The Photographer and the American Landscape

After the Civil War, Americans turned again to the exploration of their continent, especially of the exciting and little known West. One of the tools of their exploration was photography, which was still new.

The photographer-as-explorer was a new kind of picture maker: part scientist, part reporter, and part artist. He was challenged by a wild and incredible landscape, inaccessible to the anthropocentric tradition of landscape painting, and by a difficult and refractory craft. He was protected from academic theories and artistic postures by his isolation, and by the difficulty of his labors. Simultaneously exploring a new subject and a new medium, he made new pictures, which were objective, non anecdotal, and radically photographic.

This work was the beginning of a continuing, inventive, indigenous tradition, a tradition motivated by the desire to explore and understand the natural site.

John Szarkowski, The Photographer and the American Landscape (1963)

Szarkowski’s introduction to the minimal exhibition catalogue for 1963’s The Photographer and the American Landscape bothers me on multiple levels. Most of what he says would seem to be a given (at least in the popular imagination). But at its core it is absurdly nationalistic and built from a curious set of premises. I feel like I have to think it through one paragraph at a time.

It seems fair to assert that the Civil War imposed a hiatus on American expansionism; I am less certain that a case can be made that photography was a “tool of exploration”—in this context, most critics of the 80s and 90s have treated it as a tool of exploitation. The truth is likely in between. What seems even more dubious is the assertion that photography was “still new.” Opening on the note of hiatus implicates photography as more than an instrument—it presides over the phoenix-like rebirth of a new country engineered through new medium.

The “photographer-as-explorer” was the new Moses, leading art into the salvation of a new art. The first key thought is new.

The second key thought is America. Photographic exploration was indigenous to America, and inextricably tied to images of nature. It seems really odd that it took around twenty years before this sort of thinking got challenged; it is naïve at best—but at worst, it obscures the idea that photography was only one of the technologies that imaged and imagined the West. Throughout, a third key thought—the myth of nature— lurks behind as the end of all the labors of civilized culture. A nice place to visit, but not many would continue to live there after the ebullience of the late nineteenth century.