Arthur Rothstein, Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936

Arthur Rothstein (1915 – 1985), Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936, gelatin silver print. Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art, gift of George R. Rinhart, 1996.003.

One of the best-known photographs of the Depression Era, Arthur Rothstein’s Dust Bowl Cimarron County, Oklahoma depicts a farmer and his two children fighting against the elements during a dust storm.[footnote]The photograph is alternately titled Fleeing a dust storm. Farther Arthur Coble and sons walking in the fact of a dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma.[/footnote] Rothstein later remembered, “The farmer and his two little boys were walking past a shed on their property, and I took a photograph of them with the dust swirling all around….it showed an individual in relation to his environment.”[footnote]Arthur Rothstein, Words and Pictures (New York: American Photographic Book Publishing Co., 1979), 8.[/footnote]

Although the title leads viewers to believe that the photograph was taken during the height of a dust storm, the photograph was actually a reenactment. A few years after taking the picture, the photographer described how he directed the man and his boys to act out what a storm would be like. He asked the boy on the right to put his arms over his eyes and the father and older son to lean forward as if walking into a powerful storm. The dilapidated shed behind them speaks to the poverty of the times, although in reality the family’s barn and farmhouse were much sturdier structures. While the photograph captures the dire circumstances in which many farmers found themselves, it is the result of what Rothstein called “direction in a picture story” rather than a document of an actual dust storm.[footnote]James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 83.[/footnote]

Listen as Professor of History and Environmental Studies, Kathryn Morse, discusses the photograph within the context of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression:

Bryan Schutmaat, Tonopah, Nevada, 2012

Bryan Schutmaat (1983 – ), Tonopah, Nevada, 2012, archival digital print. Middlebury College Museum of Art.

Bryan Schutmaat’s Tonopah, Nevada is from his Grays the Mountain Sends, a series of photographs exploring small mountain towns and mining communities of the West. While many of the images are portraits of the men who live and work there, the landscapes in the series document the effects of mineral extraction. Initially drawn to the mythic qualities of the American West, Schutmaat eventually settled on mining as a key to understanding the complex relationship between people and the land.

As the artist notes, “More broadly, mining worked well for me because of its historic significance and what it means symbolically to the broader narrative of the project. This plays out in a myriad of ways, but there’s something to be said about the fact that the first white men to ever set foot in the American West were out there in search of precious metal. This has been echoed century after century, through following eras and into Manifest Destiny, as the patriarchs of the West slowly transformed wilderness so they could literally extract riches from the land by brute force. That says a lot and definitely ripples into the present-day West.”[footnote]Quoted in Peter Brown, “On the Road Again: Bryan Schutmaat,” Spot, Spring 2014. http://spot.hcponline.org/pages/bryan_schutmaat__2708.asp. Accessed March 14, 2017.[/footnote]

Marilyn Bridges, Geometries, Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, 1987

Marilyn Bridges (1948 – ), Geometries, Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, 1987, gelatin silver print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Gift of an anonymous donor, 2014.060. Copyright Marilyn Bridges, 2017. All rights reserved.

Just a decade before Marilyn Bridges first began photographing from the air, artist Robert Smithson published an essay titled “Aerial Art,” in which he wrote: “The old landscape of naturalism and realism is being replaced by the new landscape of abstraction and artifice.” As Smithson argued, the aerial view bypassed traditional pastoral views of the agricultural landscape, since from the sky “the landscape begins to look more like a three-dimensional map rather than a rustic garden.”[footnote]Joshua Schuster, “Between Manufacturing and Landscapes: Edward Burtynsky and the Photography of Ecology,” Photography & Culture 6(July 2013), p. 207.[/footnote]

This is certainly the case in her photograph, Geometries, Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, where farmland is translated into pattern, and details succumb to a study in shape and contrast. Still, Bridges sees her subjects as more than formal designs. As she wrote in an essay published in 1997, “I hope to alter the old steadfast view that the land is simply something we live on. I want the viewers to feel they are looking down over the edge of a precipice, and that the discomfort and disorientation they feel is part of the discovery.”[footnote]Marilyn Bridges, “Afterword,” in This Land is Your Land: Photographs by Marilyn Bridges (New York: Aperture, 1997), p. 106.[/footnote]

Bridges photographs what she calls the “calligraphy” of humanity’s attitudes toward the earth, as visible from the sky. Lacking horizons and ground-view spatial relationships, and oscillating between geometric abstractions and topographical documents, her compositions urge us to consider the implications of our relationship with the surface of the earth.

 

Edward Burtynsky, Rock of Ages No. 19, Granite Section, Rock of Ages Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991

Edward Burtynsky (1955 – ), Rock of Ages No. 19, Granite Section, Rock of Ages Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991, chromogenic color print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Walter Cerf Art Fund, 2008.034.

