NEW METAPHORICS:
SPIRIT AND SYMBOL IN CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

© Gretchen Garner

Center Quarterly 10:1, 1988
Center for Photography at Woodstock

I have not attempted to make a geographical, historical or sociological record.  My work this year as in the past has been directed toward photographing Life.

                                              Edward Weston, Camera Craft, February 1939

Thus did Weston summarize, in words as clear as his photographs, the difference between the descriptive and the metaphoric modes in landscape photography.  These two streams, running side by side, have each nourished our understanding of the world.  The descriptive has told us exactly where we are, what we have seen, what we have claimed, and what we have done to the land.  The metaphoric has suggested what powers we stand in relation to, what is beyond the visible, the deeper meanings in natural phenomena—what else it is, to use Minor White’s phrase.  And as surely as winter follows summer, the metaphoric and the descriptive rise and fall as dominant motifs of visual expression.

What causes the shift from one way of thinking to the other is beyond the scope of this essay and perhaps not really understandable outside the context of the other art media, considering the short history of photography.  Over the much longer history of other pictorial media the polar swing is a perennially repeating pattern—the romantic following the classical, symbolism following naturalism, pop art following abstract expressionism, detailed realism following abstraction.  Compared to photography, this cycle is more understandable in media like painting and drawing, as they are completely malleable to the human imagination.  Photography, the very genius of which is description, seems predisposed to linger in that mode.  Anchored as it is in the material world and mechanical process, every photograph would seem to have metaphoric feet of clay, hardly able to rise above the level of specific place, incidental detail, and descriptive fact.

Ultimately, however, photographs are made by human minds, and the mechanical process has been subdued often in a strong metaphoric tradition within landscape photography.  In their recent Landscape as Photograph (1985) Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock devote two chapters to this expression:  “Landscape as God” and “Landscape as Symbol.”  And even the best-known champion of the descriptive modality, John Szarkowski, acknowledges photography’s ability to shift from fact to symbol.  Szarkowski’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition of 1980, Mirrors and Windows, proposed that just as photographs can be transparent windows to an objective world, they can be mirrors of, if not the communally understood symbols of the nineteenth century, the private, inner meanings of the photographer.

For the decade of the seventies and the early part of the eighties, that metaphoric stream has been rather quiet, silenced by the louder rapids of the descriptive stream nearby—or perhaps it was the critical interest in the descriptive that made most of the noise, because, as we shall see, metaphoric workers have continued to produce their symbolic images throughout this recent period.

Nevertheless, reacting against the excesses of private visual language encouraged by Minor White’s teachings and writings in Aperture, reacting against the romantic love of wildness encouraged by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and the Sierra Club, a new breed of landscape photographers appeared in the early seventies, with Walker Evans as their model/mentor and their left brains fully in gear.  Their objective: to describe clearly, transparently, and without affect the look of the America we have made.  Their version is not an idealized or a romanticized one, but rather a rationally seen one, recording housing developments, industrial parks, urban detritus, change, and destruction, even what might have been called acts of God in an earlier time—Frank Gohlke’s images of tornado and volcano destruction, for example.

In 1975 William Jenkins curated an important, definitive exhibition of this descriptive work entitled New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.  The show included the work of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr.  Their grim images of landscapes strongly marked by humans (but without human presence) offered stern but inconclusive evidence of a world actually quite familiar to all of us.  With the possible exception of Nicholas Nixon’s lofty views of gleaming cities, these were landscapes of restrained regret.  No longer were the machine and the skyscraper the heroic forms they had been earlier in the century (for Sheeler or Steichen, for example), but neither was the landscape the enlivening relief from the city that Adams and Porter offered.  Instead the two had come together in bleak scenes of tract housing and factory construction.

A sentiment of regret was discernible in the new topographics, but little more.  Strictly rational and produced with a restrained rhetoric, the pictures left a feeling of emptiness.  This rhetoric involved almost anti-pictorial decisions:  Jenkins described the pictures as “stripped of any artistic frills,”and Gohlke worked toward an “essentially passive frame” instead of using the frame compositionally.  “Pictures should look like they were easily taken,” said Robert Adams.  “I attempted to make a series of images in which one image is equal in weight or appearance to another,” said Joe Deal, and Lewis Baltz summed up the hoped-for appearance of the new topographics by saying, “The ideal photographic document would appear to be without author or art.”[1]

Although they have enjoyed much art-world currency, the new topographics have had curiously little effect on the popularly consumed landscape publishing business of calendars, glossy books, and magazines.  More important, they seem even to some of their admirers to be pictorial dead-ends.  Marked by intellectual rigor, sometimes (one can’t be sure) by ecological awareness, these pictures have told us only that it is a bleak world we have made.  But what then?  Perhaps description does not suffice when it comes face to face with the problems of creating landscape images with meaning.

Against this background a resurgence of interest in metaphoric landscape photography has recently occurred.  For these photographers the world may be troubled, but it is not bleakly meaningless; instead it is “bursting with meaning,” in Frederick Turner’s phrase, and there are no particular limits placed on pictorial strategies.  Combined prints, in black and white or color; images with texts; images in series; all are used for a more directed meaning about a sense of place and about our place in it.  These photographers are trying to forge symbolic images that can replace what Joseph Campbell called the non-functioning myth of Western culture, in which “God is separate from nature, and nature is condemned of God.”

In an interview with Bill Moyers,[2] Campbell said, “We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea….If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth.  These are the eyes of the earth.”

