Lee Friedlander, Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota, 1969

Lee Friedlander (1934 – ), Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota, 1969, gelatin silver print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Memorial Art Fund, 1998.028. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

From early in his distinguished career, Lee Friedlander has been fascinated by reflections, fragments of vision, and ironies in the visual landscape. With complex compositions and spatial ambiguities, he makes us question where we stand and what we see.

In his photograph Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota, Friedlander focuses on the built environment in a variety of ways. Two figures stand in front of a bank of windows in which the monumental sculpture of Mt. Rushmore is reflected. We see figures inside the building, as well as others who are reflected on it. An elderly couple studies the monument, as we study them.

The landscape is reduced to a mere shadow of itself, as trees, clouds, and the mountain are held within the metal grid of the windows. Nature gives way to culture in the photograph, as the mountain has given way to the carved figures on its face.

Although many of us consider Mt. Rushmore as a monument to the American presidency, this altered landscape is considered a desecration by some native peoples. The Black Hills, home to Mount Rushmore, are considered sacred by the Lakota Sioux, who have sought return of the land. The mountain itself, known as Six Grandfathers, is an especially contested site.

Marilyn Bridges, Tom Loves Mary, Coral Graffiti, Hawaii, 1990

Marilyn Bridges (1948 – ), Tom Loves Mary, Coral Graffiti, Hawaii, 1990, gelatin silver print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Gift of an anonymous donor. 2014.065. Copyright Marilyn Bridges, 2017. All rights reserved.

Marilyn Bridges is an American photographer and pilot renowned for her black and white aerial photographs taken from a low flying small engine plane. From the air, Bridges provides new perspectives on landscapes, from ancient serpent mounds to rural farms, frequently focusing on human-made marks and constructions. Bridges observes, “I wish to show the subtle symbols that man creates unintentionally in the environment. Through the markings and objects he leaves on the landscape, he reveals his relationship with the earth.”[footnote]Marilyn Bridges, Sacred and Secular: A Decade of Aerial Photography (New York: International Center of Photography, 1990), p. 60.[/footnote]

Photography critic, Vicki Goldberg, has emphasized the environmental message of Bridges’ work: “From the vantage point of an angel, the earth must always be beautiful. From Marilyn Bridges’ single-engine Cessna, hovering low at the approximate altitude of an angel with wing trouble, the earth tends to be dark, ambiguous, laced with a mournful poetry.” Goldberg adds, “Bridges is a product of our time, which is awed by the planet seen from the moon, distressed by the view from the car window, and in need of an accommodation with an environment that will never be innocent again….The landscape she surveys from an open cargo door is steeped in memories of greatness and besieged by modern times.”[footnote]Vicky Goldberg, “This Delicate, Patchwork Earth,” in Marilyn Bridges, Sacred and Secular: A Decade of Aerial Photography (New York: International Center of Photography, 1990), pp. 7, 9.[/footnote]

James Welling, 6236, 2008

James Welling (1951 – ), 6236, 2008, inkjet print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Art Acquisition Fund, 2011.002. © James Welling. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London. Philip Johnson Glass House is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

A consideration of the built environment often poses questions of opposition: natural vs. human-made, wild vs. controlled, nature vs. culture. Buildings are often seen as interventions in the landscape or interruptions in the natural world. As truly natural settings are increasingly a thing of the past, we admire architectural icons that acknowledge the interplay between the natural and the built. Philip Johnson’s Glass House, a transparent cube in a wooded setting completed in 1949, is such an icon.

James Welling is a conceptual photographer whose work explores perception, abstraction, memory, and multiple definitions of photography. His series of photographs of the Glass House, made between 2006 and 2009, do all of these at once. In these photographs, Welling melds architecture, nature, and abstraction to produce dreamy meditations on the intersection between the natural and the built environment.

