From the Sublime to Graffiti

By ROBERT HUGHES

The camera charts changing views of a changing U.S. landscape

"American Landscapes," an exhibition of photographs at the Musemum of Modern Art in New York City, was mounted as a summer show, meaning a small one; and its contents--55 images of American nature, ranging in time from the 1860s to the 1970s, and in place from the redwood forests of California to the roadside strip of Rochester, N.Y.--are all drawn from the museum's own collection and put together by its curator, John Szarkowski. But its subject is a crucially important one in American visual culture. When the photograph was young, in the 1840s and '50s, most cultivated Americans were apt to imagine the interior of their continent as a vast wilderness, formless, raw and antipathetic to man. By the 1860s and '70s, this had changed. Thanks to the ideas of men like Thoreau and Emerson, combined with the pervasive religious ideology of the American middle class, untamed landscape was now seen as beautiful and instructive in itself: the sublime fingerprint of God. This gave a moral excitement to natural curiosity; and both were reflected not only in painting (as in the work of Martin Johnson Heade or Frederic Church) but also in photography.

In the years after the Civil War, photographers went with the surveying parties and railroad gangs as they painfully worked their way across the continent. Lugging their clumsy box cameras and big fragile glass plates up mountains and down canyons, they brought back what painters could not give, or not so persuasively: the "facts," the scientific truth that intersected with the myth of God's design. It was photography, even more than painting, that shaped America's sense of its own size, topographical splendor and geological antiquity in the 19th century.

Perhaps even the imperfections of the medium helped. The slow emulsion and long exposures erased the trace of most moving or living things, just as the great depth of field favored a sense of vastness. Thus in the work of photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan (1840-82), we seem to be contemplating a landscape stripped to its last formal properties, strict and still and immeasurably old. Among these early landscape photographers--and some who came later in California, like Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins--there is no suggestion that landscape could be a metaphor of human emotion.

The idea that landscape photography should be intentionally expressive did not really surface until the frontier was gone, by the turn of the century. Its bearers were among the pioneers of photographic modernism--Edward Steichen, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn, with their "symbolist," tremulous images of tree and field. In these artful and decorous prints, as Szarkowski remarks, "Nature has become ... a part of the known habit and syntax of art, like fruit or flowers arranged on the sideboard." After them, the problem was to recomplicate the game of seeing; to show how the camera could deal with what was neither familiar in landscape nor quite amenable to the given pictorial conventions. Edward Weston did this with closeups on natural detail--the ribbed flank of a sand dune, the tiny mesas of worn rock surface at Point Lobos. Ansel Adams, the most popular of all American photographers, succeeded in turning the remote stasis of 19th century topographical photos into a Wagnerian drama of events.

One cannot live under a waterfall, though, and Adams' extreme romanticism has prevented him from having many imitators today. The eye behind the lens has become more ironic, farther from Eden, more likely (as Szarkowski puts it) to see "the funny campers with their space-age hiking shoes and backpacks." There is no lack of photographers to approach landscape with intense feeling, but the feelings are not of the same kind. What happened to the old sublimities? Lost with those who believed in them: such, at least, is the message conveyed by Robert Adams' From Lookout Mountain, Smog, No. 7,1970. It has some of the traditional ingredients: the high view, the extending valley. But tourists have changed the landscape forever, imposing on it their own cretinous expressionism: thanks to the aerosol can, their names (JOE, BILL) are writ large on the rocks, reversing the order of priorities that held in such places a century before. The MOMA show is full of such ironies and surprises. Although it cannot possibly do justice to its huge subject, at least it opens some approaches to it. --By Robert Hughes

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