the sheer power of his images and his focus on symmetries, circles, grids, and sharply drawn geometric lines. He unleashes a crescendo of colours and forms in large-scale images, which, together with the filmic input of Nick de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal – in their carefully chosen angles and cuts, combined with searing, compelling slow motion – present us with a visual array that is as potently impossible for the viewer to resist as it would be for the listener to resist Beethoven’s 5th symphony. He conjures visual worlds that meld inside with outside, here with there, the up-close with the beyond, churning up our thoughts and emotions. The effect is further heightened by starkly contrasting the wonders, origins and indescribable beauty of nature with the augmented reality (AR) technique of reconstituting a lost world, as in the images of burning elephant tusks that send a message of protests against poachers.

As before: all these events, influences, impacts, interventions, transformations and imprints are addressed in scientific and political discourse under the heading Anthropocene, by which we acknowledge that, following the Holocene era, we have now entered an epoch – albeit very recently in terms of overall time – in which humankind is changing the world and shaping it in ways that are accelerating the extinction of species, the pollution of the food chain with microplastics, and the radioactive contamination of substances and the air that we breathe, such that we are truly “consuming the planet to excess”[11] to an extent that was previously achieved only by geological phenomena occurring over the course of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

There is, however, one important caveat: it is not some value-neutral “humankind” that is pushing this exploitation and destruction. “Neither the individual nor humankind in general has become a geohistorical power, but very specific individuals who have inserted themselves into the social and economic structures of the OECD world and who have lumbered the entire world populace with a kind of guilt by association for problems such as climate change, which are, in truth, caused by a minority in the capitalist western world.”[12] The Anthropocene era, according to critics of the term, is a result of the actions of powerful protagonists in the global economy and politics of both “old” and “new” imperialism”.[13]

While the term itself may be debatable[14], the impact of human intervention is not. Photographic, artistic, literary and cultural works have become just as central to raising awareness and fostering discussion regarding this difficult situation as any statistics and reports. Nick de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky do incredibly important work in this field. Landscape may have lost its innocence and the sacredness ascribed to it, but on the other hand it is our own actions and exploitation that have overstepped all previously imaginable bounds.

Urs Stahel is a freelance writer, curator, lecturer and consultant. Curator of MAST – Manifattura di Arti, Sperimentazione e Tecnologia – in Bologna, consultant of the MAST collection of industrial photography, Advisor to Foto Colectania, Barcelona,and to the Collection of Art Vontobel, Zürich. He is the co-founder of Fotomuseum Winterthur and was its director and curator from 1993 to 2013. He lives and works in Zurich. Urs Stahel studied German Literature and Linguistics, History and Philosophy at the University of Zurich. 
Since 2013 he has worked independently as a curator, author, lecturer and consultant - as curator mainly for the Fondazione MAST in Bologna, for which he is also building up the collection of industrial and work related photography. 

 

The MAST Foundation is an international, cultural and philanthropic institution based on Technology, Art and Innovation.

