The Machine in the Garden Revisited - In Depth

The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics

Early Photography and Nature

In 1839, photography emerged in the United States and quickly became a medium for discussing nature. Many believed the chemistry and apparatus of photography guaranteed its authority as scientific truth, while its expressive potential secured its prestige in the symbolic realm. This blend of optical truth and aesthetic pleasure made photographs useful for communicating values concerning human relations with the natural world. This study examines how photographic-image industries reflected and created changing models for viewing and understanding nature over 150 years. Questions to be addressed include: What nature imagery is most potent for public consumption? What ideological interests influence it? Which publics are being addressed and why? Do cultural elites reinforce or challenge dominant myths about human-nature relations? By tracing the parallel development of public nature consciousness and the production of marketable photographic imageries, dominant tendencies of North American nature photography can be seen within their broader social contexts.

Daguerreotypes and Industrial Culture

The rapid dissemination of Daguerrean technology in the United States before the Civil War allowed this commodity to be assimilated into the national middle-class consciousness. The daguerreotype and subsequent photographic media were ideal mechanical servants of a rationalized industrial culture, serving aesthetics, nationalism, medicine, criminal files, factory discipline, and other institutions of bourgeois culture. Influential American intellectuals praised the daguerreotype as a living revelation of nature itself, frozen under glass. The startlingly precise detail, heightened by the three-dimensional illusion of stereographic viewing, captured the imagination of the transcendentalists, who viewed the natural landscape as a sacred text created by God for individual interpretation. Transcendentalism combined Christian doctrines about the immanence of God in nature with Romanticism's emphasis on personal experience of the sublime. Nature was seen as a sign of divinity's awesome force and redemptive grace, available to all seekers.

Photography as a Machine in the Garden

The mid-nineteenth-century camera, like the locomotive, represented the triumph of scientific progress and was a key agent in generating images of nature and culture. Photography, like the locomotive, annihilated conventional understandings of space and time. It was a potent symbol of bourgeois progress, cloaking scientific realism in Romantic aesthetics, a marriage celebrated by American artist-photographers. In the context of nineteenth-century optimism about industrialization, photography embodied the laws of nature in human technology; nature and mechanism appeared to spring from the same divine principle. These meanings were understood to be inherent in the commodity the camera produced.

Shifting Conceptions of Wild Nature

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a radical shift in public conceptions of wild nature, coinciding with accelerating industrialization and the conquest of the continent. Rapid urbanization brought problems such as immigrant influx, a visible urban proletariat, stresses on the family, unpleasant city life, and the plundering of natural resources. The population shift from country to city was dramatic. In 1800, 5 million Americans lived in small towns or on farms, mostly east of the Appalachians, with only 7 percent living in cities. By 1900, 90 million Americans, including 30 million of non-Anglo descent, populated the continent, with 40 percent living in cities and only 37 percent farming. The Jeffersonian ideal of rural life had become irrelevant.

The Great West and the Closing Frontier

The prominence of the Great West in the national iconography of wild nature at the end of the nineteenth century indicated a sentiment that the frontier was closing. The 1890 census revealed that no vast tracts of land remained for conquest. Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis crystallized beliefs about the relationship of Anglo-Americans to the natural environment. Turner's frontier was free land settled by heroic white men who farmed, ranched, and established local folk democracies. The industrialized West of mines, railroads, grain elevators, boom towns, Indian reservations, Asian and Mexican immigrants, and institutions of commerce and finance was not included in this narrative. Eastern urban elites valued the West's natural environments more for their symbolic and spiritual meanings than for their economic potential or cultural diversity. Stereographs were central to producing a new spiritual imagery for leisure consumption.

