Thinking about the Altered Landscape

Patricia Nelson Limerick’s essay in NMA’s 1999 book The Altered Landscape considers the meaning of the word ‘altered’ as it is used to describe the work of the ‘New Topographics’ artists and their followers. Limerick is an accomplished writer and historian who deals with issues of the American West. About ‘altered’ she writes:

“This flexible and hardworking word supplies three rich meanings for the price of one. After two hundred years of American colonization, the West has indeed been altered, in the sense of changed, made different, modified. In cheerful and positive terms, it has been reshaped and resewn in order to make a better fit for the needs and habits of the humans who have colonized it. And in the glummest of terms, the West has been castrated, neutered, and robbed of its power.”

Limerick looks at the validity of all three definitions and leaves the answers to the viewer. She asks, “Can one celebrate and admire these photographers and still find much of their work irritating? You bet! A photograph can attract and still scrape and scratch at the viewer’s mind.” She points out that this work can irritate us because it doesn’t come with packaged answers. We have to figure it out ourselves – ultimately a satisfying task! And she believes that whatever the passion and convictions a photographer may have, “taking a photograph requires the photographer to calm down, think, plan, and hold still – a discipline, regrettably, forced on few other professions.”

She talks about walls of buildings – “the most easily recognized lines between the human sphere and the natural sphere” – and how the different photographers consider them. She talks about light: “And light, artificial light, just as much as natural light, is a wonder and a miracle, as a number of these photographs remind us. Over the last century, night has been transformed; starlight and moonlight may hold onto a magic that a light bulb will not match, but starlight and moonlight nonetheless dim when they compete with the radiance of electrical light. Lewis Baltz’s photograph of a construction site at night returns us to the familiar slippage of the border between inside and outside and suggests that anything may happen in this luminous place; a prophet might come upon a vision; hope might get a new life; a new life might be conceived and born. Of course, it is a construction site; of course it is an artifact of the despoliation of a more-or-less intact Western landscape; of course it is an imposition of sovereign, arrogant human will on the earth. The house is also quite a beautiful arrangement of line and light.”

“ The West has been altered, adapted to a better fit with human activity, and one element of that adaptation is that the nights are a lot brighter. It is a great deal easier after sunset to read, write, cook, sew, and look at one another than it was a century ago, to spend the evening watching TV or using a computer. Dams, coal-fired plants, and nuclear power plants made this possible. And now some people tap into these omnipresent power lines, turn on their computers, and write impassioned denunciations of the injuries inflicted on the West by the production of cheap electrical power.” But as a counterpoint to that she points out that, “All the exercises of power recorded in these photographs, exercises in earth-moving, dam building, house-constructing, road making, and power distributing have trashed landscapes that someone loved.”

Limerick feels that whether or not we are religious, we do subscribe to the story of the loss of Eden; as if we, through our relentless development, have lots our chance to live in Paradise. “By altering the Western landscape, by neutering it and stripping it of its power, we arranged for our departure from Eden. Americans themselves barred their own way back to Eden, and barred it not with a dramatic flaming sword, but with the sheer prosaic passage of time and the even more prosaic development of business and real estate. We locked the door back to Eden – not with swords, cherubim, and many-headed beasts, but with subdivisions, parking lots, commercial shopping strips, dams, highway interchanges and power lines.”

She speaks of some of the Altered Landscape photographs that depict places where nature truly has been savaged by development. And yet she reminds us that Nineteenth-Century America, with its civil wars, slavery, mistreatment of Native Americans and widespread poverty was not a paradise. “The great consolation of the historian’s life comes in the dozens of reminders that the past holds no golden age. Life today is a mess. Fortunately, life in the past was also a mess...Let me put this gently; those who see in the desecration of Western nature a ratification of the legend of the Fall, those who think that we are now living in desperate and declined times, would find some relief for their terrible sense of loss if they put down the newspaper and read a little history.”

Limerick speaks of two Wests: “ the out-of-doors, wide-open-spaced, dirt-dominated rural West, and the enclosed-spaced, walled-off, indoors, asphalt-covered urban West.” They are “trying, not very successfully, to work out a virtually agreeable zoning code. The loudest voices from the rural West ask for the freedom to make a living from the land; they demand their right to continue to practice ‘traditional’ land uses that are, in fact, barely a century old. The most audible requests from the city, meanwhile, ask for the rural West to be defined primarily as a place for urbanites to drive, hike, ski, ride mountain bikes, camp, romp, stay in bed-and-breakfasts, admire views, and recover from the pressures of life in the city. She points out that so many in the cities never consider where their food comes from, where their lumber comes from, or how it is that heat and light appear in their homes. “There is a chance that these fine-tuned urbanites would starve, or freeze, or spend their evenings in the dark if they succeeded in imposing their standards on rural America.”

Lastly, Limerick writes about aerial photography which shows “the surface of the planet as a canvas marked by geological and biological forces and by acts of the human will. Viewed from the vantage point of the sky, the transformation of the world by patterns of electric light at night leaves one stunned and speechless. Viewed from above, roads become hieroglyphics carved into the earth. In their arbitrariness and cryptic logic the roads become riddles in dirt.”