Using a digital camera on a tripod, Welling photographed through a variety of colored plastic and glass filters held in front of the lens to create veils of glowing color. Juxtaposing the glass cube of the house with the natural setting around it, Welling breaks the boundaries between the usually separate categories of landscape and architecture. As he put it, “When I realized I could make the grass red or make sun flares, splatters, and different types of visual activity in front of this supposedly transparent house, or box, the project became a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity, and color.[footnote]”James Welling,” Artforum January 26, 2010. https://www.artforum.com/words/id=24743. Accessed March 13, 2017.[/footnote]

Stephen Shore, North Black Avenue, Bozeman, 1981

Stephen Shore (1947 – ), North Black Avenue, Bozeman, 1981, dye transfer print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Gift of Ted Perry, 1987.033.

In 1982, Tennessee Williams observed about Stephen Shore’s photographs, “His work is Nabokovian for me: Exposing so much, and yet leaving so much room for your imagination to roam and do what it will.”[footnote]As quoted on the artist’s website. http://www.stephenshore.net/info.php. Accessed March 13, 2017.[/footnote] A pioneer in the use of color for fine art photography, for almost five decades Shore has balanced his work on the divide between explication and implication.

This is especially apparent in North Black Avenue, Bozeman, where Shore balances the mundane details of a suburban neighborhood – cracked sidewalk, tilted driveway, tended lawn – with elements of the natural world that, upon closer inspection, seem increasingly artificial. A spherical shrub with glowing orange leaves, a tall pine that hides the house that lurks behind it, other trees that read as white ghosts: all of these bits of nature have surrendered to an environment where they exist only by permission of a relentless human power.

Since its appearance in the 1970s, Shore’s work has been typified by deadpan examinations of banal, “boring” things. Absorbing ideas from Pop Art (Shore was a frequent visitor at Andy Warhol’s Factory) and conceptual art of the sixties and seventies, Shore explored vernacular landscapes, objects, and people in cool, affectless images. He also made what seem to be tongue-in-cheek references to “nature photography” in a number of photographs.

The disconnect between the built environment and the subjects we think of as suitable for the nature photographer is evident in many of Shore’s photographs. Shore’s subjects often play on tropes of nature photography, as when a beautiful snow covered mountain range of the sort Ansel Adams would have photographed appears in a desolate field on a billboard, or the word “sunset” on a sign takes the place of the real thing. In North Black Avenue, Bozeman, trees that would be given pride of place in a photograph by Ansel Adams or Eliot Porter are subsumed by the streets and sidewalks that border them, perhaps as a metaphor for the place of nature in general in our lives.

Sam Kudman, Middlebury ’17, composed music inspired by Shore’s photograph:

Jeffrey Milstein, Coney Island, 2015

Jeffrey Milstein, Coney Island, 2015, archival pigment print. Middlebury College Museum of Art.

Trained as an architect, Jeffrey Milstein has a special sensitivity to the built environment, manifested in his aerial photographs of densely built areas. Geometry and symmetry inform his work, as he finds beauty in the chaos of the urban landscape. Milstein observes, “As an architect, I spent a lot of time drawing plan views and working with geometry and symmetry. I like seeing everything from a bird’s eye view. It lets you see how things relate to each other. Sometimes when I am flying across the country, I look out the window at the cities and roads and try to figure out why and how a particular city and its roads grew where it did based on the geography.”[footnote]Quoted in Anna Marks, “Breathtaking Aerial Photographs Capture London’s Kaleidoscopic Landscape,” The Creators Project, December 2, 2016. https://creators.vice.com/en_uk/article/aerial-photographs-kaleidoscopic-london Accessed March 10, 2017.[/footnote]

