Poisoned Landscapes

The great tradition of American landscape art of the nineteenth century celebrated the transcendental, the sacred and the ineffable—a conjoining of the visual and the spiritual that focusses upon the perfection of nature exclusive of humanity. These include such visions of the North American continent as the Luminist paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, notably of the Hudson River Valley; the massive landscapes of Albert Bierstadt, both of the Hudson River Valley and of the American West; and the (lesser-known) photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan of the mountainous spaces of Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and New Mexico.   In the twentieth century, the most acclaimed landscape photographer is Ansel Adams, whose beautifully precise, black-and-white photographs of the American West have acquired a mythic status: here is landscape not as mere scenery but as sacred vision. In Adams’s most famous photograph, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,” we see earth and sky commingled into a timeless and seamless whole, irradiated by moonlight. The myth is that amid the visual splendors of transcendental nature there is no “refuse”—no devastation, no collapse, no erosion, no rot; no (seeming) effort, struggle, defeat, death. Which is to say, such transcendental visions of nature are not “natural” but “artificial”—they are distillations of what the eye sees and the brain chooses to select, to arrange formally as art, and to record. (And sell.)