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is one of the best-known environmental photographers in the world. From his early photographs of quarries in Vermont to his current project, Anthropocene, Burtynsky has focused on what he calls the “residual landscape” in which nature is transformed by industry. For over three decades, Burtynsky’s mission as an artist has been to create aesthetically compelling photographs with a message about our increasingly unsustainable appetite for our planet’s limited resources.

Resource extraction is as old as human civilization; however, today’s rates of consumption are exceeding the supplies needed to maintain our modern lifestyles. In photographic essays on oil, water, and mining in particular, Burtynsky makes this point with images that counter their bleak message with luscious colors and visually complex compositions. While some critics have questioned this contradiction, in Burtynsky’s view compelling images lead viewers to his deeper message.

Burtynsky began by photographing the “pristine” wilderness, but, as he has stated, “I felt I was born a hundred years too late to be searching for the sublime in nature. To me, pursuing this would have just been an expression of nostalgia.”[footnote]Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky (Ottawa:National Gallery of Canada, 2003), p. 47.[/footnote] Although Burtynsky’s works are usually thought of within the aesthetic category of the industrial sublime, Joshua Schuster has observed that “the sublime is breathlessness at a distance that stays distant and thus involves an uneasy relationship with forms of hands-on environmentalist activism.”[footnote]Joshua Schuster, “Between Manufacturing and Landscapes: Edward Burtynsky and the Photography of Ecology,” Photography & Culture 6(July 2013), p. 194.[/footnote] Schuster proposes the category of “ecological sublime” for Burtynsky (although with his emphasis on photographing the largest quarry, the largest mine, the largest oil spill, perhaps we should also factor in the “statistical sublime” when considering his work).

Burtynsky’s work examines our complex ecological relationship to commodities. As he observed in 2007, “To me, if you build your polemics around the point that all corporations are bad, it lacks necessary complexity; it is just too narrow and almost a caricature of a view. …it is …quite easy for some environmentalists to feel self-righteous, to get up on the soapbox without the full grasp of the complexity of the problem. My goal is to allow dialogue, not to draw lines and start throwing things at each other again, because this has not gotten us anywhere all these years.”[footnote]Christopher Grabowski, “Framing Global Capitalism,” The Tyee, January 19, 2007. http://thetyee.ca/Photo/2007/01/19/GlobalCapitalism.  Accessed August 1, 2016.[/footnote]

Clarence White, The Orchard, 1902

Clarence White (1871-1925), The Orchard, from Camera Work IX, 1902, published 1905, photogravure. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Walter Cerf Art Fund. 2008.022.

A member of the circle of pictorialist photographers championed by Alfred Stieglitz in the pages of the magazine Camera Work, Clarence White was an important voice for photography as fine art. Working in the medium of platinum prints, often reproduced as photogravures, White frequently portrayed his family and friends performing simple actions.

The Orchard shows three women picking apples. Instead of focusing on the hard work of the harvest season, White posed his fashionably dressed figures in the act of picking fruit from the trees or ground. A high viewpoint allows us to look down on the flowing skirt of the foreground figure, while the mid-ground women are silhouetted artistically in their dark dresses.

Danny Lyon, Cotton Pickers, Ferguson Unit, Texas, from Conversations with the Dead, 1968, gelatin silver print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Gift of Carl W. Melcher, M.D., 1983.035.

White’s decision to emphasize the artistic components of this scene runs counter to his political beliefs. As a Socialist, White believed in workers’ rights and the injustice of poverty; however, his politics rarely informed his photography.[footnote]Maynard White, Jr., “Clarence H. White: Artist in Life and Photography,” in Clarence H. White (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1977), 19. [/footnote] Instead, he steadfastly stayed “on the art side of things,” as his student, Dorothea Lange, later recalled.[footnote]Maynard White, Jr., “Clarence H. White: Artist in Life and Photography,” in Clarence H. White (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1977), 23.[/footnote] Compared to Danny Lyon’s photograph of Texas penitentiary prisoners forced to harvest cotton, White’s image idealizes agricultural labor in the interest of aesthetic appeal.

Frank Gohlke, Grain Elevator, Hutchinson, Kansas, 1973

Frank Gohlke (1942 – ), Grain Elevator, Hutchinson, Kansas, 1973, printed 1974, gelatin silver print. Middlebury Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Fine Arts Acquisition Fund, 2011.011. © Elise Paradis

In 1971, Frank Gohlke began photographing a huge depot of grain elevators seen from his home in Minneapolis, transforming the buildings into, in the words of John Rohrbach, “dreamscapes of gigantism and hidden power.”[footnote]John Rohrbach, “Who’s In Control Here?” in Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke (Chicago: Center for American Places in associations with the Amon Carter Museum, 2007), 129.[/footnote] This led to a sustained project of photographing grain elevators throughout the Midwest. The resulting photographs, including Grain Elevator, Hutchinson, Kansas, show agricultural landscapes punctuated by massive buildings that rise far into the sky from the flat fields surrounding them.

