Review: Clarke, The Photograph, Chapter 4: Landscape in Photography, 1997

Clarke sees two major strands in the history of landscape photography, one on either side of the Atlantic.  Across both, photographers were agents of viewing, the privileged few who went out into the world and brought back images from their journeys.  

In England, they were tourists, wandering about the countryside composing the equivalent of picture postcards.  Their images were highly idealized versions of a rural utopia.  Clarke cites Roger Fenton’s work as typical of the picturesque, a genre reflecting “the leisurely assumptions of a class of people who looked upon landscape scenery in aesthetic and philosophical terms.”    That is, they didn’t live there and weren’t terribly concerned with the reality of those who did.  Their version of the English countryside was a “highly edited version … – exclusive and bound by mythology.”  Clarke doesn’t bother to explain why this might have been so.  In his introduction to the chapter he remarks on how the photograph emerged at a time when painters were interested in realism and when science was making quick advances in understanding the processes of the natural world.  Why, then, this regressive trend in landscape photography? 

Across the ocean, American photographers were adventurers and settlers, people who went out into the wilderness, often at government behest, to document the lands west of the eastern seaboard.  Clarke claims their primary concern was in establishing ways for understanding the vastness the land and creating a narrative of exploration and settlement, “part of a larger definition and sanctioning of nationhood and independence.”  Clarke cites Timothy O’Sullivan’s wagon train crawling across the desert of Nevada, or Carleton Watkins’ railroad track running into the horizon of Oregon.  Where the English countryside was largely settled and typically framed by reference to farm houses, mills, and country lanes, much of the American landscape was untouched by human activity.  In trying to capture these expanses, photographers reflected the concerns of the Transcendentalists, who saw the divine reflected in nature, “the land as a natural form…alive with potential meaning.”  This was picked up explicitly by photographers such as Ansel Adams, whose work he finds infused with “philosophical presence ... [of] the transcendent.”  In this, American landscape was not so different from its English counterpart; what differed were the mythologies. 

By the 20^th century, Clarke sees American landscape photography repeating much the same themes with “revitaliz[ed] … terms of reference,” while in England he sees “increasing social awareness of how landscape should be read.”  He cites the work of Raymond Moore and Michael Parr, in which the land is increasingly cluttered, seen from a car, and nothing more than a scene on the road to somewhere else.  He says much the same of Harold Sund’s "Yosemite Valley from Wawona Tunnel,” which I can’t yet find on the internet and to which I would greatly appreciate any reference. 

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