"I'm not interested in nature, only my own nature." —Aaron Siskind

Photography embraces the pursuit of the natural and the man-made landscape with new objectivity. Since the invention of the camera obscura in the eighteenth century, the landscape has probably been the most recurrent subject of photographic study.

Although painters historically have presented and revealed ominous and malevolent qualities of nature—its fire and ice—photography rarely views the negative side of nature. The leap in the "Brown Decades" (1880-1900) to a technological culture and the spread of urbanization were concurrent with the invention and early development of photography. This youthful medium has primarily witnessed man's encroachment on his natural environment, his gradual dominance of it. Yet for a long time cameramen have portrayed the landscape as a luxurious, welcoming retreat from reality and a spiritually uplifting escape. Alexis de Tocqueville described American civilization as a tribute to "that power God has granted us over nature."¹

In a recent article for Esquire, Robert Persig chronicled the experience of sailing around the world and shed some light on man's rather misconceived relationship to nature.² For most sailors there is a great dream: to escape the nine-to-five world, to gain control of the helm and mastery of the sail, to be free of decisions except for those made with the winds, the sails and the sea. Those who venture on this unusual odyssey understand that latent terror provoked by the capricious elements and the loneliness of tending a small craft on the high seas. The physical effort involved in the undertaking outweighs the romance of it. Our subconscious, at least, can recognize the reality Persig describes: we know it through depictions by the nineteenth-century seascape painters, Albert P. Ryder and Winslow Homer.

The same fear compels our self-protective urge to build our city forts, institutionalize our culture and mold our art to insulate us from the hostile unpredictable elements. Our art is the tangible manifestation of the nobility of the human will facing the unknown but inevitable forces of life. The production of art is man's refuge from the primeval forces around him and, indirectly, a means of controlling them.

The growth of camera art is a by-product of a mechanistic age and parallels our culture's use of technology to rule our universe. One must remember that the awe-inspiring NASA photographs are not snapshots taken during sightseeing jaunts into the heavens but scientific maps of a terrain and topography soon to be exploited by the human race. These striking photographs remind us of the technological advances that have been made by man in every field, not the least of which is the advancing technology of camera equipment itself. These pictures, for instance, resulted from equipment that automatically records the comings and goings of all forms of life, whether or not a human is present to operate it. Ten years after the making of the NASA photographs, an exhibition at Light Gallery in New York gave these images a new dimension. After the passage of a decade, they could be admitted into the realm of art. They are the freshest and most faithful view the public has had of a yet unspoiled frontier; they resemble newly discovered relics that hint of our origins. The photographs of the green Earth taken from the moon transcend a documentary function, reminding us of the uniqueness of life as we understand it. Viewed from the moon, the Earth seems all the more important because it is the only place we know to be inhabited by living beings.

Art has always evoked our fragility, what is most human in us. Art lives because we see ourselves reflected in it. Thus only after some length of time could we exhibit the NASA pictures in an art gallery. Now that mankind has had enough experience to "know" space, it does not seem so mysterious or impossible to conquer. The space photographs can now be understood in this new context because we can appreciate the conditions of their making. Their very existence is a rarefied reminder of something we have already lost in "anticipation of the triumphant march of civilization."³

It is an illusion that our ancestors lived in harmony with their environment. Until the early eighteenth century man was hard put to "civilize" nature and use it for his own enjoyment, artistic or otherwise. The pleasures of real estate were enjoyed only by the gentry and then only in a relatively controlled, idyllic, pastoral environment. We need only recall the royal forest of England or the great fields of the French châteaux to understand this point. The peasant, on the other hand, was in constant battle with the elements, including the soil itself. The fifteenth-century age of exploration was not undertaken out of a love for nature but rather for financial gain. This spirit of conquest peaked with the "manifest destiny" of nineteenth-century America. Concurrently, the developing photographic medium provided a mirror by which the defoliation of the virgin American landscape could be observed.

Underwritten by the U.S. government in his explorations of the Northwest rivers, the former portrait photographer Carleton Watkins did his greatest work in the 1860s and 1870s. Documenting the unexplored waterways, he suspected, even as he first set out, that the resulting photographs of his subject would surpass in beauty what was to be their official nature.⁴ Nature's magnificence transcends the efficient logic of the camera's eye. Although it presumes to capture nature's order, it must ultimately yield to the photographer's need to understand himself, his origins. Watkins clearly found the Northwest Territory and the Yosemite Valley places where he could fulfill his creative genius. He also correctly assumed that the marketing of these photographs—views of unknown curiosities of the West—would prove to be a profitable business venture. In another sense his studies surveyed a land soon to be altered by civilization and thus acted as a record of that civilization's reach to date. Landscape as subject matter indicates, in one respect, a culture's expansion. And man is always the narcissistic consumer.