“The photographs in the Altered Landscape collection permit us to respond to ourselves, and to the messages we have marked into the earth. The photographers themselves do not pose a detached and omniscient group of observers. They admit, instead, to being part of the species that does both the looking and the marking.”

--Kathleen Durham

Carleton Watkins :: Yosemite Photographs

Did You Know :: Carleton Watkins’ Yosemite Photographs

Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) had virtually no practical photography experience during the Civil War, as did many of his contemporaries. In 1851, when he was twenty-one, Watkins left Oneonta, New York, for California, following the example of Collis P. Huntington, another Oneonta native who had moved to California to make his fortune. After a stint in Huntington's store in Sacramento, Watkins moved to San Francisco, where he chanced into an apprenticeship with the daguerreotypist Robert Vance. By 1858, Watkins had established an independent practice, photographing mining operations and land claims for financiers who were building their careers in the lap of the new state.

Watkins and his contemporaries Charles Leander Weed and Eadweard Muybridge labored under difficult conditions to produce enormous photographs of Yosemite that pushed the technological limits of the medium and mirrored the scale of the place beginning in the 1860s and continuing into the 1890s.

In 1861 Carleton Watkins made history when he hauled a huge box camera—custom-designed around the glass-plate negatives needed for large prints—into Yosemite. Once a shot was framed, the plate was coated with a light-sensitive emulsion, then exposed and developed on-site in a dark tent. It was a grueling process, in which a drop of sweat or a stray insect could ruin the image and hours of work. Watkins’s 1861 photographs were among the first in the world to be considered landscape art. Three years later, Weed took his own mammoth plate camera to Yosemite, but Watkins’s main competitor was Eadweard Muybridge. Often composed like landscape paintings, Muybridge’s Yosemite photographs differed stylistically from Watkins’s classically structured works. Muybridge also signed his negatives to avoid the piracy that plagued Watkins, whose prints were reissued without credit to the photographer. Together, these three men transformed photography as an art form and inspired generations of artists. Their legacy persists in Yosemite, which remains among the most photographed landscapes in the world.

In 1861, Watkins traveled with one of his patrons, Trenor Park, entrepreneur of the Mariposa gold mine, on a family excursion to Yosemite. Unknown to white settlers until 1849, the valley was twenty hours by stage and mule from San Francisco. But word spread fast at the Mariposa mine, and by 1858 there were land claims, a better road, and tourists enough to support a hotel. In 1859, Charles Leander Weed photographed the valley, and by 1861 Easterners had come to know of the awe-inspiring site from articles in the Boston Evening Transcript, written by the Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King.

The 30 mammoth-plate (18x22 inches) and 100 stereo views that Watkins took in Yosemite in 1861 were among the first photographs of the valley sent back east. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson received copies through Starr King, and in 1862 the photographs excited further interest when they were exhibited at Goupil's New York gallery. It was partly on their evidence that President Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 declaring the valley inviolate and leading the way to the National Parks system.

Watkins combined a mastery of the difficult wet-plate negative process with a rigorous sense of pictorial structure. For large-format landscape work such as he produced in Yosemite, the physical demands of this process were great. Since there was as yet no practical means of enlarging, Watkins’ glass negatives had to be as large as he wished the prints to be, and his camera large enough to accommodate them. Furthermore, the glass negatives had to be coated, exposed, and developed while the collodion remained tacky, requiring the photographer to transport a traveling darkroom as he explored the rugged terrain of the American West.

Relevant Vocabulary

Mammoth Plate an oversize glass plate used to make a negative image in nineteenth-century photography

Albumen Print a photographic print made on paper coated with albumen (egg white)

Ambrotype a mid-nineteenth-century photographic type in which a positive image was recorded on collodion wet plate.

Daguerreotype an early photographic type in which an image is recorded on highly polished piece of metal coated with a light sensitive emulsion. Daguerreotypes were one-of-a-kind images that could not be reproduced.

Wet Collodion a nineteenth-century photographic type in which a piece of plate glass was coated with a silver halide emulsion and placed in a camera while still wet. A latent image was recorded, and then the wet plate was developed, fixed, and varnished to create a glass negative for production of stereograph and mammoth plate photographs.

Silver Gelatin Print the most common form of twentieth-century black-and-white photographic print, in which a piece of paper is coated with a light-sensitive silver gelatin emulsion

Stereograph a popular nineteenth-century photograph in which two small, side-by-side images made using a special twin lens camera create the illusion of a three dimensional scene.

Sublime a historical, philosophical, literary, and art idea that contributed to Romanticism the notion of a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.

Romanticism an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature.

Framework

Explain to guests that the first Euro-Americans to see the Yosemite region were probably part of the Walker party in 1833, but the first official entrants were part of the Mariposa Battalion, who, in 1851, were sent to forcibly remove the Indian inhabitants of Yosemite after the discovery of gold on John C. Frémont’s ranch in the Mariposa/Bear Valley area of the Sierra Nevada foothills. Shortly thereafter, in 1855, publisher James Mason Hutchings entered Yosemite with a party of men, including Thomas A. Ayres, who created the first drawing of Yosemite Falls ever made.

