Storming the Gates of Paradise (36 page)

Marshall wanted a more “Ansel Adams” treatment, it seems, with more majesty, more unusual features, less celebration of the quotidian. But Porter found the young trees beautiful, so he photographed them. The work of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter generates instructive comparisons on many grounds: the two were nearly the same age, crossed paths as both artists and activists, and became perhaps the most famous American photographers of the second half of the twentieth century (though Adams’s reputation has not faded as Porter’s has). The differences are
obvious: Adams was a successful, confident artist in an established medium, while Porter was still experimenting in relative isolation; Adams was ensconced in both artistic and environmental communities, as Porter was not; Adams’s work, with its taste for grandeur and spectacle, has ties to the great Western landscape photography of the nineteenth century, whereas Porter was exploring the new medium of dye-transfer color photography as both a technical medium and a compositional challenge and drawing from new developments in painting.

Adams, like Porter, has suffered from becoming famous for a portion of his work now thought of as the whole. Adams also made portraits and took many close-up photographs of flora and other natural details, as well as creating series about entirely different subjects. Still, he did make the definitive majority of his pictures in the classic landscape-photographic tradition, emphasizing deep space, strong contrast, dramatic light, and crisp delineation—almost sculptural qualities that black and white was suited to portray. Porter, in contrast, often flattened out a subject and sought a painterly subtlety of color range.

Adams’s pictures often depend on the drama of a revelatory light that appears almost divine; Porter often preferred cloudy days to make his images that speak of the slowness of careful attention. In other words, Adams would usually photograph the balancing rock of Balancing Rock Canyon, but Porter would usually ignore it. One result is that Adams’s work locates itself through landmarks such as Half Dome or the Grand Tetons, while Porter’s does so through representative specimens—the sandstone of the Southwest, the warblers of the Midwest, the maple leaves of New England. Adams prized the most spectacular and unique aspects of a place; Porter focused on the representative and quotidian aspects of even the most exotic places he went. With Adams’s monumental scenes, viewers at least felt that they were remote from civilization (though cropping out the people and infrastructure in Yosemite Valley must have been a challenge at times); with Porter, they could be a few feet from it—his close-ups might speak of an intact natural order, but not necessarily of an unviolated wilderness space.

Porter had his own restrictions about what should be represented and what should be found beautiful. In 1977, he saw
The End of the Game
, an exhibition of African images by the fashion and wildlife photographer Peter Beard, at the
International Center for Photography (ICP). Beard took a radically nonmodernist tack in his book of the same name, writing on photographs, using his own work together with older images, and collaging them scrapbook-style with other material in the style of Victorian travel journals. Porter, who brought the Victorian texts of Thoreau together with his own images, could conceivably have been sympathetic, but he exclaimed in a letter that the project “was supposed to influence people for conservation but played to morbid curiosity and violence. It memorialized killing and death with dead animals, dying animals, a half eaten human body. and 100 elephant carcasses.”

Porter had gone to the ICP to discuss an exhibition of his Antarctic photographs, which also included dead animals—seals that had died after becoming stranded inland, then been mummified and partially flayed by the arid winds. But Beard’s images were not so gracious: elephants dying in a far warmer zone were a far messier business, and he attempted to suggest the sheer scope of the disaster with his copious images of elephant herds, corpses, and skeletons. He intended to shock and hoped to change minds by doing so. The huge die-off had been caused by a population explosion that denuded the landscape—ultimately it was caused by the unnaturalness of game protection laws born out of Euro-American ideas about wilderness as a place apart from humans (echoing the mistakes made by American game management that had led to the Kaibab Plateau defoliation and deer die-off decades earlier).

