American landscape photography
Giblett, R. (2009). Landscapes of Culture and Nature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
copyright Rod Giblett.
For more information go to:ttp://www.palgravemacmillan.com.au/palgrave/newonix/isbn/9780230235847?open&template=domPalgrave&ed=site/paled21.nsf
III PHOTOGRAPHIC SUBLIME AND UNCANNY
Photography is a sublime communication technology. Using light, the light of divine revelation, reason and rationalist technology, analogue photography transforms the base matter of solid objects via a slimy emulsion of chemicals into an evanescent visual image engraved or inscribed on the surface of the base matter of plate, film and paper. Digital photography transforms the base matter of solid objects via the writing of digital code into an evanescent visual image inscribed on the surface of the base matter of a disc. Photography sublimates solid matter into the thin air of sun-filled space only to transform and commodify it into the sublimate of dead matter (see Giblett, 2008c).
Sublime communication technologies, especially as used in the mass media, not only kill people and places by representing them in the dead matter of the visual and aural image, but also bring them uncannily back to life, or at least give them a strange, uncanny kind of spectral after-life in the flickering shadows, and shades, of the same medium. The uncanny for Freud was a return to the repressed brought about through ghostly, virtual presence evoked by crafted artefacts coming alive as it were, and through the disturbing simulation of human movement and speech by automatons. Sublime communication technologies are also uncanny communication technologies (see Giblett, 2008c).
The sublime has a long history in western culture (see Giblett, 1996, chapter two). The sublime implies an impossible object (such as dead rock) terrifying in its magnitude. The uncanny has a much shorter history of less then a hundred years arguably beginning with Freud (see also Giblett, 1996, chapter two). The uncanny intimates an impassible abject (such as living water) horrifying in its monstrosity (as we saw in the first four chapters above). The uncanny for Freud is associated with a vague form. In regard to form, the uncanny is thus not so much the obverse of the sublime as in-between, or the mediating category between, the sublime and the beautiful. It has neither the huge formlessness of the sublime nor the small form of the beautiful, nor the panoramic form of the picturesque, but a vague form. The uncanny is particularly applicable to considering the quaking zone, both native and feral, as depicted in and by landscape and wilderness photography. Landscape and wilderness photography in both America and Australia has worked across all four modes of the sublime, the picturesque, the beautiful and the uncanny, the topics of chapters six and seven.
Giblett, R. (2009). Landscapes of Culture and Nature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
copyright Rod Giblett.
For more information go to:ttp://www.palgravemacmillan.com.au/palgrave/newonix/isbn/9780230235847?open&template=domPalgrave&ed=site/paled21.nsf
6. Wilderness to wasteland: The Sublime, the picturesque and the uncanny
in the photography of the American West
American landscape and wilderness photography has lived under the aegis of the aesthetic, and in particular under the sign of the sublime and the picturesque, for some time. Ansel Adams photographs of towering mountains and canyons are arguably major expressions, exemplars and evokers of the sublime in photography. The sublime involves the formlessness of uplifting spectacles and produces feelings of awe and terror. By contrast, Carleton Watkinss photographs of mountains reflected in still lakes express the picturesque in photography. The picturesque presents well-formed depictions of serene scenery and produces feelings of pleasure.
Adams and Watkins reproduced from landscape painting the aesthetic categories of the sublime and picturesque with its capitalist politics of land use. Characterising the work of these two photographers in these terms is not merely of formalist or taxonomic interest but has profound political import for the ways in which land and landscape are seen and commodified. Whilst this tradition has been dominant, there have been some photographers who have deviated from it, such Timothy OSullivan whose photography of chasms and fissures evoke the uncanny. This produces an anti- or counter aesthetic of the uncanny in photography that threatens to engulf the capitalist enterprise in landscapes and lands that are not commodifiable. The uncanny has a vague form and is both fascinating and horrifying. The successors of all three photographers in the New Topographics and Atomic Photographers photograph wastelands across all three modes of the sublime, the picturesque and the uncanny (for these three modes, see Giblett, 1996, chapters one and two; 2004, chapters three and four).