The monumentality of the Western landscape awed nineteenth-century photographers. They frequently included a human figure in their vistas, indicating the scale of the natural wonders encountered. But perhaps these first photographers also used figures to make a symbolic gesture. They saw the sublime in the face of nature, yet they surely foresaw man's inevitable encroachment on this untouched, newly documented topography. The explorer-photographer's counterpart, Neil Armstrong, photographed his own footprint with a similar insight as he walked on the moon for the first time. He proclaimed that his footstep was an advancement for mankind, meaning that the moon, the first artifacts from it, and the photographs taken by the astronaut-photographers remain as curiosities. They represent something of a pure, naïve view, unencumbered by the possibility that soon the moon could be overrun by technology and development.

Throughout the late nineteenth century, the American landscape increasingly changed as men harvested its resources. At the same time that the remaining monuments of the West became subjects for great photographic art, they became tourist attractions institutionalized by the national park system. Consequently, the "faithful witness" of the undiscovered, the itinerant photographer, turned to social documentation as his mainstay: man as subject matter was unavoidable in his new landscape. Photographs began to focus on its new inhabitants and the civilization they planted on the wilderness.

By the turn of the century, artists like Alfred Stieglitz, saddened by this loss of the photograph's "innocence", turned from making a mere record of the landscape to the use of metaphor as a means of documenting it. He recognized that portraying the wilderness with nostalgic and romantic overtones was unacceptable to the mechanized twentieth century; "experiencing the wilderness" now meant savoring it in small bits or on a jaunt to the nearest national park; or in Stieglitz's case, at his hideaway at Lake George. Stieglitz and other photographers were beginning to be aware that less and less unspoiled, primeval landscape could be found in twentieth-century topography. Edward Weston's famous photograph of the three-dimensional coffee-cup sign monopolizing a Western landscape is an example of the change that was taking place. This image of man and nature juxtaposed against each other was the new vista that posed a problem for photographers to solve harmoniously.

Ansel Adams, a throwback to the nineteenth century, reminds us of the majesty of the few untouched panoramas left in our American landscape. His is a romantic image. The Yosemite pictured in his photographs is a far cry from the reality of travel carts moving thousands of tourists to Bright Angel Falls. But, Adams's fellow photographers could not retain that innocent approach. By the 1930s, Edward Weston noted that nature's forms, such as the peppers and cacti he photographed, are beautiful "because they are the ultimate expression of its potentiality."⁵ His view was a refined one, recognizing that the photographer could never be quite the detached viewer he assumed Timothy O'Sullivan or William Henry Jackson to be in their early documentation of the West. As unselfconscious surveyors, they gave us specific records for historical, sociological, and scientific use rather than expressive comments on the Western expansion.

By mid-century the more sophisticated photographers were making icons of nature's artifacts. They isolated stones, trees, and fruit, metaphorically alluding to some infinite range of spiritual, mental or psychic concerns. Paul Caponigro, seeking metaphysical issues in his work, cut an apple in half and photographed its symmetry, feeling that the inner layers would reveal what remained of nature's order, what is invisible in the raw and virgin landscape. This concern is far more self-conscious than those of the early nineteenth-century photographers and is a progression of the vision contained in the work of Weston. (Concurrently, scientific use of the medium turned to micro- and macrophotography, which are equally specific in their attention to detail.)

The modern documentary movement in creative photography stems from the photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. This attempt to map photographically the movements of hard-hit rural America was spurred by the recurring phenomenon of man's struggle with nature. The work differed greatly from the more cynical approach to the same idea of today's photography; the dignity of man in the face of adverse elements was the major visual and expressive concern. Although the FSA carefully detailed the depressed conditions of rural America, primarily a result of man's worn mismanagement of his resources, the individual was seen as heroic and noble in his struggle for survival.

The American Topographical Photographers (a label invented in the mid-1970s) pursue picture making with an attitude that minimizes stylistic concerns. They work without deliberately seeming to frame relationships and try to make pictures devoid of personal style, pictures that seem almost authorless. They hark back to their predecessors in the FSA in an apparent preoccupation with straight subject matter rather than noticeable artifice. Like the second home in the mountains and a house by the sea, our gardens and even the layout of our streets become new symbols of material status: like trained pets they reassure us of our dominant position. These photographers are fully aware of the ironic twists inherent in the civilization process. They seek to recapture the objective stance of their predecessors in the nineteenth century, but their sensibilities and their work are informed by contemporary ideas ranging from Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and James Joyce to television.