Explain that the three most significant of Yosemite’s nineteenth-century photographers—Charles Leander Weed, Carleton E. Watkins, and Eadweard J. Muybridge—all created photographs of Yosemite from glass negatives, using the wet plate collodion process, and printing them on paper using the albumen process. All three men were famed for their mammoth plates, unusually large, plate glass negatives designed to capture the large sweeping vistas of Yosemite (and other western sites). However, all three men also created numerous stereographs or stereoviews. These much smaller, side-by-side images were popular for armchair travelers after their invention in the 1840s, and they were comparatively inexpensive, which made them an increasingly popular tourist souvenir commemorating a visit to a wondrous place like Yosemite.

Explain that publisher and entrepreneur James Mason Hutchings made another visit to Yosemite in June, 1859, this time with photographer Charles Weed, rather than a painter or drawer, as he had in 1855 with Thomas Ayres. This was in part because Ayres’ drawings and lithographs, which had been published in Hutchings’ California Magazine in 1855, were deemed by readers to be fanciful—and Hutchings needed to prove that Yosemite Falls were indeed as dramatic as they had been earlier represented.

Explain that Weed took the first photograph of Yosemite in 1859, an imperial-sized (10x14-inch) salt print of Yosemite Falls. During this first visit, he made twenty imperial prints, and forty stereograph views of Yosemite, beginning what would become Later, in 1863/1864, Weed returned with a camera capable of holding 17x22-inch mammoth plates. Gold-toned albumen prints, a new technology that hadn’t been available in 1859, were made of these later negatives, which were richer and clearer than the earlier imperial salt prints.

Explain that all of Watkins’ photographs included in the exhibition are mammoth plate albumen prints from 1861-1865. He made his first visit to Yosemite in 1861, two years after Weed’s first visit, and three years before Weed’s second visit. This enabled him to make a name for himself as a Yosemite photographer, as his 18x22-inch mammoth plate images were very well received by the public, and by scientists such as Josiah D. Whitney, William Henry Brewer, and Clarence King. In a game of one-upsmanship, Charles Weed returned to the valley in 1864, and Watkins returned in 1865 with an even bigger camera with a higher quality lens.

Explain that the wet plate collodion process was an extraordinarily labor intensive photographic process. The artist would have to work quickly. First he had to clean a sheet of plate glass perfectly, removing any dust, lint, streaks, and so forth. Second, in the darkness of a tent, he coated the plate in a viscous, light-sensitive mixture of chemicals called collodion. Third, while the plate was still wet with collodion, the photographer would place the plate in a light-proof plate holder, slip it into the enormous cabinet of the large-format view camera, and remove a lens cap or board from the front of the lens or the front of the plate holder (he would have already trained and focused his lens on his subject), and make an exposure of a few seconds. The lens cap or board would be replaced, and the still-wet plate taken back to the dark tent, and developed, fixed, and varnished using a number of different chemical solutions.

The prints were made from the glass negatives (the negative-making process is described above) and then printed on albumen-coated paper. Photographic chemicals, namely silver salts, had to be bound to paper using albumen, or egg whites. The albumen printing process included the following steps: first, a piece of paper is coated with an emulsion of egg white (albumen) and table salt (sodium chloride), then dried. The albumen seals the paper and creates a slightly glossy surface. Second, the paper is dipped in a solution of silver nitrate and water, rendering the surface light-sensitive. Third, the paper is dried in total darkness. Fourth, the dried, prepared paper is placed in a frame in direct contact under a negative, often a glass negative with collodion emulsion, and exposed to light until the image achieves the desired level of darkness. Fifth, a bath of sodium thiosulfate fixes the print’s exposure, preventing further darkening. Finally, optional gold or selenium toning improves the photograph’s tone and stabilizes it against fading (e.g. the Weed photograph from 1864).

Explain to guests that Watkins and his contemporaries created both mammoth plate photographs and smaller stereoviews. Like their painter counterparts, the photographers sold their mammoth plate prints to discerning collectors, often wealthy patrons including the likes of Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington, and their smaller stereoviews to tourists and armchair travelers elsewhere in the country.

Wim Wenders, "Meteorite Crater, West Australia"

Meteorite Crater, West Australia
Large Scale Aerial Photograph, 1988

Wim Wenders is known internationally as a film maker from Germany. By way of scouting via small aircraft for movie set locations for his films, his photographs of these sites eventually led to museum exhibits of his very large scale (typically over fifteen feet in length) aerial photography. A major photographic survey of his “Pictures from the Surface of the Earth” has toured museums world wide since 2001. Meteorite Crater was shot in West Australia on just such a scouting expedition. Difficult to reach by car, Meteorite Crater was on a map of Australia in a remote area west of Alice Springs. Wenders discovered the place on an aerial location survey, circled the enormous crater, landed on the dust strip next to it, and walked for an hour to get into the middle of the giant circle. Wenders claimed the aerial photograph documented the site as a meteorite crater. However, controversy surrounded the artist’s naming of the site. Apparently, the crater wasn’t created by a meteorite: it’s a naturally occurring bowl-shaped depression of land in the earth.

Ernst Wilhelm Wenders was born in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1945. Wenders studied medicine (1963-64), and philosophy (1964-65), before interrupting his academic studies to became a painter in 1966. By 1967 he was working as a film critic and producing several short films, and this continued until the 1980s. In 19882 he moved to New York and has since then become involved in producing and directly hundreds of films through various cinema companies. Two of his best known films are Wings of Desire and The Buena Vista Social Club. He currently lives in Los Angeles and Berlin with his wife, Donata, a photographer.