notes
[1] Anthony Bannon, director of the George Eastman House until 2012, previously a filmmaker and journalist for Buffalo News, recalls having found the show uninspiring, as reported by Alison Nordström in her contribution to the history of the reception of New Topographics, in the exhibition catalogue issued by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona under the auspices of then director Britt Salvesen, and published by Steidl. Landscape photographer Mark Klett, who was enrolled at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester at the time, said that the photos seemed “intentionally boring” to him and that he did not like how the photographers detached themselves from their motifs in an apparently cold way. He considered that the show’s underlying concept of objectivity had not been achieved. See Britt Salvesen, New Topographics (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009)
[2] See Estelle Jussim/Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, Landscape as Photograph (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1985)
[3] Cited in Walt Whitman Archive at https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1867/poems/184
[4] In AB bookman's weekly: for the specialist book world (1985) Vol. 76, No. 19-27; p. 3326
[5] See: Britt Salvesen, New Topographics (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009)
[6] Paul Virlio, Speed and Politics, transl. Mark Polizotti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006). Originally published as Vitesse et Politique, (Paris:  Edition Galilee, 1977)
[7] Rolf Kreibich, Die Wissensgesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986)
[8] Krishan Kumar, From post-industrial to post-modern society. New theories of the contemporary world. (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005)
[9] Hans Gebhardt, “Das Anthropozän – zur Konjunktur eines Begriffs” in HDJBO 2016, Article 3, Vol. 1, p, 28
[10] Gebhardt, ibid., pp. 33- 34
[11] John Urry. “Consuming the Planet to Excess”, in Theory, Culture & Society (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi & Singapore: SAGE 2010), Vol. 27 (2–3) pp. 191–212
[12] Schwägerl, C. & Leinfelder, R. (2014), “Die menschengemachte Erde” in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 5 (2), pp. 233–240
[13] Harvey, D., The new imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003
[14] Diskussion des Begriffs siehe auch Jürgen Manemann: Kritik des Anthropozäns – Plädoyer für eine neue Humanökologie. Transcript, Bielefeld 2014. Manemann, Direktor des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, diskutiert darin das Verhältnis der Menschen zu ihrer Umwelt: „Der Mensch formt die Natur. Das ist der Kern der Anthropozän‑These.“ Er kritisiert die Extropianer und Transhumantisten, für die es gelte, die „Menschheit zu überwinden“, und formuliert, dass die gegenwärtigen Herausforderungen pragmatischer, praktischer, gar politisch greifbarer sein könne, dass wir der Welt demütiger begegnen sollten.

Adams, Baltz, Burtynsky: The Role of Landscape in North American Photography

Changes in the American landscape photography

Words by

Urs Stahel

Adams, Baltz, Burtynsky: The Role of Landscape in North American Photography
© Ansel Adams | The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. (Wikimedia Commons)

Around 1970, photography, particularly in America, underwent a major transformation. The role of landscape in photography had begun to change radically. If we compare, for instance, The Tetons and the Snake River taken by Ansel Adams in 1942 in the Grand Teton National Park just south of Yellowstone National Park, with Tract Houses, Colorado Springs or Pikes Peak Park, Colorado Springs, both by Robert Adams, taken in 1968 and 1970 respectively, we instantly notice two or three striking differences. In the photograph by Ansel Adams, the mountain stands majestically in the centre of the image, commanding the perspectival vanishing point, while the river, in keeping with its name, seems to snake towards the viewer in the foreground. The image is dark and almost menacingly gloomy, with only occasional flashes of light appearing among the clouds above the mountain, and a glittering channel of water that seems to meander through the landscape like molten steel, breaking brightly through the shadows with a gleam such as black-and-white photography so ably captures. No trace of civilisation is visible in the picture. What we see spread out before us is evidently landscape at its purest – enhanced, at most, by the light, the aperture and shutter speed, and perhaps by a yellow or red filter – its romanticism dramatically heightened by subtle darkroom techniques.

The images created by Robert Adams are entirely different. They are not based on the principle of central perspective. Nor do they aim to create a centre that is filled, or even, for that matter, fulfilled. Instead, the houses sprawl unchecked into the background and seem almost to spill over the edges of the picture at both left and right. Unlike the work of Ansel Adams, these images are conspicuously, indeed almost glaringly, bright. We are not looking here at dark and dramatic atmospheric conditions in which the compositional approach and the play of light and shadow guide our mood and our emotions, but at a sunlit, brightly illuminated landscape in which the only contrast and visual structuring lies in the shadows cast by the houses themselves – the photographs having probably been taken around 4 or 5 in the afternoon. In contrast to the emptiness and solitude portrayed by Ansel Adams, what Robert Adams depicts, first and foremost, is civilisation. We find ourselves looking at a landscape and glimpsing a view of a natural world in which groups of houses or even entire settlements spread out across the plain, occupying it and taking over, as it were.