Garry Winogrand, the seminal figure of the movement, can be seen roving Los Angeles in a battered Cadillac photographing people, distorted architecture and the convoluted intersections where man meets landscape. He knows full well that man is a reflection of his own beginnings and his own endings. Less classic in his approach, his attempt is almost mannerist. He keeps a watchful eye for man's extravagances, for proof of the wastefulness of our culture, and the over indulgence of our most mundane activities. In our decorative and sartorial guises, he sees us often as little more advanced than our primate cousins. His is a consummate document, a compulsive endeavor to leave a record of this culture.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the avant-garde photographer knew full well that there remained few concerns for the medium's descriptive capabilities with regard to the natural landscape. A new generation of more cynical artists, like Robert Adams and Joel Sternfeld, became preoccupied with the imposition of suburban America on those once majestic hills of Colorado and California. Others, like Stephen Shore and Doug Baz, sought out the place for natural objects in man's civilized landscape. They documented the bushes, the flowers, and the gardens that had been planted in controlled settings and manicured by man in his leisure.

Another group of contemporary photographers is preoccupied with landscapes that the artist constructs himself: John Pfahl, John Baldessari and John Divola among others. A visual construction is created to be photographed and a witty allusion or "sight gag" that would not exist without the artist's manipulation becomes the content of the picture. John Divola, for example, embellishes, or even defaces his landscapes, dramatically drawing attention to the absurdities created by man in his environment and ironically contrasting twentieth-century self-consciousness to the purity of nineteenth-century landscape photography. The contemporary artist is now creating his own artifacts for the landscape, making art itself the subject for reportage. This group of photographers is aligned closely in its concerns and linked to contemporary artists such as Christo and Smithson.

Latent in today's photographic imagery are the seeds of tomorrow's development. Although the photographer is the last to admit to influences on his development, he is both a product of the medium's history and, indeed, the environment he works in, and the pictures he makes reflect both influences. Few creative photographers have deliberately depicted the cragginess of the woods, the dirt or the bugs. No equivalents have been made for the unpleasant experience of passing through the brush and being whipped in the face with a swinging branch.

In his book, The Unforeseen Wilderness (1971), Ralph Eugene Meatyard depicts a passage through the Red River Gorge using the harshest of light and the least pleasing of tones in his pictures. In the eroded gorge, one feels the portent of an unfavorable passage. Nature has its perverse side, opposing any advancement of technology. Meatyard's Red River Gorge pictures provide a photographic equivalent. Alan Watts, in Nature, Man and Woman (1970), observed that nature is usually seen symbolically as the feminine side or our life. We know a love of nature as a sentimental fascination with beautiful surfaces. But "seagulls do not float in the sky for delight but for watchful hunt of food."⁶ Violence is inescapable in the predatory relationship that permeates our life.

The American landscape is more profoundly charged by those buildings that man has built upon it than by natural phenomena. As structures are built, the artist and the photographer contrive new imagery that documents the encroachment of civilization. Today the juncture in photography rests on the fact that man totally dominates the landscape. Nature photography as such can only be a reminder of a forgotten past, a throwback to the dream that no longer exists. No wonder that the recent eruption of Mount Saint Helens attracted thousands of photographers, journalists, and artists who sought to catch a glimpse of Mother Nature storming. Hundreds of picture makers gasped from their jeeps and airplanes at the sight of such primeval activity rarely perceived in their mundane lives. The potential of a volcano's destructive force impresses us, but in our routine life, it is inconceivable that this spectacle will harm us. We gawk at the volcano as we might at a freak in a circus.

Few pictures of natural disasters have been made purely for expressive reasons; nature's harshness has been documented but rarely is it used in photographic art as other than a romantic backdrop for some human concern. Even the news pictures of Mount Saint Helens were basically confined to the majestic luster and the silkiness of the dust-laden earth around it. If the subject is repulsive to the viewer, often the photograph of it is seen negatively; the preconditioned reaction to the subject often causes the importance of the artist's attempt to be lost. In the hands of a master photographer, even disagreeable subject matter can be made fascinating enough—"acceptable" enough—to impart the aesthetic experience. Such might be the case in the Coyote (1941) picture by Frederick Sommer or the bleak desert landscape for which he is also famous. One can argue that the experience of whether the object photographed is negative or positive is subjective. But it can also be argued that the position and clarity of the technique and the virtuosity of the composition contribute to making an object transcend its origins and its subject matter. Consequently, the conditions that make a beautiful object of a photograph are matters for more deliberate judgment and objective observation.

All of these points of view combine to leave us with one dominant concern: the primitive element in man fears the unknown, including the nature that lies just beyond the borders of his civilized world. The camera, faithful as a mirror, only reflects man's impulse and need to control and dominate these natural forces. Without risk of physical harm, photography probes the unknown, helping man understand and conquer the unfathomable.