At the invitation of Enari Gallery, I was asked to lead a panel at Unseen, Amsterdam. This is the opening statement the panel talk with photographer David Benjamin Sherry and head of exhibitions at FOAM Amsterdam Claartje van Dijk. September 2023.
American Landscapes are intimately known to us, even if we have never seen and experienced them ourselves. Through movies, television, literature, painting and (of course) photography we have engaged with it in personal and political ways. The famous, large-scale landscapes by Alfred Bierstadt and Fredric Church, for instance, represent the romantic sublimity of nature, but also reveal a certain European-American mindset: nature is at the same time a cornucopia, an unspoiled refuge from city life, and a wilderness that should be tamed, colonized, exploited, and emptied of what were said to be fearful savages that appeared antithetical to the exclusive dream of westward expansion.
19th century myths around the landscape and the ‘West’ pretend that the land is there for the taking of tough explorers who are willing to risk their lives to build a future for themselves in unforgiving landscapes and thereby contributing to the building of nation and empire. Manifest Destiny and the frontier keep informing American political discourse today. These are the myths: the reality is that the land wasn’t empty, and it wasn’t un-peopled before Europeans colonized it.
Photography, too, played an instrumental role in constructing myths around the West. Photographs by Muybridge, Watkins, O’Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson tap into ideas of manifest destiny and frontier mentality. Their pictures reveal the ongoing expansion of the nation, but do not show the human and environmental cost of it. We should also remember that the great photographers of the American landscape in the 19th century saw themselves as explorers too, as incarnating the American man face-to-face with an unforgiving nature. This is a narrative that runs through many writings and exhibitions on the American landscape, of which there are many. Just to name an important one: John Szarkowski’s 1963 MOMA show ‘The Photographer and The American Landscape’: the American landscape is place for men, a place of violence, it is, in short, not for everyone. David Benjamin Sherry counters this discourse by ‘queering the landscape’.
Besides this story of the American landscape and how its politics are reflected in it, we can also tell a counter-story. That of photography playing a crucial role in conservation, preservation, and protest movements, and helping, too, to found the National Parks. Take writer John Muir, who in 1876 was faced with the rapidly changing landscape of the American West. He saw here the
waste and pure destruction are already taking place at a terrible rate, and unless protective measures be speedily invented and enforced, in a few years this noblest tree-species in the world will present only a few hacked and scared remnants.
He describes nature as ‘God’s first temple’ and calls for a stop to the mindless exploration and exploration of nature. He writes more than 150 years ago, about the
Practical importance of the preservation of our forests’ that is “augmented by their relations to climate, soil, and streams. Strip off the woods with their underbrush from the mountain flanks and the whole State, the lowlands as well as the high lands would gradually change into a desert. During rainfalls, and when the winter snow was melting, every stream would become a destructive torrent.
A later writer like Anne Dillard wrote that “If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever fresh vigor.”
Myths, traditions, idea are handed over the new generations whose task it is to review, criticized, reformulate, update ideas on the landscape. From Muybridge to Ansel Adams, from Lewis Baltz to David Shore, to David Benjamin Sherry. The following discussion between Sherry, Van Dijk, and Versteeg will include reflections on creation, work in the darkroom, myths and realities, countering these through ‘queering the landscape’, and the great traditions of American photography.