Since the invention of photography in the early 19th century, landscape photography proliferated and captivated viewers for its ability to faithfully record a natural scenic view. In fact, the world’s first photograph created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1827 was a landscape that produced an image from the upper window of his family’s country home in France. He made the photograph through a method called heliography that required an exposure time of over eight hours. Soon thereafter, photographers flocked to locales from Niagara Falls to Egypt to capture photographs of what the everyday person might not have the opportunity to see, and audiences collected and viewed them voraciously through stereoscopes—devices through which a set of corresponding two-dimensional images appear three-dimensional—for entertainment. As the ability to travel increased, tourists would share their photographs of a waterfall in Hawaii or the Grand
Canyon with informal slide show get-togethers. Presently, not a day goes by without a friend or family member contributing their own photographs of various landscapes taken by cell phone on multitudes of social media platforms.
But what is a landscape’s relationship to nature, and how do photographs of the land reveal humanity’s relationship to nature? More specifically, how have artists responded to the landscape in myriad ways and how have their responses shaped humans’ conception of nature—positively or negatively? Over sixty artworks from the Museum’s Collection delve into these compelling questions. This exhibition is partly inspired by theorist Deborah Bright’s seminal essay from 1985, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men,”¹ which begins by emphasizing that most landscape “views” are not naturally occurring, but rather socially
constructed perspectives and heavily influenced by painting compositions and techniques. She concludes that there is actually very little “wild” left in nature. At the time, she also critiqued the photography world for its lack of diverse artists’ points of view in landscape. She explained this phenomenon as originating from governmental survey expeditions to the American West, for which only white male photographers were hired, and which completely ignored, and thus erased, the perspectives of Indigenous Americans from American landscape photography. Lastly, with the advent of nuclear power, climate change, and pollution, Bright’s essay questions whether it is ethical for artists to make contaminated and overdeveloped sites look aesthetically pleasing to viewers without any contextual information.
Along the lines of Bright’s inquiries, the photographs in Viewfinders have been divided into five separate sections that trace the various responses artists have had to nature and underline viewers’ responses to them: the first, Picturesque; the second, Wild; the third, Denatured; the fourth, Abstract; and the fifth, Imaginative. These categories are by no means exhaustive nor mutually exclusive; however, they outline major trends in landscape photography since the early 19th century.
The first, Picturesque, is probably the most prevalent and has been subconsciously engrained in human vision. This pastoral landscape genre follows the “Claudean composition,” named for the 17th-century French painter Claude Lorrain, characterized by tonal gradation from foreground to background, with the
vantage point as a reflective body of water in the center framed by trees, and a meandering path that facilitates the viewer’s entry to the pictorial space. This organizing principle became popular in 18th-century British landscape paintings, and was quickly adopted by American artists, as a response to the Industrial Revolution. The compositional formula offered a way for human beings to exert control over the vast and diverse landscape. Landscape architects later created vistas that followed the Claudean composition. The Olmsted family landscape architectural firm created some of the most famous and unnatural “natural” sites in the world including New York City’s Central Park and Caumsett State Historic Park Preserve, located on the West Neck peninsula in Lloyd Harbor, NY; yet some visitors view these parks as nature in its untouched state. Caumsett State Historic Park Preserve has been a favorite subject of artists such as N. Jay Jaffee and Neil Scholl, whose photographs capture the landscape architects’ signature picturesque landscapes in the park (fig.1). Several artists in the exhibition, including Carol Fonde and Joanne Mulberg (see cover image), also offer picturesque views of Long Island that follow the Claudean composition.
A subset of these picturesque, constructed views are topographical photographs—they are photographs taken for political, economic, or social objectives such as government surveys of the land, mapping, location of natural resources, and for railroad companies expanding westward in the 19th century. One of Bright’s major criticisms is that many 19th-century topographical surveys made no mention of the Native Americans who inhabited the land for thousands of years. Shinnecock Nation tribal member and artist Jeremy Dennis reasserts their presence with his multimedia research project, On This Site —a website and book that feature his photographs of landscapes inhabited by Indigenous peoples with information about their histories, languages, and customs (fig.2).
In many ways opposite to the picturesque, the second category, Wild, is akin to Nature, or the “Sublime,” a term popularized by philosopher Edmund Burke in the mid-18th century. Wild images such as George Barker’s Niagara Falls (1888; fig.3) feature vast, rugged natural scenes that emphasize the power of nature. In Barker’s photograph, frothy explosions of white water represent the force of the Falls. Although contained within the frame of the picture, the power of the plunging water was meant to inspire awe and terror in viewers. By
cropping out signs, handrails, and trash receptacles in the park, Barker, subversively, underscores the sublimity of the natural scene, unobstructed by human beings. Works like Barker’s contributed to American nationalist iconography as well as helped grow a robust tourist industry that trickled over into homes, where affordable postcards and stereoscopic devices became popular forms of entertainment. More than a century later, Japanese photographer Kenji Nakahashi carried on the tradition by capturing a similar view in Niagara Falls (1990; fig.4) during a visit there. The hunger for sublime views and the thrill of adventure continue today with extreme travel reality shows, adventure programs, and photography on social media.
