Customer Reviews

The Altered Landscape

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Make no mistake! The camera can lie. Photography is disingenuous. Most of the recent pictures in this extraordinary book were taken at desolate, degraded, despoiled locations, the sumps and junkyards of our technological stewardship of our planet. As pictures, many of them are eerily beautiful, and much of the text of the book is about the photographic art of finding "images of stunning visual power and forceful intellectual and emotional content" beyond the boundaries of conventional beauty. But they have been assembled by the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno for a broader historical purpose - to document the impact of humans on the natural landscape of the American West - much of it shamefully destructive - as well as the cultural paradigm of unhindered exploitation of the land that has typified American expansion and human occupation of the Earth at large.

The earliest photos are from the 1860s, but the large majority date from recent decades. Many of the most impressive, artistically, are black-and-white, including museum-worthy shots by Ansel Adams and Robert Dawson. The color plates have an odd way of rendering ugly subjects whimsical, like the LA paintings of Wayne Thiebaud or the pop-art images of Andy Warhol. The black-and-white images capture more of the monumental agony of 'altered' nature. Again, make no mistake! We've NOT altered the landscape for the better, not even for our own betterment. We've made a mess.

The photos are what make the book powerful, but the three essays included are intellectually probing. Historian Patricia Limerick traces the 'ambivalent' American attitude toward the landscape and cultural stewardship of the land back to its roots in Christian theology and in the Romantic imagination. Art critic Dave Hickey is concerned more with photography as an art in the context of western American expectations about design and about nature.
Art historian Thomas Southall places these specific photographers of the 'altered landscape' within the larger history of landscape painting and photography.

For most people who examine this book, I'm fairly sure, the documentary themes will outweigh the purely artistic. The western states of the USA are markedly underpopulated and 'undeveloped' in comparison to the eastern states and to most of the land mass of the whole planet, excluding the polars regions. Nevertheless, people have altered even the wastelands of desert and mountain to a shocking degree, in careless ways that 'we' hardly take notice of and seldom repair. In observing our misdeeds against the landscape, the camera never lies.