Stereographs and Railroads

Stereographic-view companies vied for popular view series of the geologic West, particularly the railroad companies that wanted to advertise the scenic wonders of their routes to urban dwellers. Photographers like Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Jackson, Frank Haynes, and Charles Savage worked for the railroads. William Henry Jackson's views of Yellowstone's geothermal spectacles were instrumental in convincing Congress to create the first national park in 1872, powerfully backed by railroad interests that owned tourist concessions. Stereographs brought these views into middle-class American homes, offering the illusion of depth and detail. Tourists sought out the spectacular features they had seen in pictures: giant redwoods, geysers, canyons, mountains, and painted deserts. Scenery was commodified and sold to a mass public, its consumption a sign of leisure and status.

The Environmental Impact of Leisure Consumption

The popularity of leisure consumption began to take its toll. Nature was being loved to death. In 1908, 69,000 travelers visited the national parks; by 1921, annual attendance soared past one million. Automobiles revolutionized access. Alpinists, backpackers, and hikers began to pool their resources to protect their spiritual refuges. The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 in San Francisco to preserve the forests and features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. John Muir was elected its first president, and the Sierra Club became a major advocate for wilderness preservation, blending aesthetic taste and environmental politics.

American Art Photographers and New Valuations of Nature

Apart from the mass marketing of stereographs and postcards, how were American art photographers responding to the new valuations of nature? New York, particularly Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 and Camera Work magazine, was the center of aesthetic arbitration for U.S. art photographers. Stieglitz anointed Paul Strand as his exemplary progressive photographer. Strand spurned the painterly effects of fin de siècle pictorialism in favor of straight photography. Formally, Strand took cues from European Post-Impressionist styles, particularly Cubism. These photographers traded older rhetorics of pictorialism for hard-edged abstraction, simplified forms, and spatial ambiguity.

Photography as Mental Labor

Photographers understood photography to be mental labor. They saw the physical act of photographing as a personal, spiritual revelation in which camera placement, lens, filtration, format, film emulsion, and printing paper were intuitive and subjective. Borrowing from European Symbolism and Roger Fry and Clive Bell's theory of Significant Form, they saw the descriptive aspects of photographs as irrelevant, except as these illuminated the artist's feelings. These feelings were concentrated on the instant of exposure, when the decision to capture the majesty of the moment was realized.

Reaction to Ubiquitous Photography

Photographers seized on the act of releasing the shutter as the epiphanic instant as a reaction to the ubiquity of photographic technologies. The First World War and the defeat of Germany were a windfall for George Eastman, who appropriated German patents and opened up new areas of goods manufacture. Small roll-film cameras, such as the Leica, helped revolutionize photojournalism, fueling an appetite for photographs. The Symbolist bulwark thrown up by Stieglitz and Strand can be seen as a maneuver against mass culture and a rejection of certain painterly styles.

Legacies of Romantic and Symbolist Aesthetics

The legacies of Romantic and Symbolist aesthetics as reprocessed by Stieglitz and the straight photographers of the 1920s provide the context for representing the American environment and its social character. The importance of the rugged western wilderness as a locus for the sentiments of white, middle-class Americans around nationalistic and ethnocentric ideals cannot be overlooked. Edward Weston and Ansel Adams played an indispensable role as interpreters of a distinctively American natural, national landscape, popularizing the tenets of the New York avant-garde.

Weston and Adams: Interpreters of the American Landscape

Weston's doctrine of previsualization was rooted in the valorization of the moment of exposure as the essence of photographic genius. His tirades against Impressionist styles paralleled those of Stieglitz and Strand. Adams rationalized Weston's previsualization into a technical scheme for producing the desired range of negative densities: the zone system. The act of photographing became highly abstracted, detached from any content save its luminance. But both Weston and Adams spoke of the act of choosing tonal values as emotionally and spiritually guided, independent of the subject and therefore universalized and transcendent. Tones, shapes, and their arrangements were read as equivalents for the feelings the photographer had about life.

Conservationist Politics and Abstract Aesthetics

Such an abstract aesthetic was useful to emerging conservationist politics in California after the First World War. Dramatic images of the uninhabited wilderness drew on Progressive Era anxiety about the effects of overcivilization. Weston's preferences for simply composed images and the surface textures of natural forms constructed a world regulated by a dominating intellect, purified of contradictions. Adams took Muir as his model, seeking landscapes that put his zone system to the test: stormy skies, moonlit deserts, snowdrifts, and the sharp contrasts of light and shadow.