Quote by the artist: (from Wenders’ official website)
“Bigger is never better per se, nor more beautiful. But some of these landscapes and places that I photographed deserved nothing else but the biggest possible prints. I was limited by the size of the photo paper, otherwise, I would have gone even bigger. To understand these places, you have to immerse yourself in them.”

--Lois Smalley

Marks on the Land: An Exhibition of The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection Tour Blueprint

December 16, 2007-May 4, 2008

Introduction

Edward Burtynksy, Nickel Tailings #36, Sudbury, Ontario (1996)

This survey of The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection consists of fourteen photographic prints depicting different kinds of human marks on the land. From the impermanent conceptual marks made by Jim Sanborn in his landscape-scale light projections, to the far more insidious and permanent scars on the land made by mining operations depicted in Terry Evans’ and Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, each of the eight artists in this survey grapples with ideas about how and why people make land-marks—and what effects the marks have on our perception, understanding, and relationship to the land.

The exhibition lends itself to discussions of landscape history (à la Jennifer Bethke’s recent Museum School class), how people treat different kinds of landscapes, and how we learn to understand landscapes and identify ourselves in relation to them.

This exhibition is presented as part of the NMA Art + Environment exhibition series, an initiative that brings community, artists, and scholars together to explore the interaction between people and their environments

The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection

As you know, The Altered Landscape Collection is the largest collection within the museum—numbering more than 600 pieces—and is made up almost exclusively of contemporary photography, beginning with The New Topographics, and more contemporary work that has grown out of that movement. Historically important twentieth-century photography—that of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, in particular—has been added to the collection to contextualize the work within the collection, as well as within the history of twentieth-century photography in general.

If the NMA is known nationally for its collections, it is known for The Altered Landscape Collection specifically. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the museum began acquiring photography for a new signature focus collection. The museum’s motivation was to gather landscape works that would address audiences across cultural boundaries and, over time, to position the Museum as a unique visual and intellectual resource. The NMA sought to highlight environmental issues, already emphasized in other areas of the Museum’s collection, and provide a forum for the study and appreciation of land, environment, and environmental thought in art. The NMA’s goal was to recognize the tremendous contribution that photographers have made to our understanding of place and environment, while building its collection in a new direction.

The Altered Landscape is, at its core, about the American west, especially the Great Basin. As the eastern landscapes depicted by the Hudson River School painters gradually disappeared through conversion to human settlement, the west assumed a greater role as the representative of the idea of “wilderness.” For generations, photographers such as William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton E. Watkins, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Eliot Porter played a leading role in how the landscape was perceived. Their imagery projected and reinforced a romanticized view of the environment in which landscape is an expression of a beautiful and sublime ‘nature.’

By the mid-1970s, however, a small group of photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Frank Gohlke began to challenge this traditional view. In the influential exhibition at George Eastman House in 1975 titled “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” these photographers focused on contemporary industrial culture—land transformed by human presence. Collectively, they rejected the approach of viewing landscape as beauty, for the “sake of art,” isolated from the context of culture. For the New Topographics photographers, as they came to be known, landscape photography needed to reveal a new artistic viewpoint in response to the specific content of the images. For them, and those that followed, landscape photography needed to challenge traditional notions about land and landscape, beauty, and the nature and purposes of photography. It is in this context that we find the newest exhibition of works from this collection.

The current exhibition’s images depict landscapes in the American West and elsewhere that have been marked in some way—physically, conceptually, artistically, irrevocably— documented by photographers such as Richard Misrach and Terry Evans. The critical edge to some of the works in the exhibition is very clear: Robert Dawson and Edward Burtynsky subtly characterize marks on the land caused by dams and mining operations, for example. Others, such as Jim Sanborn and John Pfahl, photograph other kinds of marks: impermanent light projections of which the only record is the photograph, and more physical, yet still temporary, marks made on the land in the conceptual photographs of John Pfahl.

Orientation

You’ll find the exhibition hung in the Altered Landscape Gallery. The east and north walls feature photographs of much more physical marks on the land: Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of nickel tailings in the surface water in Ontario, Canada, for example. On the south and west walls are photographs of marks that are more conceptual in nature: John Pfahl’s photographs of temporary but still physical lines on the side of a shed, images of Christo’s monumentally-sized landscape installations, or Jim Sanborn’s photos of light projections on geologic formations in the west.

Vocabulary

Silver Gelatin print
Photograph on paper or plasticized paper coated with an emulsion of light-sensitive silver salts suspended in gelatin, printed out or developed out, and fixed. Came into general use in the 1880s; the developed variety remains the standard black-and-white photographic process.

Dye Transfer print (e.g. Polaroid).
Self-developing color photograph. The complex process, first described by Edwin Land in 1947, has been popular among amateurs and artists since the early 1960s.

Chromogenic print (also chromogenic dye coupler or C-Type print)
The most common type of color photograph, printed from a chromogenic color negative; consists of dyes within gelatin layers on a plastic-coated paper base. Subject to fading and color shifts in dark storage and on exhibition. Developed in the 1940s as an outgrowth of chromogenic color transparencies (Kodachrome, invented in 1935). Used by amateurs and artists alike. (Also called "C-print" or referred to by various brand names.)