The photographs in the third category, Denatured, reveal what happens when humans try to control or degrade the land, removing or permanently altering the natural qualities of a landscape. Photographs in this section feature harm to animals, urban congestion and industrialization, and attempts to control nature. In Norris Dam (1935; fig.5), Berenice Abbott records human hubris by replacing the once sublime mountains
of landscape photography with the mighty Norris Dam—a manmade structure designed to tame and redirect nature. In Abbott’s cityscape West Street (1936), there is no vegetation or anything organic left in the frame—by the early 19th century human exploits had completely overtaken the landscape of Lower Manhattan. Over a period of fifteen years, Jan Staller also photographed environments altered by human activity—construction and industrial sites that contained monumental sculptural elements, as seen in Water Purification Plant, Hempstead, Long Island, 1991 (1991). Interestingly, the medium of photography, in itself, can be construed as a part of denaturation. Photography is an industrial and now electronic process with heavy metallurgical origins and a long history of polluting waters near its factories (e.g. Kodak and Polaroid). Presently, it also contributes to e-waste.
Ironically, photographs that pay more attention to the formal qualities of nature—such as shapes, textures, light, and colors—may have contributed to the devaluation of nature. Sierra Club artists such as Eliot Porter made this type of photography popular in the 1950s. Abstract landscapes, the exhibition’s fourth category, discard standard compositional formats, as well as narrative or historical references, in favor of close-up, cropped, dynamic perspectives without any reference to human presence. Such is seen in Stuart McCallum’s Amaryllis Study #1 (n.d.; fig.6) and Beech Study #2 (n.d.) and William Eggleston’s “Jamaica Botanical Series” (1978). Curator John Szarkowski described Eggleston’s close-ups of palms and ferns as, “photographs of experience, as it has been ordered and clarified within the structures imposed by the camera.”2 Artists like Eggleston broke with the Claudean tradition in order to be free from painting’s history. However, some critics observed that the results were far from ecological, as the photographs manipulated and transformed nature to create a spectacular “image.” Critic Robin Kelsey has written that, despite its popularity and the Sierra Club’s benevolent intentions, this type of image “leaves nature prone to substitution by other sources of visual delight and spectacular fascination.”3
Perhaps the most ecologically minded type of landscape photography can be found in the fifth category in the exhibition, Imaginative landscapes. Here, artists create cut-and-paste collages, recycle found objects, reverse tones, and rely on reflective surfaces to create new, energetic landscapes that bring out the magical, whimsical quality of the natural
world. For example, Barbara Roux creates mise-enscènes in wooded areas with frames or mirrors placed against a leafy ground. The use of framed mirrors in works like Swinging Frame (2002) and The Earth Views the Sky (1998; fig.7) reflects the scene back to the viewer, connecting them to nature and underlining humanity’s direct effect on the natural world. In another series, which includes the work Night Rises Up (1998), poetry or text from natural history books is inscribed into cut down or broken tree trunks to merge the subjective individual with the natural world. Viewfinders also features a selection of works from GELI (Gift Edition Long Island), a “time capsule” of digital videos and prints, by artists who address the effects of globalization, climate change, and the need for climate-focused reform in their work, including Cliff Baldwin, Jeremy Dennis, Mikael Levin, the artist duo LoVid, Mamoun Nukumanu, Han Qin, Lauren Ruiz (fig.8), and Christine Sciulli.
As elucidated in the discussions above, photographers have the power to affect our interpretation and treatment of nature by inviting us to see differently. Viewfinders offers a survey of American nature photography and its varied styles and movements, some of which contributed to the idea of the singular “tunnel vision” that Bright wrote about in her essay over thirty years ago. Yet the photographs on view educate us in several ways about the interrelationship of humans and nature—that humans deeply affect the environment—it
is not wild and untouched, or a superficial spectacle to be swapped out for a shinier replacement. These images allow us to better understand the historically one-sided relationship of humans with nature, and to reconsider how we look at nature and depictions of it. Additionally, many of the contemporary artists featured in Viewfinders offer alternatives, acting as bright lights signaling the end of that brand of tunnel vision, with diverse voices, techniques, and perspectives that use the medium of photography as a clear advocate for education and environmentalism, providing a model for the years to come.
Susan Van Scoy is Associate Professor of Art History at St. Joseph’s University, NY. The author would like to thank Karli Wurzelbacher, Curator, The Heckscher Museum of Art and Sarah S. King, Editor-in-Chief, SNAP Editions, for their invaluable feedback.
1. Bright’s essay, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography,” originally appeared in Exposure 23, no. 4 (Winter 1985). It later appeared in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
2. John Szarkowski, William Eggleston’s Guide (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976), 10.
3. Robin Kelsey, “Photography and the Ecological Imagination” in Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, eds. Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 404.