The Hetch Hetchy Valley Controversy

Enduring romantic ideals of the purity and sanctity of wild nature proved inadequate to the new political realities of the twentieth century. The fight to preserve the Hetch Hetchy Valley from damming galvanized wilderness preservationists. Muir framed the fight as a struggle between God and Mammon. But this drama collapsed before modern accounting methods, the cost-benefit analyses of resource managers, exemplified by Gifford Pinchot, who believed the needs of people outweighed the needs of nature. Preservationists met Pinchot's technocratic challenge by developing cost-benefit strategies of their own.

Wartime Propaganda and Postwar Nostalgia

The Second World War and the Cold War gave a renewed boost to the appeal of natural landscapes. Wartime propaganda emphasized the abundance of American life. Adams's landscape epics played well as a respite from images of the 1930s Dust Bowl and the horrors of Buchenwald and Hiroshima. The United States's new role as a global superpower found imagery in the nineteenth-century version of Manifest Destiny. In 1946 and 1948, Adams received Guggenheim Fellowships to photograph the national parks and monuments. Adams hoped his photographs would restore a lost experience of nature corrupted by postwar family tourism, with its car campers, parking lots, and trash dumps. His contempt for mass culture was shared by contemporaries, but his nostalgia for an organic society found resonance among environmental activists.

Aldo Leopold and Ecological Theory

Most historians credit Aldo Leopold with changing the ways Americans conceived their relationship to the environment. Leopold changed the emphasis in environmental politics from protecting wild nature for spiritual reasons to making it a matter of scientific necessity. His notions of an ecological conscience and a land ethic appealed to aestheticians and romantics, but his data gathering and micro-habitat study swayed bureaucrats. Leopold felt that the balance of nature could be damaged. Wilderness preservation was a matter of preserving the aboriginal biota. All living things were interdependent, and a new ethics was needed.

Photographic Expressions of Ecological Thinking

It was not until the early 1970s that photographic expressions emerged that reflected new thinking about the interrelations of nature and development. This lag can be explained by the appeal of the romantic wild nature aesthetic. The idealizations of Weston, Adams, and their imitators seemed sufficient.

The Sierra Club and Environmental Advocacy

The 1950s and 1960s were the testing ground for conservationism's muscle. Until 1950, the Sierra Club remained local, numbering only seven thousand members. But that year, it formed its first chapter outside California. By the early 1980s, it boasted an international membership of over one-half million. David R. Brower led media campaigns to bend public opinion, using articles, color motion pictures, and illustrated brochures. Brower inaugurated the Sierra Club's Exhibit Format series of wilderness advocacy books.

Pollution, Overpopulation, and the Counterculture

The 1960s also brought the dangers of pollution and overpopulation to public attention. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring demonstrated the pervasiveness of pollution by chemical pesticides. Carson's exposé provoked alarm among the middle classes. Another spur to public consciousness was the publication of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), a treatise on environmental damage being done by global overpopulation. These debates were affected by the counterculture movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Ecoradicals advocated a new land and consumption ethic. The attacks of Ralph Nader and his Raiders on corporate waste led to tougher manufacturing standards. Counter-culturists were the vanguardists of the new, middle-class ecological and health consciousness of the 1970s. This movement bore fruit in a demand for goods and services the corporate economy could not provide.

The Oil Crisis and Alternative Energy

The popularization of new consumer values and skepticism about growth was spurred in 1973 when OPEC raised the price of oil. Underpriced oil disappeared, sending the economy into recession. Fuel-efficient Japanese cars made gains in the American market, and Jimmy Carter was voted into the presidency in 1976, partially based on his alternative-energy agenda.

