Storming the Gates of Paradise (35 page)

This close-up scale emphasizes the ordinary over the extraordinary. Plate 17 in
The Place No One Knew
is titled “Near Balanced Rock Canyon”; Balanced Rock is a landmark, an outstanding and unusual feature of the landscape visible from a distance. But Porter’s medium close-up shows large, river-rounded rocks on a rock surface, the small rocks mostly grayish, the bedrock on which they lie more yellow, a quotidian scene near the unseen exceptional one. Of course, this image was made to be seen in context, with other, more spectacular images of the rocks and water of Glen Canyon, and this serial approach changes the expectations for each photograph: they need not each be prima ballerinas, each straining for the spectacular, but a corps de ballet, fleshing out the overall picture. But plate 17 also suggests that ordinary rocks are important enough, that we can love a place for its blackberries or its stream ripples, not just for its peaks, waterfalls, or charismatic macrofauna. All parts have equal value. These images make it clear why Porter was willing to fight for Diablo Canyon, a beautiful, pristine, but unexceptional landscape.

Working in close-up, Porter was as often calling attention to that which we overlook as to that which we don’t encounter because of its remoteness. He came near to stating a credo when he wrote, “Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. Nature should be viewed without distinction. . . . She makes no choice herself; everything that happens has equal significance. Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake that many people make: they think that
half of nature can be destroyed—the uncomfortable half—while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side.” Porter came of age artistically at a time when a radical shift was taking place in the way Americans understood and managed nature. In the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, predators and rodents were often depicted as “nuisance species,” to be eradicated so that the useful species—game and domestic animals—might flourish. Conservationists were evolving into ecologists as they came to understand that it is generally impossible to preserve a species or a place apart from the complex systems of which it is part. In his overall pictures, Porter comes as close as any artist has to portraying ecology.

“Every corner is alive” suggests another important aspect of Porter’s characteristic close-ups. Landscape photography generally depicts open space, usually defined by a horizon line, with the camera looking forward, much as a standing or striding human being might. It depicts, most often, an anthropomorphic space—anthropomorphic because its central subject
is
space, space that can be entered at least in imagination. Too, it often shows things at such a distance that the entities themselves—the grass or trees or rocks—cannot be subjects, only compositional elements. The implication of many classic landscape photographs (and the paintings from which they derive) is that such space is, in some sense, empty, waiting to be inhabited. This evolves, of course, from the way landscape painting itself evolved out of anthropocentric painting: the banditti or the Madonna got smaller, and the landscape behind the drama got more complex, until eventually the actors left the stage—but the landscape was still composed as a stage, as scenery. And scenery’s principal function was its ability to serve as a backdrop, to describe habitable space. Porter, on the other hand, often photographed flat surfaces up close—the surface of the earth, a stone, or a tree trunk—and with subtle tonal ranges. He looked directly at his subject, which was matter itself, rather than across or through it to space. There is very little empty space in his images and thus little or no room in which to place oneself imaginatively. The scale is not theatrical, or at least not anthropocentrically so.

He once remarked, “Don’t show the sky unless the sky has something to say.” This seems to propose that the sky should be a subject in its own right, rather
than a provider of orienting horizon lines and inhabitable space above the surface of the earth. His extensive series of photographs of clouds bear this out by suggesting that clouds should be seen on their own terms, as scientific and aesthetic phenomena, not simply as part of a landscape scene. In fact, there are very few
scenes
in Porter’s work. If the image is not a close-up, the camera may be tilted down or up to show things on their own terms, rather than as background to habitable space. And Porter’s favorite view is straight ahead, into an impenetrable thicket of saplings. If landscape photography has an empty center, in Porter’s work nature itself fills that center, whether with leaves, stones, creatures, or clouds: nature, not humanity, is the true inhabitant of Porter’s places. This is not landscape photography, but nature photography, a wholly new genre, which Porter founded. If it has an ancestor, that ancestor is still-life painting and photography, though before Adams and Porter, still-life subject matter was nearly always domestic items, indoors, stuff that could be set up for the studio easel or camera—fruit, flowers, household objects, instruments, food, not wild stuff in its own place and on its own terms.

As Caponigro noted, Porter was motivated as much by ecological as by aesthetic aspects of a phenomenon. It may be that he liked lichen so much not only because it had wonderful color range and texture, but also because it represented a unique symbiosis between a fungus and a mold, making its home on the seemingly inhospitable faces of rocks. Many of his pictures are meeting grounds between various forces and beings. It seems likely that, in the absence of a color photographic tradition to learn from, Porter learned from painting, and the painting of the 1940s and 1950s was mostly abstract. In his flat-to-the-picture-plane images, Porter seems to have learned from abstract expressionism, and some of his rock-face pictures are impossible to look at without believing that he had been influenced by the movement. Abstract expressionism likewise emphasized what in Jackson Pollock’s work was sometimes called “all-overness,” and in the others later on “color-field painting.” The composition in other of Porter’s photographs shows the strong influence of the great modernist photographers, though he adapted what he learned from them to color and to a very different kind of involvement with his subject matter. Porter rejected much of high modernism’s
philosophy in the way he tied his work to science, politics, and literature, but he never quarreled with its strategies and aesthetics.

In some ways, the golden age of the Sierra Club publication program seems to parallel the golden age of American landscape painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the American West was celebrated in paintings by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Thomas Moran and in photographs by Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Jackson, and others. In that time, it was the West that was terra incognita to the majority; in the 1960s, it was the remaining remote places east and west. Both were eras in which the American public discovered their terrain through artistic representation, and in both cases American landscape was seen as the stage on which no actors had yet entered, as virgin wilderness before the first efflorescence of civilization. Thomas Cole had written that “the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness. It is the most distinctive, because in civilized Europe, the primitive features of scenery have long since been destroyed or modified.” For Cole, American landscape was a stage on which the principal acts had yet to take place, and this idea of wilderness as a place before people, as a place as yet affected by nothing but natural forces, has been powerful ever since. Wilderness, as Wallace Stegner wrote of it in 1960 in the letter that coined the term “the geography of hope,” meant a place apart from civilization, a place where humans had not yet and should not arrive on stage.

Since that era, much has been written to revise this idea, most significantly by acknowledging that Native Americans spent millennia in places Euro-Americans dubbed virginal, and that the supposed pristine condition had been much affected by the Native presence—and sometimes damaged by their absence. Out of the imagination of wilderness and the ignorance of indigenous presence came a false dichotomy: a wholly nonhuman nature and a wholly unnatural humanity. The latter was seen as a threat, meaning that the former had to be protected as a place
apart. William Cronon has written, “The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul.” Now that the critique of modernity is accomplished, we have entered upon the critique of wilderness—not of places themselves, but of the way they are described, administrated, and imagined.

One of the ironies of Porter’s career is that he did much to give “the wilderness idea” a face, but that face exists not so much in the images he made as in the way people perceive them.
In Wildness
was seen—and successfully deployed—as a book in defense of wilderness. Most of the congressional representatives and senators to whom Brower sent it called it
In Wilderness
in their thank-you notes. In fact, most of the phenomena it portrays might readily be seen on the near fringes of civilization—by a small-town New England schoolchild taking a detour through the woods on the way home, for example, or by Thoreau on the outskirts of long-settled Concord. The creatures are small—caterpillars, moths, songbirds; the bodies of water are brooks, not rivers; the trees are maples, not bristlecones. The photographs could have been used equally to justify development, in that the flora and fauna they show could and do survive on the fringes of developed areas. In 1962, simply depicting the quiet splendors of the natural world was a powerful argument, in part because it had never been made as Porter made it. Success would wear out this argument’s impact, setting a different task for a later generation of environmentally concerned photographers.

There are no human traces in
The Place No One Knew
, though the region abounds with petroglyphs and ruins and is partially within the huge Navajo-Hopi reservation. Rainbow Bridge, which the Sierra Club fought for as a great natural phenomenon whose setting would be damaged by the Glen Canyon Dam, has more recently been fought for as a sacred site by five Indian tribes in the area. But the book seems to postulate Glen Canyon as an untouched place and the dam as the first devastating human trace that would be left on it. Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and
deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development. In more recent years, it has become equally valuable to understand the ways that human presences can do other than destroy, the way that wild places can be a homeland, not an exotic other. The wilderness idea may be specific to an immigrant industrial society. Porter and most of us have no trouble seeing traditional peasant and indigenous cultures with their biodegradable, bioregional, often handmade artifacts as part of their landscape; in his Baja book, he depicted a few religious sites amid the plants and rocks (and focused on Mexican churches in another book). Among one of Porter’s most memorable later images is one of an apple tree, leafless, bearing withered golden fruit, on his Tesuque, New Mexico, property, an image of nature, but hardly of wilderness.

As Porter got older and went farther afield, more and more human traces began to appear: in his Iceland book, for example, there are abandoned houses nestled into treeless slopes and weathered by the same forces as their surroundings. In his work from Egypt and Greece, the stone buildings are treated much as the stone of Glen Canyon was—which is to say that if Glen Canyon’s nature was seen as art, this art is seen as nature in its materials, its erosion, its sense of place (and one could argue that excluding human traces from Glen Canyon was necessary to postulate nature itself as art, so that Glen Canyon becomes a gallery being drowned—thus was Brower able to compare it to the Sistine Chapel—and proposing it as art made a very different argument than, say, proposing it as habitat). In Porter’s work from China and Africa, people appear as part of the place, and the majority of the photographs show people. How to show contemporary Americans as part of their landscape is a problem that subsequent generations took on: one could almost trace a history from the discordance of tourists, nudists, and developers in the 1960s and 1970s to more recent photographs—by Barbara Bosworth, Mark Klett, Robert Dawson, among others—that show more complex, ambiguous, and sometimes even symbiotic relationships with the land.

Working on the scale of book sequences, rather than individual images, Porter can be thought of as creating a portrait of a place out of myriad details. Though he was often concerned with documenting the diversity or the more endangered phenomena, his selections did not always please fellow environmentalists. George
Marshall charged, in a 1965 letter to Porter about the artist’s Adirondacks project,

What has troubled me is that few of them seem to represent or symbolize what seem to me to be the major characteristics of the Adirondacks which have made them for many of us a region unsurpassed in beauty. These unique characteristics are to be found, I believe, in its so-called High Peaks, its other mountains in places, its large lakes and ponds, its spagnum marshes . . . and first growth forests. . . . Some of this is represented in your photographs, but frankly, as I recall them, very little.

And to David Brower, Marshall wrote, “Most of the photographs as I recall them are of second growth forests which have been burnt or lumbered. I feel little in this book as it now stands . . . justifies the title ‘forever wild.’ ” That they represented the consequences of logging rather than of forest succession is evident only to the ecologically knowledgeable; human traces are not always so visible as petroglyphs or pavement. The same second-growth forests had been shown in
In Wildness;
perhaps it was because the new photographs were meant as a portrait of a specific place rather than generalized evocation that such details mattered. Marshall seemed to think that the trees should have been left out or should have been photographed as something other than beautiful since they represented something other than an ecosystem in its ideal state (Michael Cohen has commented that perhaps Porter, like Thoreau, felt that second-growth forests represented healing). Marshall raised the enduring conflict of environmental photography: that what is ecologically good is not necessarily beautiful, and vice versa.