Milstein’s Coney Island departs from the emphasis on roads and large buildings seen in his aerial portraits of New York, Los Angeles, London and other cities. Instead, he focuses on the lights and patterns of the amusement park, drawing our attention to the Wonder Wheel and Luna Park. A place we can imagine filled with the sounds of fairground rides and the smells of street food becomes a quiet study in shape and color. Part of Milstein’s series titled “Parks and Recreation,” Coney Island is an example of his desire to photograph places where humans gather. As Milstein observes, “From earliest times people gathered in public spaces for community events, sharing of information, and sporting competition. Italian towns formed around public piazzas. The Greeks had the agora, the Acropolis, and outdoor theaters. Great cities like London and New York have devoted valuable land to public parks.”[footnote]Quoted in Laura Gallant, “21 Stunning Photos That Will Make You See American Differently,” BuzzFeed, January 14, 2016. https://www.buzzfeed.com/lauragallant/21-stunning-photos-that-will-make-you-see-america-differentl?utm_term=.wtgeLyZ0PR#.ak9VW2oXA1. Accessed March 10, 2017.[/footnote]

Marilyn Bridges, Geometries, Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, 1987, gelatin silver print. Middlebury College Museum of Art, gift of an anonymous donor. 2014.060

Photographing while leaning out of a helicopter, Milstein provides dizzying views of public spaces. As is the case in the work of Marilyn Bridges and Jamey Stillings, the aerial view leads to abstraction by drawing our attention to geometric elements arrayed on the flat surface of the earth.

George A. Tice, Industrial Landscape, Kearney, N.J., 1979

George A. Tice (1938 – ), Industrial Landscape, Kearney, N.J., 1979, gelatin silver print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1981.107.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, George Tice has spent six decades documenting his state’s built environment of urban and industrial places. Focusing on what he calls the “sad beauty” of decaying cities and industrial sites,” Tice draws our attention to the quotidian details of often overlooked places, chronicled in his 2002 book, Urban Landscapes. This body of work, begun in the 1960s, focuses on the built environment as a metaphor for identity, passing time, and the homogenization of the American landscape.

Finding a sense of place in the built environment is essential to Tice. In an interview with Jean-Paul Caponigro in 1997, Tice observed: “I think New Jersey is rapidly changing; the landscape, its density, in the last ten years there’s 15,000 more cars on the road. It went through a big boom period of expansion, building office buildings and malls. The malls have killed many of the small towns. The main street is dying. Some are thriving but many are just getting by. There’s less and less of the local, there’s more of the big chains. Sometimes while traveling I can wake up in Connecticut and think I’m in New Jersey…. So I photograph what is essentially, characteristically New Jersey.”[footnote]Jean-Paul Caponigro, “George Tice,” July 1, 1997. http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/photographers/conversations/george-tice/Accessed March 10, 2017.[/footnote]

William Henry Jackson, Phantom Curve, c. 1881-82, albumen print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick W. Lapham III, 1984.043.

In this photograph of a rail yard, light glints on the tracks that lead our eye to a horizon of water tanks, smokestacks, and electrical wires. Compared to William Henry Jackson’s Phantom Curve, made nearly a century earlier, Tice’s scene lacks any references to the natural world. Instead, Tice offers a bleak commentary on a once-optimistic view of industry and transportation. Nevertheless, the subject is beautifully printed, with details emerging from the shadows and carefully controlled highlights.

Berenice Abbott, Canyon Stone and William, 1936

Berenice Abbott (1898 – 1991), Canyon Stone and William, 1936, gelatin silver print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick W. Lapham III., 1984.030. Berenice Abbott/Getty Images

In 1939, Berenice Abbott published Changing New York, her monumental survey of the material culture and built environment of New York. Funded by the Depression Era’s Federal Art Project, Abbot’s photographs examined old buildings that were slated to be demolished, as well as new construction. Inspired by French photographer Eugène Atget’s earlier chronicle of the streets of Paris, Abbott applied her awareness of modernist aesthetics, especially Surrealism, to her work. Using a large format 8x 10 Century Universal camera, she produced a detailed record of the city.

The Wall and Hanover Building at 63 Wall Street provides a backdrop for the Farmer’s Trust Building at 22 William Street on the right and the National City Bank at 55 Wall Street on the left, as well as the pedestrian bridge that connects them. The unusual viewpoint and unexpected enclosed bridge between the buildings in this photograph underscore the geometries of urban canyons and modern skyscrapers. Unlike Edward Steichen’s view of the Flatiron Building from two decades earlier, with its trees and evening atmosphere, this photograph concentrates solely on the urban built environment.