The New Topographics

In 1976, an exhibition was mounted at the George Eastman House by William Jenkins, who proposed that the photographers in his exhibition represented the American landscape in a radically new way, replacing Romantic and Symbolist styles with an impersonal objectivity. He labeled this work the New Topographics. This style was embraced as a model for environmentally concerned photography, although the photographers rejected any political agenda. These photographs were about the end of romantic nature and the blurring of the boundaries between the human and the natural.

Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz

The work of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz was influential on younger art photographers. While conserving an older preoccupation with formal technique, their approach to the complicated disorder of the scene was novel. Part of its appeal lay in the Surrealist pleasures of photographs. But the messages were not personal. In the context of Carson, Ehrlich, and Nader, these photographs were homilies on the dissonances of our modern environment. Nature is scarred by recreational vehicle tracks, carved by highways, and assaulted by resorts.

Dead Tech

In 1981, the Sierra Club published Dead Tech: A Guide to the Archaeology of Tomorrow, with photographs by Manfred Hamm. Hamm's photographs were organized by subject categories: military ruins, automobile graveyards, and abandoned steelworks. A polemical photographic essay on the costs of industrial waste, Dead Tech was more forthright than the work of the New Topographics photographers. But both projects turned the old nature story on its head. Those corruptions are inescapable, they declared; there is no longer any outside or inside. The photographs spoke for themselves.

The Sublime and the Spectacle of Our Fall

The photographers' refusal to pursue the implications of their work had consequences. Another reincarnation of an old poetics of the sublime began to make its presence felt. But this time it was the sublimity of the spectacle of our own fall.

The Conservative Backlash of the 1980s

The 1980s brought the conservative backlash against consumer movements and environmental regulation, epitomized in Reagan's elevation of James Watt. Watt set about dismantling political consensus on wilderness preservation, opening up public land to leases for mining, oil, and ranching interests, and turning the national parks into private-enterprise zones.

Environmental Disasters and Political Activism

The decade also brought coverage of environmental disasters. The scientific reports on acid rain, deforestation, ozone depletion, and global warming became a source of international concern. The resistance of the Reagan and Bush administrations to demands for pollution reduction made the United States an international pariah. The scandalous deals that rocked the Environmental Protection Agency under Reagan galvanized a new wave of political activism. This included broadened agendas among the established conservationist groups and new grass-roots direct-action groups.

Earth First! and Deep Ecology

These new groups tended to be anarchist and locally based, rejecting organizational hierarchies. No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth! was the motto of Earth First!, and many of the ecoradicals drew their philosophies from theories of deep ecology. Deep ecology drew on Eastern thought as well as Western precedents. Its guiding tenet was that humans are not the measure of the natural world, but are subordinate to its laws. Deep ecology positioned itself as a critique of Western philosophy; it rejected the idea of humans as morally different from other forms of life. Deep ecologists advocate biocentrism. Anthropocentric ideologies are seen as inimical to the harmony of all life.

Critiques of Deep Ecology

The dichotomy between biocentrism and anthropocentrism was disputed by social ecologists, who argued that the idea of a higher order of nature in harmonious balance was not borne out by research. Rather, nature appears to be in continual states of flux. And human interventions are not universally harmful. Thus the debate should not be about whether or not humans intervene in nature, but what sort of interventions should be promoted and what opposed.

Feminism and Environmentalism

Feminism added another flavor to the radical environmentalist stew. Concerned at the lack of race and gender analysis among the male-dominated groups, feminists launched their own critique during the 1970s and 1980s. In these formulations, the culprit was dominant male attitudes toward nature, including the evolution of Western science, technocratic thinking, global militarism, and the subordination of women and children. For many cultural ecofeminists, the male problem was biologically determined.

Reclaiming Paradise

An effort to introduce a feminist critique of photography and nature surfaced in 1987 with the exhibition Reclaiming Paradise: American Women Photograph the Land. Reclaiming Paradise attempted to recover a distinct nature aesthetic for women from the identification of the landscape genre with male photographers. As is often the case with cultural-feminist theories, differences among the photographers' class, historical milieu, sexual orientation, and race were ignored.