Tour Framework

• Explain that the Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection is the largest collection in the NMA permanent collection, and that it contains almost 700 photographs that depict landscapes changed at the hands of humans, primarily from the second half of the twentieth century forward.

• Ask guests what they see in Robert Dawson’s photograph “Spillway, Lake Berryessa, California.”

• Explain that Robert Dawson is a San Francisco-based photographer whose work deals primarily with altered landscapes of the west. This photograph depicts a dam on the Putah Creek in Solano/Napa Counties in California.

• Ask guests what kind of message(s) Dawson’s photograph conveys about the spillway.

• Invite guests to look at James Turrell’s photograph “Roden Crater Low Aerial Oblique Looking Toward N.E.”

• Ask guests what they think they are seeing in the photograph. Does anyone know where the Roden Crater is located, or why it exists?

• Explain that Roden Crater is a volcanic crater located at the edge of the Painted Desert near Flagstaff, Arizona. James Turrell is primarily a sculptor and installation artist, who has a mining claim on the Roden Crater. He has spent more than twenty years opening caverns in the interior of the crater, creating an open air observatory for viewing stars without the aid of a telescope.

• Ask guests to compare the Turrell image and the Dawson image. What are the differences between the human-made marks on the land in the images?

• Explain that Richard Misrach’s photograph “Battleground Point #21” is an image of a part of the Carson Sink, northeast of Fallon, Nevada.

Richard Misrach, Battleground Point #21, 1999.

• Ask guests to consider Terry Evans’ photograph before they look at or learn its title. What do guests think they are seeing in the image?

• Explain that the image depicts a gravel pit north of Kanopolis, Kansas. In her artwork, Terry Evans has photographed sites all over the Midwest, particularly in and around Chicago.

• Ask guests what kinds of things the artist might be choosing to emphasize by taking an aerial photograph of a landscape instead of a “traditional” landscape photograph?

• Ask guests to consider Edward Burtynsky’s photographs before their perceptions are directed by the wall labels and the works’ titles. What do the images appear to be of? Do they look anything like, say, the Yellowstone National Park mud springs or something similar?

• Explain that the images are Burtynsky’s depictions of the effects on the landscape of dangerous nickel tailings near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The tailings have polluted both the ground and surface water of this area near Lake Huron in the Great Lakes region.

• Ask guests to compare the marks on the land in Evans’ and Burtynsky’s photographs. In what ways are they similar? In what ways are they different?

• Ask guests if they thought of the photographs as beautiful initially. Why? Does the information about the subject of the photographs affect their beauty? Why or why not?

• Ask guests to consider how the photographs by Burtynsky, Evans, Dawson, Turrell, and Misrach are different from the photographs of Sanborn, Pfahl, and Volz. How are the marks made on the land different between and among them?

• Explain that one of the ways the marks are different has to do with documenting the relationships people have to land. For example, Burtynsky and Dawson document mining and hydroelectric marks made on the land, whereas Pfahl, Sanborn, and Volz document temporary or ephemeral marks made for a very different artistic purpose. Why? What are the artistic purposes or intents of the different photographs?

• Ask guests to look carefully at the grid of John Pfahl photographs on the west wall of the gallery. What does Pfahl focus the viewers’ attention upon in the image? How can you tell? Why would he choose this as a subject?

Pfahl explains the images this way: “The added elements suggest numerous mark-making devices associated with photographs, maps, plans an diagrams. On different occasions, they may pointedly repeat a strong formal element in the landscape…; they may fill in information suggested by the scen….; they may depend upon information external to the photograph itself…; or, finally, they may be only arbitrarily related to the scene….”

• Explain to guests that Pfahl photographs scenes in which he, the artist, has inserted temporary visual aids to create his photographs: string, tape, or wire, for example, that heighten the visual characteristics of the photographs.

• Explain that Jim Sanborn is a sculptor and photographer who is very interested in conceptual understanding in art, as well as physics, light, and landscape.

Sanborn explains: “My original intention was to recreate in some way the work of the nineteenth-century cartographers and photographers who were hired to map and photograph the monumental western landscape.[…] Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, and other artists were doing large-scale installations in the natural environment. Those projects affected the land tremendously, and not always with a pleasing effect on the environment. Bulldozers were brought onto the land, and the land itself was manipulated. I decided to counteract that in some way and still do very large outdoor installations. I had completed several in the early 1970s in which I placed objects in the environment, and the end result was photographs of the outdoor installations.

• Explain that Sanborn built his own large-scale projectors to project light onto geologic landforms. He then photographed the projections, leaving no trace of the large-scale artwork that he had created; the only record of the work is the photograph.

• Ask guests to consider the Wolgang Volz photographs of Christo and Jean-Claude’s “Running Fence” and “Valley Curtain” projects. In what ways are these photographs different from others in the exhibition? What kinds of marks on the land do the photographs document?

• Ask guests to consider the multi-layering of artistic decisions in the photographs. Not only does the photographer-as-artist decide how to frame and compose his image of the subject, but Christo and Jean-Claude have also made artistic decisions regarding the placement and purpose of their installation of cloth and anchors in the landscape.