As art historian Peter Barr has noted, Abbott’s attitude about the city was deeply influenced by Lewis Mumford’s writings about America, especially his division of American history into technological eras. Like Mumford, Abbott descried the industrial effects of the post-Civil War “paleotechnic era” and hoped that urban planning would bring about a more humane and human-scaled “neotechnic era.”[footnote]Peter Barr, Becoming Documentary: Berenice Abbott’s Photographs 1925-1939. Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University.[/footnote]

Edward Steichen, The Flatiron—Evening from Camera Work XIV, 1904, published 1906

Edward Steichen (1879 – 1973), The Flatiron—Evening from Camera Work XIV, 1904, published 1906, tritone photogravure on paper. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Walter Cerf Art Fund, 2008.026.

In 1904, Edward Steichen made this evocative photograph of the streets of New York at twilight. Printed using colored inks, the photograph captures the interplay between the natural tree branches, the rainy streets, and the newly built Flatiron Building, one of the tallest buildings in New York at the time. Designed by Daniel Burnham, the Flatiron Building symbolized the latest advances in modern design and steel-frame construction. The building was a symbol of American technological progress; as Steichen’s colleague Alfred Steiglitz declared, “The Flat Iron is to the United States what the Parthenon was to Greece.”[footnote]Quoted in Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 42.[/footnote]

Andō Hiroshige, Fujikawa in the Snow, 1855, woodblock print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Merchants National Bank, Burlington VT, 1974.002.

By allowing the tree to play a prominent role in the foreground, however, Steichen juxtaposed natural and human-built elements. Steichen may have been drawing on his knowledge of Japanese prints, in which similar natural and built features exist harmoniously. Such an aesthetically relevant source would certainly be in keeping with Steichen’s interest, shared with Stieglitz, in underscoring the potential of photography as a fine art medium. Like Japanese woodblock prints, this photogravure was printed with multiple inks (tritone signifies three inks) to produce a color image in the days before practical color photographic processes were available.

The melding of the built and the natural in Steichen’s photograph predicts the role that many cities are playing today as forerunners in environmental awareness and sustainability.

William Henry Jackson, Phantom Curve, c. 1881-82

William Henry Jackson (1843 – 1942), Phantom Curve, c. 1881-82, albumen print. Middlebury College Museum of Art.  Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick W. Lapham III, 1984.043.

During the 1860s, railroad construction radically changed the face of the frontier. Destroying the lives of Native Americans and greatly altering the environment, the railroad enabled large-scale mining and agriculture, along with the permanent settlements that followed. The railroad was a key element in the rise of the built environment in the West, and the accompanying telegraph lines signaled a contemporaneous rise in communication technology.

William Henry Jackson spent part of his youth in Rutland, Vermont, then enlisted in the 12th Vermont Infantry during the Civil War. After a broken engagement, he headed West to work as a bullwhacker on the Oregon Trail. He set up a photography business in Omaha in 1867, then served on the U.S. government survey headed by Ferdinand Vanderveer Hayden from 1871 until its completion in 1878. As a member of the survey, Jackson took some of the first published photographs of the Yellowstone region, documents that led Congress to declare Yellowstone the first national park. In the 1880s, Jackson took on a variety of projects for hotels and railroads, producing thousands of photographs over his long career.

Phantom Curve is located a few miles east of Osier, Colorado. In the early years of Denver and Rio Grande railroad, ghosts were thought to be seen in this stretch of track, although these phantoms were probably the headlights of the locomotives reflecting off the rock formations, or hoodoos, seen in Jackson’s photograph. Jackson shows standing and reclining figures at the base of the rock, while a railroad track, a train car to its side, and telegraph poles are evident in the lower right. These elements speak to the changes taking place in the landscape, as the railroad transformed the natural ecology and social dynamics of the region.

Visiting lecturer and architect, Andrea Murray, shares her thoughts on the photograph: