Porter had his own restrictions about what should be represented and what should be found beautiful. In 1977, he saw The End of the Game, an exhibition of African images by the fashion and wildlife photographer Peter Beard, at the International Center for Photography (ICP). Beard took a radically nonmodernist tack in his book of the same name, writing on photographs, using his own work together with older images, and collaging them scrapbook-style with other material in the style of Victorian travel journals. Porter, who brought the Victorian texts of Thoreau together with his own images, could conceivably have been sympathetic, but he exclaimed in a letter that the project “was supposed to influence people for conservation but played to morbid curiosity and violence. It memorialized killing and death with dead animals, dying animals, a half eaten human body. and 100 elephant carcasses.”
Porter had gone to the ICP to discuss an exhibition of his Antarctic photographs, which also included dead animals—seals that had died after becoming stranded inland, then been mummified and partially flayed by the arid winds. But Beard’s images were not so gracious: elephants dying in a far warmer zone were a far messier business, and he attempted to suggest the sheer scope of the disaster with his copious images of elephant herds, corpses, and skeletons. He intended to shock and hoped to change minds by doing so. The huge die-off had been caused by a population explosion that denuded the landscape—ultimately it was caused by the unnaturalness of game protection laws born out of Euro-American ideas about wilderness as a place apart from humans (echoing the mistakes made by American game management that had led to the Kaibab Plateau defoliation and deer die-off decades earlier).
It could be said that Porter photographed uneventful cyclical time, Adams an almost Biblical sense of revelatory suspension of time, and Beard the turbulent time of the news. Elsewhere Porter had argued that photography “almost always unintentionally softens rather than exaggerates the unpleasant aspects of the conditions it attempts to dramatize most forcefully. The same is true when photography is used to show the devastations produced by man’s works. The utter desolation visible on the scene of operation is almost impossible to reveal in photographs.” Although, concerning Beard, he argued that the photographs were not softened at all, but sensationalistic, the same principle—that a photography makes the most reprehensible things pleasant to behold, even fascinating—remains. This assertion justified Porter’s own strategy of showing what can be saved and what remains intact, rather than what has been ravaged, of photographing nature as existing in cyclical time rather than history (though looming catastrophe had been the unseen subject of The Place No One Knew).
Porter and Adams functioned in a unique way at a unique time: their aesthetic work had a kind of political impact that is hard to imagine in any other arena. Even those who were not great supporters of the publications program of the Sierra Club acknowledged that it was the books—particularly the photographic books, and among those particularly Porter’s—that first made the Sierra Club a visible force nationwide. It was a rare moment in history when art could achieve political ends so profound, when the mere sight of such images and reminder of such places became a powerful motivating force, when a pair of artists who were much admired in museum circles could do heroic work in environmental ones. No artist can ask for more than to live in a time when art can change the world.
LEGACY
Today’s well-respected landscape photographers are making very different work, and few of them have the role within environmental organizations or the broad popular success that Porter did. The terrain has changed. Almost two decades after In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, the landscape photographer Robert Adams wrote,
More people currently know the appearance of Yosemite Valley and the Grand Canyon from having looked at photographic books than from having been to the places themselves; conservation publishing has defined for most of us the outstanding features of the American wilderness. Unfortunately, by perhaps an inevitable extension, the same spectacular pictures have also been widely accepted as a definition of nature, and the implication has been circulated that what is not wild is not natural. . . . There are now far fewer unpublicized wilderness areas, and there are relatively few converts, with the exception of children, left to be won to the general idea of wilderness preservation.
Adams argues here that the same images mean different things at different points in history. By the time he wrote, the popular imagination had reached a point where such imagery had achieved what success it could; a new generation of photographers, he argued, ought instead to “teach us to love even vacant lots out of the same sense of wholeness that has inspired the wilderness photographers of the past twenty-five years.”
Of course, it can be argued that Porter photographed backyards, if not vacant lots, along with people, ruins, and signs of rural life from Maine to Mexico, but this Adams has a point. Whatever images Porter made, the images of his that proved most memorable and influential were of a pristine nature, a place apart. Though Porter’s pictures may have been primarily of the timeless seasonal world of natural phenomena, they existed in historical time; and their influence, even their appearance, has changed over the decades. Later in his career, Porter himself came to believe that his photographs were as likely to send hordes of tourists to an area as to send hordes of letters to Congress in defense of that area, countering Fox’s argument that the books could substitute for visits to wilderness. Far more Americans had become familiar with the remote parts of the country, and recreational overuse as well as resource extraction and development threatened to disturb the pristine places. It may be precisely because Porter’s work succeeded so spectacularly in contributing to American awareness and appreciation for remote and pristine places that different messages may now be called for. This invisible success is counterbalanced by a very visible one: thousands of professionals and countless amateurs now produce color nature photography more or less in the genre first set out by Porter.
The professional work is not quite like his (nor is the amateur, though for different reasons). For the most part, Porter seemed to value truth more and beauty—at least showy, bright beauty—less. He was concerned more with representing processes, systems, and connections than many of his followers are. He often made photographs of reduced tonal range, and some of his images of bare trees in snow are not immediately recognizable as being in color: “Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors.” The contemporary nature photographers whose work is seen in calendars and advertisements tend to pump up the colors and portray a nature far more flawless and untouched than anything Porter found decades earlier (though the best defense for such images is that some of them continue to raise money for environmental causes). Their work tends to crop out anything flawed and to isolate a perfect bloom, a perfect bird, a perfect icicle, in compositions usually simpler than Porter’s. Looking at these images, one has the sense that if Porter founded a genre, the genre has become narrower rather than broader since.
Porter photographed dead animals and mating Galapagos turtles, but Barry Lopez, who himself once photographed animals, noted: “In the 1970s came, ironically, a more and more dazzling presentation of those creatures in incomplete and prejudicial ways. Photo editors made them look not like what they were but the way editors wanted them to appear—well-groomed, appropriate to stereotype, and living safely apart from the machinations of human enterprise.” A kind of inflationary process has raised the level of purity, of brightness, of showiness each image must have. Some of this may be about the continued evolution of technologies; with improvements in film and cameras and innovations like Photoshop, more technical perfection is possible now than in Porter’s time. And images that were relatively original in his work have now become staples, even clichés.
The thing least like an original is an imitation; they look alike, but they are not akin at all in their function in the world. Porter’s work is innovative, responding imaginatively to a new medium and the new w
ay of representing the world that the medium made possible. Imitating Porter is not responding to the world but to a now-established definition of it. As the decades go by, these images tend to look more and more like each other and less and less like what we actually see most of the time we go to natural places. The photographers who are most like Porter in their innovations of composition, their definition of nature and the human place in it, as well as the role of photography in the preservation of the world, may be those whose work looks least like his, who make work that responds to their beliefs, the crises of the day, and their outdoor encounters with the same imaginative integrity as Porter did to his. But Porter’s primary legacy may not be photographic but something far more pervasive, a transformation of how we see and what we pay attention to.
The Botanical Circus, or
Adventures in American Gardening
[2003]
Eden is the problem, of course. Eden stands as the idea of nature as it should be rather than as it is, and in attempting to make a garden resemble Eden, the gardener wrestles the garden away from resembling nature—nature, that is, as the uncultivated expanses around it, the patterns that would assert themselves without interference. If gardens were actual nature, we would just have a plot of land outside, left alone, that wind and birds and proximate plants would seed and rain would water. Even in the humid temperate zones, let alone in America’s desert Southwest, a good deal of manipulation of soil and water is necessary to make something nonnative grow. Eden serves as the phantasmagorical plan, as the ideal nature, to which every gardener cleaves. But no two gardeners have quite the same vision of it, and some versions of paradise are very fabulous and unrestrained indeed. There are both individual variations and historical evolutions in the ideal of the garden as an improved nature, a paradise; and of course paradise itself originally meant an enclosed garden, the kind of formal Islamic garden whose floor plans can be seen on most Persian carpets.
We love nature as a child loves a parent, but gardeners love their gardens as parents love children, with a preoccupied, hectoring, imposing love, not unlike that of museum curators, editors, animal tamers. Thoreau fretted over it in Walden, writing of the crop he grew with gardeners’ contemplativeness:
I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer,—to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil. . . . My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. . . . A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead.
Thoreau wrote with such wryness because, as an American romantic, he admired the unaltered landscape, and that admiration itself was the fruit of a long European history of garden evolution and the control of nature. Nature was sufficiently abundant, even overwhelming, throughout most of human history that it did not need to be referenced as an ideal, exactly. Some cultures assumed that nature was fine as it was, making gardens unnecessary; others thought that nature was fallen and yearned for an absent paradise whose parameters they sketched with herbs and flowers and walls or, in Asia, with pines and pools and stones. Usually they yearned for a more visibly ordered nature. Our horticultural ancestors the Romans had topiary and espaliered trees and neatly patterned beds; their ideal nature partook of geometry reminiscent of military formations. After them, one could say that nature relaxed into boudoirlike sanctuaries for all the senses until safety, wealth, and a returning preoccupation with geometrical order prompted the explosion of the formal garden in the seventeenth century. Gardens—aristocratic gardens, gardens of extraordinary expense—then reached a sort of Euclidean-Cartesian apogee of conical trees and long allées and managed fountains, and spread into the surroundings as they grew larger and larger: Versailles with its avenues to the horizon is the ultimate example, a garden that competes with the world. A 1712 English guide described part of an ideal garden’s layout:
two Squares, each having four Quarters, with Basons. It is terminated by a long Arbour, with three Cabinets facing the Walks and Pavilions. On the Right are Green-Plots cut, to answer the walks, having Water-works, as on the other Side. These are bounded by a double line of Cases and Yews, and behind, by green Niches for Seats and Figures. On the Side is a Parterre of Orange-Trees walled in, having Iron Grills against the Walks; and at the End is a Bason, with Cabinets and green Niches for Seats.