We can well imagine how turning 180 degrees upon our own axis could shift the gaze away from pristine, unspoiled nature towards the ever-growing suburbs and the encroachment of the tract houses onto the plains. We can also see how this shift might trigger a sudden insight, and an awareness that the previously prevailing notion of nature in photography might not, or at least no longer, coincide with the actual reality of the American landscape. That same sudden insight, as it were, might even have been what turned an Ansel into a Robert, 25 years down the line. Yet this same abrupt transformation was also what inspired the work of Lewis Baltz, as well as that of Joe Deal, Henry Wessel jr., Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore and many others besides who we associate with the iconic 1975 New Topographics exhibition that has since come to be regarded as a veritable milestone in photographic history, even though few people took note of it at the time, and fewer still found it appealing. What took place in those years was truly a double reality shift; a leap of consciousness triggered by a crack in the mirror of reality and a corresponding breach in its perception. It was akin to scales falling from the eyes, first of the photographers themselves, and then, some time later, from the eyes of those who look at photographs. A paradigm shift. On reprising the exhibition at the Creative Center of Photography in Tuscon Arizona in 2009, Britt Salvesen noted how dry and unexciting some visitors had found this objective style of photography at the time.[1]

Ansel Adams was one of the last towering giants of a landscape photography that idealised and romanticised nature and whose images depicted far more than just nature itself, by portraying beauty, the sacred and even the godlike, as described by Estelle Jussim in Landscape as Photograph.[2] In their photographs, nature was transformed into a symbol. Around 1865, in a poem called Give me the Splendid Sun, included in his famous Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman wrote:

GIVE me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling;        

Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;

Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;

Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape;

Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching  content;

Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the  Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars; [3]

 

Whitman was the poetic voice of a movement that was embraced, each in their own way, by such photographers as Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Jackson in the nineteenth century and by Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Brett Weston in the twentieth century. What their photographs have in common is that they articulate a notion of the American landscape as Nature writ large: grandiose, unspoiled, beatific. Nature is idealised and stylised as the embodiment of the eternal, the enduring, the divine, challenged only by its own forces – sun, rain, snow and storm. Landscape thus becomes a natural body that is sacrosanct and pure, in contrast to the accursed besmirchment that is the urban body. With that, the psyche of the American subject created, as it were, a means of escape, a refuge in the primordial, a surrogate for the divine, envisioning godliness in the natural landscape and at the same time turning away from the gradual occupation and increasing exploitation of the land. Photography, that most fastidious instrument of truth, as it has so often been described, was deployed here not so much to reveal previously hidden truths, but rather as a form of realism that verified a poetic, pantheistic, conservationist – or even at its most extreme, political and ideological –form of whitewashing. These were symbolic exaltations sanctified by truth, because they were mechanically, technically, and chemically produced. The transcendence of any actual reality by and in photography is stated by Ansel Adams: “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”[4]

Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke and their ilk[5] took this ideal of an America that had so long been portrayed as rugged, empty, serenely beautiful and self-fulfilled, and they quite simply populated it. The heroic notion of Self and Nature was transformed into Us and our Public Park, and eventually morphed into Them and their Picket Fenced Gardens. Where once there was an unsullied haven of nature, there was now a row of suburban family homes, with cast-off car tyres and other debris scattered around as a sign indicating the presence of somebody who had already been there. Landscape thus became territory; bounded, defended, and above all occupied. Landscape became an economic entitity, to be conquered and commercialised. Lewis Baltz, in particular, turned the new image of landscape into the very antithesis of the traditionally romantic notion of nature and, in doing so, completely transformed the previously prevailing romanticism in the way images were perceived.

One notable apex in this re-appropriation of nature and landscape was the series shot by Lewis Baltz in Park City, in 1979. His detailed documentation of a huge building project that involved developing a garden city and commuter hub just 45 minutes from Salt Lake City on the polluted grounds of a former silver mining area, marked a high point in his astute and precise observations of landscape. Park City was a large-scale construction project that the developers hoped would turn an enormous profit. It was a project of the kind that Baltz described as no longer building for people, but aimed solely at maximising profits for the consortium. Over the course of two or three years, Baltz produced a portfolio of 102 photographs. It was a comprehensive and exacting visual research project, culminating in a series of small-format prints pinned to the wall documenting the construction of this gigantic hybrid in which marketing messages projecting a fictitious romantic landscape were merged with hard-nosed financial interests. Outwardly framed by supertotal views panning from the hills down towards the plain, the photos approach the camp of the modern age step by step, encircling it and capturing it according to a prepared and prescribed raster system that takes in first the material stocks, then, increasingly, the actual construction phases and, finally, the houses themselves, whereby the interiors of the gradually completed homes represent the inner promise of this complex intended as a luxury development. Baltz took on the challenge with all the precision of a surveyor, noting the location and viewpoint of each photograph, e.g.: Park Meadows, Subdivision 2, Lot 64, looking West. His photographs inside the buildings are charged with ambiguity. We can never quite discern whether they are being fitted out or dismantled, erected or demolished.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the predominant photographic attitude in art was one that sought to show things just as they were, warts and all, unromanticised, as neutral and objective as possible, viewed through an almost scientifically precise lens. These photographs have a deliberate air of cool detachment that eschews all human pathos and sentiment. Very much in the vein of conceptualism and structuralism, they chart structures and morphemes, exploring the typological and systematic properties of rampant urbanism, while at the same time demonstrating the geometric and economic exploitation of nature on a broad scale as an expansive functional landscape. This kind of photography could, potentially, invoke some of its predecessors of the 1920s and 1930s by referencing the works of, say, Eugène Atget, Albert Renger-Patzsch or Walker Evans. Only the times and the signs had changed. The landscape as a whole was transformed into a vast, finite periphery – from nature to periphery, from prairie to periphery – so that photography itself has increasingly become an instrument of research.

In the past two or three decades, rural and urban structures have been thoroughly shaken up once more. While the early twentieth century saw the emergence of a dynamically future-oriented vision of the city, the changes taking place today are even more fundamental. Following the conquest of space, came the conquest of time – summarised by Paul Virilio as “speed”[6] – and following the conquest of time came the dissolution of place. We are here, but we work for there, and we are all connected online. What first became possible with the advent of the telephone – communicating across locations – has now become an integral part of daily life, both private and professional, through mobile networking. The relationship between the centre and the periphery has slewed 180 degrees in the opposite direction. The centres are being decanted and repurposed, while the periphery has become central to the economy. Suddenly, the periphery is everywhere, reaching all the way to the deserts, the seas and the mountains. These are the new investment hubs and economic hotspots, cast adrift from long-developed historicity, tradition, meaning and symbolism to become purely functional. They are zoned, sold and used. The handling of landscape, the exploitation of nature, its economic usage and industrialisation, continue apace, radicalising at speed.

Once more, albeit from a different perspective: just as a cultural revolution swept through society in the 1960s and 1970s, today’s western industrial society is now in the throes of an ongoing high-tech revolution, in which new partnerships are forged. “It was not the production factors of labour and capital, nor the productivity of material and energy resources, nor even resource information as such, that were key to social and economic structural change, but the productive factors of knowledge and technology.”.[7] Society and the economy is changing even faster due to the development of information and communications technology, via the internet. The revolution in information technology has recalibrated the relationships between space and time, materials and data, starkly altering spatial and temporal connections in the post-industrial era.. “Past societies [...] were primarily space-bound or time-bound. They were held together by territorially-based political and bureaucratic authorities and/or by history and tradition. Industrialism confirmed space in the nation state while replacing the rhythms and tempo of nature with the pacing of machine. [...] The computer, the symbol of the information age, thinks in nanoseconds, in thousandths of microseconds. Its conjunction with the new communications technology thus brings in a radically new space-time framework for modern society.”[8]

It is into the reality of this new, radicalised world that Edward Burtynsky inserts his photography, as he has being doing for many years. In the meantime, we ourselves are changing the world we live in and the environment we inhabit, not just locally, but globally. We are impacting our natural resources with unprecedented intensity and speed in an era already labelled the Anthropocene. We are doing so according to the concept of an epoch shaped by humans, beginning with the 1800-1945 phase of industrialisation and followed by the great acceleration of the postwar era, then further compounded by a global population explosion in combination with widespread sealing of our landscapes through megacities, economic globalisation and the rise of an excessively consumerist society. There is now a growing awareness of the consequences of our impact on the global ecosystem.[9] Sahel Syndrome, Overexploitation Syndrome, Dustbowl Syndrome, Burnt Earth Syndrome, Aralsee Syndrome, Favela Syndrome, Disaster Syndrome, Smokestack Syndrome, Landfill Syndrome: these are just a few of the terms used to describe some of the typically undesirable side-effects and environmentally damaging patterns of the natural and civilisational trends that form part of the great shadow being cast by humankind over the face of the earth’s ecosystem.[10]

Like all contemporary photographers, Edward Burtynsky is up against the increasing invisibility and disappearance of essential elements, the interplay of cause and effect; cables, black boxes, data banks, abstractions. His strategy must necessarily diverge from that of the New Topographics. Both the idea and the reality of the man-altered landscape have now progressed so far that it is no longer possible to approach these problems by way of visual fieldwork alone. Instead, a symphonic visual world needs to be composed and presented in a way that will seduce and shock the viewers and jolt them into awareness, leaving them tormented by a guilty conscience. Burtynsky does this in several ways. For instance, he may elevate an image into the realms of heraldic syntax by documenting a theme visually while at the same time heightening it into a symbol. Often, Burtynsky will clamber into a helicopter, or fly a drone, in order to capture and show broad swathes of landscape from above, like some animated map that can render the increasing appropriation of nature. The landscapes in his photographs often look like rolled-out sheets of reptile skins onto which their human usage has been stamped or etched. We humans seem to plough over the skin of the earth, tattooing it and gradually, bit by bit, at times even explosively, throwing it out of kilter. Burtynsky counters this entwined network of ever more dense and constantly proliferating interventions into nature by means of the sheer power of his images and his focus on symmetries, circles, grids, and sharply drawn geometric lines. He unleashes a crescendo of colours and forms in large-scale images, which, together with the filmic input of Nick de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal – in their carefully chosen angles and cuts, combined with searing, compelling slow motion – present us with a visual array that is as potently impossible for the viewer to resist as it would be for the listener to resist Beethoven’s 5th symphony. He conjures visual worlds that meld inside with outside, here with there, the up-close with the beyond, churning up our thoughts and emotions. The effect is further heightened by starkly contrasting the wonders, origins and indescribable beauty of nature with the augmented reality (AR) technique of reconstituting a lost world, as in the images of burning elephant tusks that send a message of protests against poachers.

As before: all these events, influences, impacts, interventions, transformations and imprints are addressed in scientific and political discourse under the heading Anthropocene, by which we acknowledge that, following the Holocene era, we have now entered an epoch – albeit very recently in terms of overall time – in which humankind is changing the world and shaping it in ways that are accelerating the extinction of species, the pollution of the food chain with microplastics, and the radioactive contamination of substances and the air that we breathe, such that we are truly “consuming the planet to excess”[11] to an extent that was previously achieved only by geological phenomena occurring over the course of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

There is, however, one important caveat: it is not some value-neutral “humankind” that is pushing this exploitation and destruction. “Neither the individual nor humankind in general has become a geohistorical power, but very specific individuals who have inserted themselves into the social and economic structures of the OECD world and who have lumbered the entire world populace with a kind of guilt by association for problems such as climate change, which are, in truth, caused by a minority in the capitalist western world.”[12] The Anthropocene era, according to critics of the term, is a result of the actions of powerful protagonists in the global economy and politics of both “old” and “new” imperialism”.[13]

While the term itself may be debatable[14], the impact of human intervention is not. Photographic, artistic, literary and cultural works have become just as central to raising awareness and fostering discussion regarding this difficult situation as any statistics and reports. Nick de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky do incredibly important work in this field. Landscape may have lost its innocence and the sacredness ascribed to it, but on the other hand it is our own actions and exploitation that have overstepped all previously imaginable bounds.

Urs Stahel is a freelance writer, curator, lecturer and consultant. Curator of MAST – Manifattura di Arti, Sperimentazione e Tecnologia – in Bologna, consultant of the MAST collection of industrial photography, Advisor to Foto Colectania, Barcelona,and to the Collection of Art Vontobel, Zürich. He is the co-founder of Fotomuseum Winterthur and was its director and curator from 1993 to 2013. He lives and works in Zurich. Urs Stahel studied German Literature and Linguistics, History and Philosophy at the University of Zurich. 
Since 2013 he has worked independently as a curator, author, lecturer and consultant - as curator mainly for the Fondazione MAST in Bologna, for which he is also building up the collection of industrial and work related photography. 

 

The MAST Foundation is an international, cultural and philanthropic institution based on Technology, Art and Innovation.

notes
[1] Anthony Bannon, director of the George Eastman House until 2012, previously a filmmaker and journalist for Buffalo News, recalls having found the show uninspiring, as reported by Alison Nordström in her contribution to the history of the reception of New Topographics, in the exhibition catalogue issued by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona under the auspices of then director Britt Salvesen, and published by Steidl. Landscape photographer Mark Klett, who was enrolled at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester at the time, said that the photos seemed “intentionally boring” to him and that he did not like how the photographers detached themselves from their motifs in an apparently cold way. He considered that the show’s underlying concept of objectivity had not been achieved. See Britt Salvesen, New Topographics (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009)
[2] See Estelle Jussim/Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, Landscape as Photograph (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1985)
[3] Cited in Walt Whitman Archive at https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1867/poems/184
[4] In AB bookman's weekly: for the specialist book world (1985) Vol. 76, No. 19-27; p. 3326
[5] See: Britt Salvesen, New Topographics (Göttingen: Steidl, 2009)
[6] Paul Virlio, Speed and Politics, transl. Mark Polizotti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006). Originally published as Vitesse et Politique, (Paris:  Edition Galilee, 1977)
[7] Rolf Kreibich, Die Wissensgesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986)
[8] Krishan Kumar, From post-industrial to post-modern society. New theories of the contemporary world. (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005)
[9] Hans Gebhardt, “Das Anthropozän – zur Konjunktur eines Begriffs” in HDJBO 2016, Article 3, Vol. 1, p, 28
[10] Gebhardt, ibid., pp. 33- 34
[11] John Urry. “Consuming the Planet to Excess”, in Theory, Culture & Society (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi & Singapore: SAGE 2010), Vol. 27 (2–3) pp. 191–212
[12] Schwägerl, C. & Leinfelder, R. (2014), “Die menschengemachte Erde” in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 5 (2), pp. 233–240
[13] Harvey, D., The new imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003
[14] Diskussion des Begriffs siehe auch Jürgen Manemann: Kritik des Anthropozäns – Plädoyer für eine neue Humanökologie. Transcript, Bielefeld 2014. Manemann, Direktor des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, diskutiert darin das Verhältnis der Menschen zu ihrer Umwelt: „Der Mensch formt die Natur. Das ist der Kern der Anthropozän‑These.“ Er kritisiert die Extropianer und Transhumantisten, für die es gelte, die „Menschheit zu überwinden“, und formuliert, dass die gegenwärtigen Herausforderungen pragmatischer, praktischer, gar politisch greifbarer sein könne, dass wir der Welt demütiger begegnen sollten.
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