Conclusion

Art facilitates learning by engaging the senses, bypassing conditioned patterns of thinking and allowing other ways of knowing to come forward, sometimes subtly, and sometimes forcefully. All of the photographers in this exhibition engage our senses—but for very different reasons and purposes. Whether the works focus on natural, cultural, or political aspects of the environment, artists have always been sensitive to environments and responsive to our relationship to environments.

Salt Dreams: Reflections from the Downstream West Tour Blueprint

Introduction

The Salt Dreams exhibition consists of approximately twenty-five platinum palladium photographic prints of the Salton Sea, California’s largest (man-made) lake, and its surrounding environs, made by artist Joan Myers. Six additional prints depict other greatly-altered landscapes in Hawaii and Arizona. All of the prints contained in the exhibition are recent acquisitions for the NMA’s Altered Landscape: Carol Franc Buck Collection. The book published in coordination with the exhibition, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, written by William deBuys, and published by the University of New Mexico Press, contains both portfolios of Myers’ photographs of the Salton Sea area, as well as fine essays by deBuys. The book won the 1999 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.

The exhibition lends itself to discussions of California history, themes of immigration and settlement, water issues in the west, human alteration of landscapes, and agriculture, as well as ecology, biology, and chemistry. Finally, the photographs present a wonderful opportunity to discuss the processes and methods of photography, particularly of the platinum palladium variety.

The exhibition of Salt Dreams was originally organized by the California Council for the Humanities in conjunction with the Museum of History and Art, Ontario, California.

This exhibition is presented here as part of the NMA Art + Environment exhibition series, an initiative that brings community, artists, and scholars together to explore the interaction between people and their environments.

Joan Myers, “Salton Sea Telephone Poles” n.d. Platinum palladium print with watercolor. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Artist’s Statement

Forty miles southeast of Palm Springs, California, lies a great saltwater lake called the Salton Sea. Heavily polluted yet home to a large population of fish and birds, the lake has attracted get-rich developers, gullible buyers, and aimless retirees for nearly a century.

The Salton Sea was an accident. In 1905 the Colorado River burst a poorly made irrigation heading and for two years flowed unimpeded into a giant prehistoric lakebed called the Salton Sink. The water formed a spectacular lake in the arid southwest desert.

For the last fifteen years, I have photographed what has happened to the Salton Sea. In the years since the landlocked sea was formed, irrigation run-off from the Imperial Valley and industrial waste from Mexico have slowly raised salinity, pesticide and toxic mineral levels of the water. Poor water quality now endangers the teeming fish as well as the fishermen and birds that eat them.

Environmental abuse has been matched by the avarice of real estate speculators. Over the years developers built subdivisions on the shores of the Salton Sea. They planted palm trees along wide curving avenues named Marina Drive, Dolphin, and Acapulco. Yet I found that few homes were built on the thousands of developed lots. I marveled at a once elegant yacht club, motel, and golf course that today lie abandoned. I photographed the weeds growing up through the cracks in the wide roads.

Today great flocks of pelicans fly over what has become a fetid sump. Desiccated fish line the sandy beaches. The lake lies fallow, a pastel shimmer in the harsh Colorado Desert, a symbol of dead dreams and the beauty of a landscape man has uncaringly exploited.

Platinum Palladium Photography

Photographs made using platinum and platinum palladium printing processes are among the most sought-after photographs because of their relative value, their increased archival longevity over silver gelatin prints, and because of their much higher tonal range. Writer and photographer William Laven explains them this way: “The qualities of a Pt/Pd [platinum/palladium] print have long been heralded by photographers, curators, critics and collectors; it has a long, rich and delicate tonal scale and unmatched archival quality. What might be a monochromatic black on a silver print, for example, will be rendered as a series of subtly differentiated tones in a Pt/Pd print. Similarly, middle and highlight tones are more delicately defined. Since the prints are hand-coated onto rag paper, the image actually sits in the fiber of the paper so the texture and weave of the paper become integral to the image compared to silver prints where the emulsion layer sits on top of, rather than in, the paper surface. Pt/Pd prints therefore, have a tactile quality unique to hand-coated non-silver materials. The long scale and tactility of a Pt/Pd print are what cause many people to describe them as ‘precious’ or ‘jewel-like.’” (From an essay in View Camera magazine, July/August 1998, Vol. 11, No. 4.)

Platinum and platinum palladium prints require ultraviolet light to be printed; therefore, they require considerably more exposure time than other silver salt-based printing processes. However, unlike gelatin silver prints, platinum and platinum palladium prints do not need to be “fixed” with chemical stops.

Joan Myers, “Salton Sea Birds” 1987. Platinum palladium print with watercolor. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Tour Framework

• Explain that the works in the exhibition were created by an artist named Joan Myers, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

• Explain that Joan Myers was born in 1944 in Des Moines, Iowa, and had an early interest in the sciences and mathematics. In the early 1970's she turned to photography. Today she utilizes various digital methods, as well as the platinum-palladium photographic process and continues her exploration of hand-applied color. She uses medium- and large-format view cameras.

• Ask guests why they think there might be a large, increasingly salty lake in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Why might it be of interest as a subject to Myers?