The notion that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction is as true of gardening as anything else: the English in the eighteenth century began to link the formality of such gardens to despotism and generated a notion of nature as ideal that is still with us. It was a tremendous reversal, full of its own contradictions.
The idea that unaltered nature might be worthy of contemplation as gardens was always slipping into the collective imagination in that century, and nature—or rather, Nature—became a goddess constantly invoked. A year after the above-cited garden manual, Alexander Pope effused, “There is certainly something in the amiable Simplicity of unadorned Nature, that spreads over the Mind a more noble sort of Tranquility, and a loftier Sensation of Pleasure, than can be raised from the nicer Scenes of Art.” All the garden geometry of paths and parterres and, particularly, topiary had come to seem obnoxiously or at least ridiculously unnatural, that new term of condemnation, and Pope condemned the last with famous verve in an imaginary catalogue of topiaries: “Adam and Eve in Yew; Adam a little shatter’d by the fall of the Tree of Knowledge in the Great Storm; Eve and the serpent very flourishing. St. George in Box; his Arm scarce long enough, but will be in a Condition to stick the Dragon by next April. A green Dragon on the same, with a Tail of Ground-Ivy for the present. N.B. These two not to be Sold separately,” and so on. The naturalistic garden known as the English garden evolved by degrees; parterres and topiary were done away with, and the gridded landscape gave way to serpentine paths and meanders, but sculpture and architecture still abounded until mid-century, when the inimitable Capability Brown began to do away with them as well.
Of course, the English garden was imitating a very particular notion of nature, one that at least at first was found more in the paintings of Claude and Poussin and sometimes Salvator Rosa than in the countryside all around. So one of the great contradictions is that the English garden is imitating art in its attempt to imitate nature, and the nature it is willing to imitate is once again a very specific idealized thing, though at least it’s a flowing, complex thing. The radical idea was that nature was already orderly (an idea that cleared the way to start questioning the Fall or even to go with Rousseau and see it as a fall from natural innocence into civilized corruption). One thing led to another, as plenty of garden histories recount at length, and the culmination of this naturalizing process was that the surrounding landscape was by the 1770s found worthy of contemplation and suitable for strolling. Scenic-appreciation guidebooks by the likes of William Gilpin replaced garden-books as the manuals of appropriate aesthetic responsiveness.
To some extent, the world ever since has been regarded as once only gardens were. It’s a tremendous history, out of the garden and into the landscape, and from thence originate both the outdoor industries and the environmental movement, perhaps even the idea of the national park. It’s about a knight’s move toward democracy—first toward gardens that, if they required less maintenance, required more space: a thousand-acre garden is only so democratic. But it opened the way to regard the
whole world as a garden, at which point one no longer needed privileged access: Hampstead Heath would do, or an excursion train, or a long walk away from the factory districts (the latter two assiduously utilized into the mid-twentieth century in England, though nature never achieved that kind of populist status in America, perhaps because too many populists were still busy fleeing the farm). It recalls a parallel evolution in the visual arts in the second half of the twentieth century, in which, as Robert Irwin put it long before he himself became a garden designer, “the object of art may be to seek the elimination of the necessity of it.”
The eighteenth-century dissolution of the garden into the landscape is a spectacular history that left only one unresolved question: what kinds of gardens were people going to have around their homes after that apotheosis of Nature? Christopher Thacker writes, “For several decades the nineteenth century had no distinctive garden style, but remained unsettled, eclectic and searching, as it did in architectural form, in furniture and in clothing.” If the great eighteenth-century impulse came out of the growing control that human beings had over the world, a control that meant it was safe to let down the garden walls and satisfying to be occasionally overwhelmed by nature rather than to overwhelm it, then the nineteenth century came from very different impulses. Letting well enough alone was one of the few pastimes the Victorians never entertained. A new fussiness returned, as did the formalism of bright flowerbeds that no longer spoke of great Euclidian expanses of aristocratic order, just of the obsession with pattern and the bourgeois anxiety to sort it all out. And there was so much more to sort out. The Victorian garden comes perhaps from the botanical garden rather than the pleasure garden or landscape garden. And the botanical garden was less about the beauty of Eden per se than its symbolic and literal abundance. This is a shift in part from the garden as primarily a composition to the garden as a collection, and with that shift the garden regained its details—its flowers and unusual plants—that had been lost in the rush toward naturalism. (One of the peculiarities of garden history is how little it is plant history, particularly the landscape gardens, in which everything was meant to become pleasing composition at a suitable distance; flowers were banished in part because such gardens were not about details and close-ups and individual phenomena, and they were certainly not about brightness.)
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 28