If I had a wilderness...

I have to say, I was pretty excited to get this week's readings in the form of the catalog from Manifest Destiny/Manifest Responsibility. My thesis covers two painters from the Hudson River School Era, Caspar David Friedrich and Albert Bierstadt but I also researched Sanford Gifford and kind of secretly love him. He is the first, that I know of and who I've researched that so obviously depicts man and his effect on nature in a way that questions the values and reasons of Manifest Destiny.

Sanford Gifford, Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866

The painting uses the tropes of the Hudson River School in a way that seduces the viewer. Gifford almost convinces us that the Valley is supposed to look this way, its bowl shape contours with the mountain and a spectacular, unobstructed view is left. The tree stumps are left though, pretty obvious to us in a time when Eco-consciousness is firmly implanted into our brains. But not so obvious to people of the mid-19th century. None of the early Hudson River School painters ever left this sort of commentary. Until this point, it was more like this...

Thomas Cole, Home in the Woods, 1847

Cole's painting has less of an edge on it. A family has settled on the bank of a river, in a beautiful and pristine mountain valley. The people, their freedom and the opportunity to live in a land so overwhelmingly sublime was the promise of America and how the country came to define it's identity. Wilderness was the point by which they would define and name the new development. Wilderness symbolized freedom from religious persecution or more importantly, wilderness symbolized the taking over of religion by nature.

I watched Jeremiah Johnson last night. It just happened to be in my Netflix que. It's a movie by Sydney Pollack (whom I don't normally think of when I think of Westerns) and stars Robert Redford as the ultimate frontier-wilderness man. The story is a little predictable as Westerns go however, the moral of the film is a little different as Johnson struggles between killing and living peacefully with the Native Americans. He wants to live peacefully with them but they are savages and uncompromising. Nothing can stop them from brutally killing you and then taking your scalp.



The struggle with the Indians could be seen as a metaphor for how America conquered the Wilderness and "settled" the land-- systematically wiping them out and forcing them into reservations that are a fraction of the size of our National Parks. It is interesting to think about the names of the places where we live and how the towns, parks, roads and even picnic areas can have some link to a history or at least idea, that the place was once wilderness.

When I'm out shooting in the Midwest and I don't really have an agenda for the day, sometimes I'll pick a place with a name that sounds really good and wild-like thinking that the area will be scenic and ideal for my project. A lot of times the place will have the word "Falls" in it like Little Falls or Laughing Falls or whatever. More often than not, the place sucks. Whatever Falls referred to or meant when it was named, the place doesn't have that feature anymore. It somehow evaporated or was developed over. I can't say that this formula is true when I go out west. More often out there I'll find what I'm looking for when I search by a name (i.e. Red Rocks). But it really disappoints me when it happens. What were the settlers thinking when they named the place? Did they really think that the place looked like what they were calling it? Were they really conscious of how much Romanticism was intertwined with the language they were using?

Another part of this reading that got me thinking was the part about Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant and their legacies on the land. I didn't really know the part about Grant establishing the first National Park in the Yellowstone territory- for some reason I always thought it was Roosevelt. The meaning of wilderness and settlement was to each of them, very different. Jackson and even Jefferson to an extent, really didn't use much discretion in the way of setting aside land that would be left "untouched" or undevelopled. They saw the vastness of the frontier as waiting to be developed and civilized, there's for the taking. Grant actually was the first one to say "hold on, wait a minute, we might go too far. We should probably save something before we ruin it." This is similar to how we marginalize and legislate land use today. A very small portion is rendered to park status and then everything else can be packaged and sold to developers and then those developers try to mimic the environment in their new development (I'm beginning to sound like Robert Adams).

I can easily get upset over this when I read about it. But I think the more proactive thing to do and the thing I've been attempting to do with my photographs is to ask questions. When is it too much? Aren't we co-existing with the land in good ways already? is it all bad? I'm sure it's not. I think many of my photos show ways in which we celebrate the land by establishing development. Ignoring the land really isn't an option. Development will ultimately happen in some capacity, so, why don't we try to reconcile and make the most out of it?

Red Rocks, 2008

I'll end with this video I found on YouTube. It asks the question what would happen if we just give up and live out in the land? what happens then? can we actually become one with the wilderness? For the record, I think the man in the video is not my audience.




Oh, and I just read this in the nytimes about this noteworthy Gifford painting. I wonder who bought it...

Sanford Gifford, Mount Mansfield, 1859