• Explain that today the Salton Sea is located in Imperial County, in the lower Colorado Desert Province of California. It is not actually a “sea,” but a human-made lake filling up the Salton Sink or Salton Trough, the dominant geologic feature in this area of California. However, in ancient times, there was a naturally occurring occasional lake in this area called “Lake Cahuilla,” named for one of the primary groups of people indigenous to this area of California.

• People in our area will understand the similarity of the Salton Sink to the Carson and Humboldt Sinks, so making the connection for them may be helpful.

• Explain that the photographs in this exhibition are platinum palladium prints. This means that the prints are made with an iron salt “emulsion” that contains platinum and palladium, as well as hydrogen peroxide and other chemicals, which is painted or rolled onto a piece of paper and allowed to dry. The photographer then projects an ultraviolet light through a negative onto the paper, and the light reacts with the iron salts, platinum, and palladium, causing the platinum and palladium to build up to varying degrees in the image. In this case, Myers then hand colored the prints with subtle watercolor washes.

• Explain that artists and collectors value platinum palladium prints for their non-reflective surface; their very delicate and large tonal range; their tendency to resist curling; and their archival stability, due to their frequently being printed on 100% rag papers.

• Stop at the photograph entitled Horse Intaglio (Altered Landscape Gallery). Ask guests what they see in the photograph. What do they see first? What do they think the artist has done to make that element stand out? Ask guests if they know what the word intaglio means. Explain that intaglios are ancient pieces of land art created by indigenous peoples—they are images incised into the surface of rocks or the ground.

• Explain that the geographical area depicted in the photographs is the ancestral homeland of the indigenous peoples sharing the Yuma languages, including the Cahuilla, Quechan, and Cucupa bands of American Indians. These peoples were variously dependent upon desert springs, the Colorado River and its delta, and its related plant and animal communities for survival. Explain that these peoples frequently created large-scale intaglios incised into the surface of the earth.

• Stop at the photograph called Torres-Martinez Reservation. Explain that the 1905 flood that created the Salton Sea inundated half of the lands belonging to the native peoples resident in the region. This after the lands allotted to them in treaties from the 1870s gave the Indian people small pieces of non-contiguous land.

• Ask guests whether they think the photo of Torres-Martinez Reservation depicts an “American Dream,” or whether it offers a commentary on the notion of the “American Dream.”

• Explain that Spanish explorers began passing through the Salton Sea area in the 1500s, and in 1540 Hernan de Alarcón, part of Coronado’s land expedition through the southwest, traveled up the Colorado River. Melchior Díaz, also part of the expedition, probably ventured as far as what is now called the Imperial Valley. The area’s extreme aridity and lack of gold meant that the region remained relatively untouched for three more centuries.

• Ask guests what major historical event they know began in 1848-49 in California.

• Explain that following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, California, in 1848, tens of thousands of migrants moved west across the U.S., and north from Latin America, hoping to strike it rich. Approximately 10,000 would-be gold miners crossed the Imperial Valley and the Salton Sink depicted in these photographs.

• Explain that U.S. Army explorers returned to the region in the 1850s under the auspices of exploring the possibility of a railroad in the Pacific Railroad Exploring Expedition of 1853. Expedition geologist William Phipps Blake noted that the Imperial Valley, though arid, could be successfully irrigated to support agriculture.

• Stop at the photograph called Date Palm in the Altered Landscape Gallery. Explain that between 1869 and 1891, Major John Wesley Powell also saw the potential for agriculture in the Imperial Valley, calling it the “Egypt of America,” as it was “the land of the date palm.” As such, a connection was drawn between the fertile richness of the Nile River and its agricultural bounty and the arid Imperial Valley, if irrigation were realized. Ask guests if they can see texture in the photograph. Explain the difference between “real” and “implied” texture. Ask how the date palm in the photograph looks like it would feel if they could touch the plant. If guests could touch the photo, would it have the texture of the date palm?

• Explain that, realizing the potential for agriculture, the California Development Company (CDC) and its subsidiary, the Imperial Land Company (which is how the county got its name when it was incorporated in 1907), began to develop a vast system of irrigation canals to bring the waters of the Colorado River to the desert floor.

• Stop at the photograph called Imperial Valley Canal in the Altered Landscape Gallery. Explain that the CDC built the Imperial Canal and over 700 miles of waterways to bring the Colorado River’s water to the desert floor of the Imperial Valley. By 1902, some 100,000 acres of land were in cultivation. A good image depicting the cultivated lands is Imperial Valley Field, Spinach, immediately adjacent to Imperial Valley Canal. Ask guests if they see a pattern in the photograph. Where? How does the way the artist composed the image move your eye around the image?

• Explain that a spring flood in 1905 burst through the CDC’s irrigation headings in the canal system, flooding the valley floor. Eventually, nearly all of the Colorado River’s water was flowing through the canals, and emptying in the valley floor, forming what is now the Salton Sea depicted in the photographs. The flow of the river’s water into the Salton Sink was not stemmed for two years.

• Explain that after the Southern Pacific Railroad built flood control gates (1907) on the river and canal system to protect its railways, less water entered the Sea, and, combined with evaporation, the depth of the lake shrank from 80 feet to closer to 30 feet by 1930. Eventually engineers diverted more Colorado River water to maintain the depth of the lake at about 30 feet.