The principal place these photographers have depicted in photography has been the American West. In the West, Sandweiss (2002, p.2) argues, nineteenth-century [as did twentieth-century] American photography found its most distinctive subject. The American West and photography were made for each other. The West, she goes on to suggest, is a fabled place of fantastic topography, exotic people, the place where the nations future would unfold (Sandweiss, 2002, p.3). In both spatial and temporal terms, it was the ideal place for photography to represent and for the evolving technology to develop. As a result, American photography, for Sandweiss (2002, p.154), would realize its most compelling and distinctive subject in the West, not only in the nineteenth century but also in the twentieth. The Western landscape was the American future stretched out before it in enticing prospect in both the spatial and temporal sense in the age of exploration only to become a terrifying prospect in the nuclear age.
Ansel Adams
Just as John Muir is a monumental figure in the American conservation movement (Giblett, 2004, p.125), so for Weber (2002, p.14) Adams is a figure of towering stature in the history of photography. He was what she goes on to call Americas greatest landscape photographer of the twentieth century. Besides sharing monumental status, Adams and Muir shared a common landscape aesthetic of the monumental and a conservation agenda, though there were some differences between them. Adams was a long time member of the Sierra Club that Muir helped to found. Not just a conservation organization, the Sierra Club for Solnit (2007, p.235) put the aesthetic to political use in a way no other environmental group had. The Australian Wilderness Society followed suit with no regard for the politics of pictures, and of aesthetics (see chapter seven below). Turnage (1990, p.10) describes Adams in his introduction to a collection of Adams (1990) photographs of the American wilderness as a kind of visual Muir. This applies to Muir of the mountainous wilderness and not to Muir of the marsh and swamp wilderness as with his encounter with an alligator in Florida (as we saw in chapter one). Weber (2002, p.15) argues that Adams underlying motivation for his Yosemite photographs came to parallel the ideas of John Muir. Or more specifically, Adams motivation for his Yosemite photographs paralleled Muirs ideas about Yosemite. For Garrard (2004, p.69), Muir wrote the book but Ansel Adams took the pictures. This applies specifically to Muirs mountain books, and not his swampy one.
Adams was (according to some) putting the sublime words of John Muir into pictures that expressed and evoked the sublime. Or more precisely, he put some of Muirs words into pictures. Schama (1995, p.9) argues that Adams did his best to translate his [Muirs] reverence for nature into spectacular nature icons. Muirs reverence for nature was couched, however, in two distinct vocabularies: an earlier one produced by his experience in the marshes of Canada and swamps of Florida and a later one in the mountains of the Sierra (see Giblett, 1996, pp.240-1; 2004, pp.125-43). Adams translated Muirs reverence for mountains into spectacular nature icons whereas wetlands are neither iconic nor spectacular. Adams did not translate Muirs reverence for marshes and swamps into pictures with one notable exception (my favourite entitled The Black Sun). Adams photographs arose out of him experiencing what Weber calls (2002, p.16) the high-altitude epiphanies of natures cosmic unity as described by Muir. More specifically, Muir described these in his later life. In his earlier life he described the experience of the low-altitude exigencies of natures grotesque fertility in the native quaking zone of marshes and swamps. Muir was not only a believer in the God of the mountains and the national parks; he was also a follower earlier in his life of the Great Goddess of the wetlands when he went into Canadian marshes and Floridian swamps. Adams did not photograph these as a general rule. As he did not follow Muir into these marshes and swamps, he was a selective follower of Muir and incomplete illustrator of his words. He did not photograph any wetlands with one possible exception, but concentrated in his landscape or wilderness photographs on the monumental mountainous and the stunningly sublime, though he did also take some photographs of the small and beautiful. Adams for Jussim and Lindquist-Cock (1985, p.22) presents us with the towering mountains and sweeping vistas we would tend to associate with a God of sublimity. They refer to his famous photo of a clearing winter storm in Yosemite as an example (Adams, 1990, plate 51).
Muir eventually became known as the father of the American national parks, or at least of the idea for them