Some recent metaphoric landscape work has simply grown out of work that began long before the new topographics—Paul Caponigro, Jerry Uelsmann, and Emmet Gowin, for example, continue to serve as “eyes of the earth.”  Though he cannot be confined under the heading “landscape photographer,” Jerry Uelsmann’s images have long been steeped in symbols drawn from the natural world, and during the last decade his synthetic images have increasingly dealt with the imposition of culture on nature, as well as with the historical process and the past.[3]

The past has a powerful attraction as a subject for many others, some looking to see mistakes made there and some looking for lost wisdom.  Several have taken the neutral descriptive eye of the new topographer and combined it with other elements, resulting in a richer, more directed image such as Vida’s text/image series on Death Valley.[4]  For others, ancient cultures, in particular their sacred places, have become the center of attention.  Megaliths presents Paul Caponigro’s photographs of the ancient stones of Great Britain[5] (in his words, “these giant bones of the Mother”), and Marilyn Bridges in her small plane has made aerial views of ancient sacred sites, collected in Markings: Aerial Views of Sacred Landscapes.[6]  Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art presents contemporary photographs of the ancient native  American rock drawings of the Southwest.[7]  In explaining the reasons the book’s five photographers are fascinated by their subject, Keith Davis has written:

By honestly perceiving these marks in our own cultural image these artists express their faith in what today’s art can and should be.  Their images are deeply moral visions conveying a profound respect for the evidence of time, the primacy of culture, and the grandeur of the earth.  They offer an implicit critique of our own moral relativism and spiritual malaise, while celebrating the transcendent power of human expression and imagination.[8]

For others the myths of our religious tradition have been reanimated.  Paul Shepard reminds us, in Nature and Madness,[9]that the Western religions were born in the desert, a place of extreme contrast—between the life-giving river and the death-dealing emptiness—and that this contrast laid deep in our psyches a sense of conflict and apocalypse from the hand of a god of wrath.  Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos are, he says, about “desertedness,” and the section titles of his book (“The Terrain,” “The Event,” “The Flood,” “The Fires”) have the ring of Biblical catastrophe.  To accompany his lushly colored scenes of fire and flood in the barren American West Misrach writes that “the desert may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment.  The human struggle, the successes and failures, the use and abuse, both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert.”[10]  Steven Foster draws on another part of tradition in his recent landscapes of Milwaukee parks and backyards, using the mystical Hebrew concept of “Makom” (the place where God is).  Some views are meant to evoke specific Biblical places (like the Garden of Eden), while others, especially the ones printed as negatives, are less directly referential but glow with a genuinely mystical light.

For some of the new photographers a frank sense of human presence, from Mark Klett’s picnicker at the edge of the Grand Canyon to Mary Beth Edelson’s private rituals, denotes a necessary connection of humans to the landscape.  For Linda Connor the fascination with marked sites of ancient and exotic cultures is most importantly a focus on human presence in the landscape, “intimacy to the land,” as she puts it.  For Edelson, resonances between natural forms and the female body are a dominant theme, and her work reveals a feminist/pagan sensibility, suggesting a direct and sacred relationship to the land.  For other women, including Connor, this is a minor theme in the context of larger overall landscape concerns.[11]

Elsewhere (in Reclaiming Paradise: American Women Photograph the Land) I have explicated the expansion of the landscape tradition that women’s work provides when it is understood to belong to the history of landscape.  Women’s photographs of domestic, inhabited land; photographs of performance/ritual within the landscape; and photographs of sensual identification with nature, sometimes very close in their viewpoint—all, I have argued, are landscape images.  While women’s photographs have been especially rich in metaphoric expression, I have not meant to suggest that metaphor is “women’s work” and that description is “men’s work.”  I do suggest, though, that the freedom that women have brought into photography during the seventies and eighties—the freedom to be personal, to be relatively free from the historical canon, and to enjoy a sense of beauty as well as a sense of play with the medium—are freedoms that have eased the way for the resurgence of metaphor in photography at large.  Today the dry, descriptive approach of the new topographers seems exhausted.  Many photographers are instead deeply engaged in metaphor, addressing the mysteries that lie at the heart of our life here on earth.

1- All quotes are from the introduction to William Jenkins, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape  (Rochester, NY: International Museum of Photography, 1975).

2 - Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (NY: Doubleday, 1988), excerpted in New Age Journal, July/August, 1988, pp. 82-83.

3 - For a broad overview of his work, see James Enyeart, Jerry N. Uelsmann, Twenty-five Years: A Retrospective  (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982).

4 - Gretchen Garner, Reclaiming Paradise: American Women Photograph the Land (Duluth, MN: Tweed Museum of Art, 1987), pp. 52-53.

5 - Boston:  Liittle, Brown/NYGS, 1986.

6 - NY: Aperture, 1986.

7 - Albuquerque: UNM Press, 1988; includes photographs and essays by Linda Connor, Rick Dingus, Steve Fitch, John Pfahl, and Charles Roitz, and essays by Polly Schaafsma, Keith Davis, and Lucy R. Lippard.

8 - Ibid., pp. 130-131.

9 - San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982.

10 - Albuquerque: UNM Press, 1987.

11 - See Garner, op. cit.: photographs by Berenice Abbott, Anne Brigman, Linda Connor, Barbara Crane, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater, Liliane DeCock, Mary Beth Edelson, Marion Faller, Linda Gammell, Lynn Geesaman, Laura Gilpin, Betty Hahn, Dorothea Lange, Cynthia MacAdams, Joan Myers, Marion Patterson, Kathryn Paul, Mary Peck, Meridel Rubenstein, Geraldine Sharpe, Clara Sipprell, Gail Skoff, Evon Streetman, Vida, and Marion Post Wolcott; essays by Elizabeth Hampsten and Martha Sandweiss.