Taking part in the important exhibition, “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” in 1975 at the George Eastman House, Gohlke joined eight other photographers in producing dead-pan records of landscapes that acknowledged the place of human intervention in nature. Working counter to the idealized views of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, New Topographics photographers looked to the vernacular landscape and its architecture as a key to understanding contemporary culture.

Gohlke’s photographs stand out for their emphasis on the agricultural landscape and the symbols inherent in it. Rebecca Solnit writes of Gohlke’s grain elevator photographs, “grain elevators challenge the horizontality of the landscape, becoming watchtowers or church spires; but it only takes a moment to realize that those structures were made to hold grain and that they, stark against the sky, speak of the great expanses of level, arable land and the people who toil there. The grain that fills a grain elevator is, after all, the horizontal piled high.”[footnote]Rebecca Solnit, “Comfort and Debris,” in Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke (Chicago: Center for American Places in associations with the Amon Carter Museum, 2007), 156.[/footnote]

Jacques Lowe, untitled, c. 1960

Jacques Lowe (1930-2001), untitled, c. 1960, gelatin silver print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Stephen Nicholas, 2015.120.

Jacques Lowe’s photograph of a farm boy bringing cattle along a fence on a snowy field feels familiar to those of us who live in Vermont, where diary cows frequently symbolize an idyllic existence far from the seemingly pernicious effects of urban life. However, when it comes to the land and issues of sustainability, rural agricultural practices raise as many questions as they answer.

Lowe’s photographs often focus on the innocent pastimes of children, although in this instance the boy participates in a larger dialogue about labor on the land.  The wire fence that separates the child and cattle from the space in front of them reminds us of complexities of raising livestock, which some scientists have shown are major contributors to air and water pollution.

Paul Strand, White Fence, Port Kent, New York, 1916

Paul Strand (1890-1976), White Fence, Port Kent, New York, 1916, photogravure, published in Camera Work, 1917. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Walter Cerf Art Fund, 2008.031. © Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive

Paul Strand’s photograph, usually referred to simply as The White Fence, appeared in the pages of the magazine Camera Work, edited by Alfred Stieglitz, who devoted the final two issues of the magazine to Strand’s work. In Strand, Stieglitz saw a new voice, one that plumbed the visual world for its abstract qualities, in keeping with the rise of interest in abstraction among avant-garde painters and sculptors.

Clearly Strand was drawn to the interplay of shapes and geometric planes in this photograph of a fence and buildings; however, the role of the fence in cordoning off and shaping a space also has metaphoric implications that Strand would continue to explore in later photographs of walls, fences, and gates. Pure landscapes are rare in Strand’s work. Instead he was drawn to close-up views of foliage or, as in the case of this photograph, images that commented on the interactions of humans with the land.

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

Similar to the aerial work of Marilyn Bridges, an unexpected viewpoint encourages us to consider the altered landscape in new ways.  Strand pulls us close to the fence, inviting us to peer between as well as over its slats to the more distant barn and house.  And, as in Bridges’ work, geometry signals human dominance over nature.

Marilyn Bridges, Barn Shadow, 1981

Marilyn Bridges (1948 – ), Barn Shadow, 1981, gelatin silver print. Middlebury College Museum of Art. Gift of an anonymous donor, 2014.078. Copyright Marilyn Bridges, 2017. All rights reserved.

In 1940, Woody Guthrie wrote the song, “This Land is Your Land.”  Photographer Marilyn Bridges, whose work is included in three sections of this exhibition, observed in 1990, “This song affirms the grandeur of the land as a symbol for the unlimited possibilities of a people blessed with this ‘land of good and plenty.’ But the years have not been good to the earth. Mankind has flexed its muscles and challenged the land to a test of durability. There can be no winners in this contest. For there can be no doubt that while the land will exist without people, people cannot live without the land.”[footnote]Marilyn Bridges and William Least Heat-Moon, This Land is Your Land: Photographs by Marilyn Bridges Across America by Air (New York: Aperture, 1997), p. 106.[/footnote]

In this photograph, Bridges uses the shadow of a barn in the foreground to imply that we are looking at farmland, while the trees and their shadows suggest a natural world apart from human alterations. Bridges’ aerial viewpoint distances the viewer, literally and figuratively, from the scene. In place of the customary intimate position of walking level, the aerial shot enables the viewer to view the scene in what one scholar has called the “post-human” gaze of a survelliance camera or reconnaissance satellite.[footnote]Joshua Schuster, “Between Manufacturing and Landscapes: Edward Burtynsky and the Photography of Ecology.” Photography & Culture 6(July 2013), pp. 207-08.[/footnote]