Ecofeminist Critiques

More recent ecofeminist critiques have highlighted the necessity for targeting abuses at local levels and making links among sex, race, class, and environmental abuses. Ecofeminists have also led the way with an international analysis of these crises. Vandana Shiva has been in the vanguard in developing an anticolonialist feminist theory that links international economic policy with the destruction of local economies and women's place within them. Third-world environments are underdeveloped and not productive.

Environmental Problems and Artists

With such a proliferation of environmental critiques, one might expect artists to address an array of environmental problems from a variety of political positions. Some artists put their talents to work in the service of direct-action organizations. But in the mainstream art-photography world, works have remained indebted to the past. The 1980s gave the appearance of pluralism in the art market, but this had more to do with consumer labels than with any increased tolerance for views that deviated from the political mainstream.

Environmentally Concerned Photography

What is promoted as environmentally concerned photography relies on established conventions of beauty or un-beauty. Landscape encodes traditions in Western art. For the most part, contemporary photographs present dramas of the human and the natural. Their emotional tone is either ironic or apocalyptic. The photographs of Richard Misrach, John Pfahl, and Lewis Baltz have been lauded as expressions of a contemporary environmentalist consciousness.

The Art vs. Propaganda Argument

Suspicions that Baltz's studies of waste sites, Pfahl's power-plant pastorales, and Misrach's color studies of the man-mauled Mojave merely glorify what they depict are countered by the argument that the photographs are art, not propaganda or corporate publicity. It is as though being an artist is a sufficient guarantee of a kind of natural innocence from values. Vision that strikes a human chord in the viewer and the technical proficiency to make such resonances felt are what make art happen. But what is this human chord, if not shared values about the photographs?

Arcadia Revisited

In the introduction to Arcadia Revisited (1988), Pfahl verges on treating modern-day pollution as an occasion for an intensified aesthetic experience. Pfahl testifies that one day a wind shift propelled a cloud of fumes his way, forcing him to abandon his picture making and stumble back to the car. It now appears that confronting pollution has become the new test of the photographer's personal courage.

Postmodernism and the End of Nature

Has any postmodernist version of the end of nature debate emerged to critique this nostalgia for paradise lost? Frederic Jameson's 1984 essay presented the postmodern condition as a sharp rupture from the imperatives of the past. For Jameson, this transformation corresponded to the change from industrial capitalism to a postindustrial multinationalism that is diffused and impossible to grasp coherently. Radical artists must operate schizophrenically in a culture of simulacra. No longer is there an inside and an outside, or the possibility of any coherent subject position. As far as nature is concerned, the vision of the preindustrial society is destroyed by late capitalism. Jameson sees possibilities for artists to construct cognitive maps that can situate individuals within the global system.

Artificial Nature

The Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art in Athens sponsored the 1990 exhibition Artificial Nature, curated by Jeffrey Deitch. Artificial Nature examined the changes in consciousness resulting from the transformation of our natural environment into an artificial environment. The book shows us Jameson's dystopian sublime in full swing: global, cybernetic, and totalizing. Does this strategy of amassing visual data from diverse archives bolster an abstract curatorial idea?

A Consumer Disneyland

This dazzling compendium adds up to little more than a tramride through a consumer Disneyland, and the text is unedifying. The questions of privilege and power (Who has access to these new technologies?) go begging. Nor should the unprecedented access to information these new technologies make possible be mistaken for enlightenment.

The Local and Political Character of Environmental Crises

Artistic and environmentalist strategies that are invested in totalizing solutions to the nature/culture debate will remain ineffective. The designation of generalized categories of victims only masks historical causes and effects. Symptomatic of the failure to understand the local character of environmental crises is the absence of nonwhites from the boards and staffs of environmental organizations. Similarly, they and their worlds are absent from exhibitions that address environmental issues. Natures, cultures, and environments are local and historical; they are not epiphenomena. They are contested across social, political, and economic territories. As tools of communication, photographs will continue to have a role to play in these debates. What we now face is the challenge of making images of nature speak in local tongues.