Exercise 4.4 Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men

We are asked to read the essay Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men by Deborah Bright, note key points of interest and add personal reflections.

The essay is written in 1985, and of the genre of articles that raises issues of gender and of subjectivity vs. objectivity with a heavily US bias. It treads the ground of whether landscape is a middle class construct, both practically in the sense of being available to those with the means to access the wilderness, and artistically in the sense of landscape photography being a symbol of control of the land. Bright sets out her case early on:

"it is certainly true that among educated, middle-class audiences, landscape is generally conceived of as an upbeat and wholesome sort of subject which, like mom and apple pie, stands indisputably beyond politics and ideology and appeals to ‘timeless values.... this is too simple. Images of landscape cannot be perceived simply as an antidote to politics, as a pastoral fantasy lulling us back to some primordial sense of our own insignificance."

She continues:

"In the aristocratic classical tradition of painting, landscapes were principally fields for noble action—carefully cultivated gardens suited to the gods and heroes who populated them."

Landscape is seen as a 'selected and constructed text', but the underlying structures of the choices made in that process not challenged - almost as if landscape is taken for granted. Theses choices invariably are middle class and exclude racial and other minorities 

US Western landscape has, Bright contends, become commoditised: 'its benefits bought and sold in the form of camping fees, trail passes, equipment, and vacation packages at wilderness resorts.' Those who can enjoy the packaged scenery, feel part of the American adventure, experience the wilderness. 

This is unduly simplistic, as Bright omits to consider those who live in rural communities. It is unlikely that residents of poor communities in Appalachia, for example, recognise themselves as beneficiaries of packaged landscape to enjoy on Labor Day weekend; they live in it every day. The majority of residents of rural communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania among others defied the metropolitan elite establishment by voting for Donald Trump. 

Bright comments on Jenkins' New Topograhics exhibition, arguing that the view that  photographers had moved from formalism to social critique: "had more to do with the impoverished expectations of what passes for social criticism in the art world than with any positions claimed by the photographers themselves." The artists' work was imbued with social significance by the very fact that it was displayed in the exhibition:

"Modes of framing and hanging, neutral walls, minimal labeling, high rents in high-fashion retail districts, and a reverential hush provoke feelings of awe and respect before the images, even before we’ve inspected them closely."

We are influenced by the fact that photographs are in an exhibition. We go to see them in the expectation that they will say something profound; if we expect to receive a profound message from an exhibition, we will say so whatever. Who wants to spend a morning staring at prints only to come away thinking 'What a waste of time?'. Even worse to say that and then get rebuked by peers who 'see' the profound meaning in the exhibits.

Bright comments also on Robert Adams' (one of the New Topographics photographers) visit to a monument to miners slaughtered by state militia in Colorado, having completed an assignment photographing open pit mines for a commercial assignment. He arrives and realises that his mission - to take pictures that might indict new strip mines - was hopeless; the miners were uninterested and probably members of the National Guard. He continues:

"I was left at the end of the day with a sense of the uncertainty of evil, of the ambiguity of what photography could do with it, and of the fact of my own limited skills. After years with a camera I had wasted still more time trying to do what it apparently was not given me to do."

Adams clearly had no sense of the irony of his statement: that someone - a third force perhaps - had denied him the opportunity to photograph what he considered important. He fails completely to empathise with those who choose a career that somehow did not fit with his preconceptions. It is the view of the subjective observer parachuting himself in to 'show' what he believes to be an evil in the landscape. 

And that is ultimately the problem with some of Bright's thesis. She is selective insofar as she chooses to point out the inconsistencies, the lack of supposed objectivity in the work of others. She decries sexism but then suggests that women might have a 'special stake in documenting zones of privacy and public spaces used primarily by their sex.' Why?, one asks; is this a move to 'women only' photography? It seems paradoxical to suggest this when scorning the male dominated world of wilderness photography. Bright suggests that women's reproductive capacity made it easy to see them 'as nature itself' whereas men's biological miss was 'compensated by the development of symbolic creativity':

 "Men choose to act upon nature and bend it to their will while women simply are nature and cannot separate themselves from it."

Whether this was ever true is open to debate, but it is hardly so now 30 years on from when Bright wrote. 

I conclude that part of Bright's thesis that considers the restrictive ideology around galleries and museums is very relevant today. I believe that 'academic' photography builds up its own structures and self imposed barriers of which the need to demonstrate printed images in a gallery context is a key example. Less convincing are the arguments around perceived sexism; this has in my view been much reduced in recent decades.