• Stop at almost any of the photographs depicting evidence of development, including Salton City Golf Course (Bridge) (Altered Landscape Gallery), Salton City Golf Course (Palms) (Installation Gallery), or any of the photographs of the Salton Bay Yacht Club. Explain that in the late 1950s land speculators, real estate developers, and others believed that the Salton Sea could be transformed into an inexpensive version of the resort community of Palm Springs, located 40 miles to the north northwest. Can guests see subtle colors in the golf course photographs? Where? What effect does the coloring of the photographs have on them? Do the subtle watercolor washes convey the colors of the desert around the Salton Sea?

• Explain that this version of the “American Dream” was never truly realized because of the lack of industry, inadequate infrastructure, the extreme heat, and the water’s foul smell due to its stagnation, increased salinity and eutrophication, and resulting die-off of fish and birds.

• Explain that as a result of decreased flows of Colorado River and canal waters, as well as increased flows of New River and Alamo River waters, which contain a great deal more salt and nutrients from agricultural runoff, the salinity of the lake’s waters is increasing at an alarming rate. In addition, the nutrients from the agricultural runoff cause algal blooms in the water, which reduces the oxygen content of the water, and results in fish and bird die offs.
  

• Ask guests if they can find evidence in the photographs of the fact that the Salton Sea is today of major ecological significance to coastal California.

• Explain that as a result of development in southern California in the twentieth century, the varied landscapes there that once supported diverse wildlife populations no longer do. The Salton Sea thus became a human-made refuge for wildlife, particularly migratory waterfowl. Today the Salton Sea is a major stop on the Pacific Flyway for migrating water birds. However, the increasing salinity and eutrophication of the Sea’s waters is endangering the health of the birds and fish, resulting at times in the die off of large numbers of the animals. What kinds of textures do the photographs of the dead fish and birds contain?

• Explain that today, were the water level of the Salton Sea not to be maintained, there would be toxic levels of salt and other chemicals built up in the sediments of the lake, that, were they to dry, could cause health concerns downstream and downwind of the Salton Sea. (This is similar to the problems at Owens Lake documented in David Maisel’s Lake Project photographs).

• Explain that arguments erupt from all points of view about how best to manage the Salton Sea. Today the water level is maintained at a specific level, but even so, runoff is causing increasing salinity and eutrophication. These photographs ask, in effect: Why is the American Dream so pervasive? Why do people try to alter the landscape, first to irrigate the desert for agricultural purposes, then to turn an “accident” into a (failed) “resort community”? What can be done about the increasing salinity and eutrophication of the water? What is the best, most cost effective, or otherwise pragmatic solution?

Conclusion

Our guests, particularly school groups, choose to visit the museum to give students a special opportunity, to enrich their learning experiences, and to have fun. The information and the tour framework suggestions contained in this blueprint are avenues into the Salt Dreams: Reflections from the Downstream West exhibition. The blueprint is designed to provide ideas for engaging guests of all ages in exploring the artistry of Joan Myers photographs, as well as ideas for helping student visitors engage in thinking about the photographs through frameworks of history, social studies, biology, ecology, and geology.

Joan Myers, “Salton Sea Small Building” 1987. Platinum palladium print with watercolor. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Jim Sanborn :: Photographs

Horse Valley, Utah IV, (c) 1996.










Text Projection: Blue Mesa, Utah, (c) 1995.











From an interview with Jim Sanborn by Milena Kalinovska in Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction (Washington, D.C.,: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2003):

From 1995 to 1998, I did a series of installations in the western United States. I had to give my espionage work a rest as it had taken a lot out of me. I decided to do a series of projects in the environment. I returned to the western landscape and completed a series of large-format projections in remote areas. My original intention was to recreate in some way the work of the nineteenth-century cartographers and photographers who were hired to map and photograph the monumental western landscape. […]

Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, and other artists were doing large-scale installations in the natural environment. Those projects affected the land tremendously, and not always with a pleasing effect on the environment. Bulldozers were brought onto the land, and the land itself was manipulated. I decided to counteract that in some way and still do very large outdoor installations. I had completed several in the early 1970s in which I placed objects in the environment, and the end result was photographs of the outdoor installations. […]

I learned to overpower natural daylight with large-format projections that I did for MIT in Cambridge in 1993. The projector I used at MIT was very expensive, so for this project I ordered the lenses and some of the mechanical parts from Austria and built my own. I got a large generator and put this equipment in the back of my four-wheel-drive vehicle and drove into remote areas of the West to do some very large-scale projections. I began doing these projections by testing them from my studio in Washington. I was able to project gigantic images on a warehouse a quarter mile away. I practiced in the urban environment and then took it into the wilderness. I took a 4x5 camera with me, and the projector I designed was like a gigantic slide projector that used 10x10-inch slides. I worked with a typography company that generated maybe a hundred different transparency images that I had drawn. I designed these
slide images based on Euclidean geometry. […]

I had to choose remote sites so that I didn’t get any lighting from cities or vehicles. The projections I was producing were so large and powerful that I knew they could be seen from miles away. I had to be in areas where I could work for five or six hours before anybody reached me. I was able to make images as wide as half a mile and have a very large impact on the environment without leaving a trace of what I had done. To me that was very important. I considered it a very gorgeous landscape, and I didn’t want to muck it up.[…]