It could be said that Porter photographed uneventful cyclical time, Adams an almost Biblical sense of revelatory suspension of time, and Beard the turbulent time of the news. Elsewhere Porter had argued that photography “almost always unintentionally softens rather than exaggerates the unpleasant aspects of the conditions it attempts to dramatize most forcefully. The same is true when photography is used to show the devastations produced by man’s works. The utter desolation visible on the scene of operation is almost impossible to reveal in photographs.” Although, concerning Beard, he argued that the photographs were not softened at all, but sensationalistic, the same principle—that a photography makes the most reprehensible things pleasant to behold, even fascinating—remains. This assertion justified Porter’s own strategy of showing what can be saved and what remains
intact, rather than what has been ravaged, of photographing nature as existing in cyclical time rather than history (though looming catastrophe had been the unseen subject of
The Place No One Knew
).

Porter and Adams functioned in a unique way at a unique time: their aesthetic work had a kind of political impact that is hard to imagine in any other arena. Even those who were not great supporters of the publications program of the Sierra Club acknowledged that it was the books—particularly the photographic books, and among those particularly Porter’s—that first made the Sierra Club a visible force nationwide. It was a rare moment in history when art could achieve political ends so profound, when the mere sight of such images and reminder of such places became a powerful motivating force, when a pair of artists who were much admired in museum circles could do heroic work in environmental ones. No artist can ask for more than to live in a time when art can change the world.

Today’s well-respected landscape photographers are making very different work, and few of them have the role within environmental organizations or the broad popular success that Porter did. The terrain has changed. Almost two decades after
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World
, the landscape photographer Robert Adams wrote,

More people currently know the appearance of Yosemite Valley and the Grand Canyon from having looked at photographic books than from having been to the places themselves; conservation publishing has defined for most of us the outstanding features of the American wilderness. Unfortunately, by perhaps an inevitable extension, the same spectacular pictures have also been widely accepted as a definition of nature, and the implication has been circulated that what is not wild is not natural. . . . There are now far fewer unpublicized wilderness areas, and there are relatively few converts, with the exception of children, left to be won to the general idea of wilderness preservation.

Adams argues here that the same images mean different things at different points in history. By the time he wrote, the popular imagination had reached a point where such imagery had achieved what success it could; a new generation of photographers, he argued, ought instead to “teach us to love even vacant lots out of the same sense of wholeness that has inspired the wilderness photographers of the past twenty-five years.”

Of course, it can be argued that Porter photographed backyards, if not vacant lots, along with people, ruins, and signs of rural life from Maine to Mexico, but this Adams has a point. Whatever images Porter made, the images of his that proved most memorable and influential were of a pristine nature, a place apart. Though Porter’s pictures may have been primarily of the timeless seasonal world of natural phenomena, they existed in historical time; and their influence, even their appearance, has changed over the decades. Later in his career, Porter himself came to believe that his photographs were as likely to send hordes of tourists to an area as to send hordes of letters to Congress in defense of that area, countering Fox’s argument that the books could substitute for visits to wilderness. Far more Americans had become familiar with the remote parts of the country, and recreational overuse as well as resource extraction and development threatened to disturb the pristine places. It may be precisely because Porter’s work succeeded so spectacularly in contributing to American awareness and appreciation for remote and pristine places that different messages may now be called for. This invisible success is counterbalanced by a very visible one: thousands of professionals and countless amateurs now produce color nature photography more or less in the genre first set out by Porter.

The professional work is not quite like his (nor is the amateur, though for different reasons). For the most part, Porter seemed to value truth more and beauty—at least showy, bright beauty—less. He was concerned more with representing processes, systems, and connections than many of his followers are. He often made photographs of reduced tonal range, and some of his images of bare trees in snow are not immediately recognizable as being in color: “Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors.” The contemporary nature photographers whose work is seen in calendars and advertisements tend to pump up the
colors and portray a nature far more flawless and untouched than anything Porter found decades earlier (though the best defense for such images is that some of them continue to raise money for environmental causes). Their work tends to crop out anything flawed and to isolate a perfect bloom, a perfect bird, a perfect icicle, in compositions usually simpler than Porter’s. Looking at these images, one has the sense that if Porter founded a genre, the genre has become narrower rather than broader since.

Porter photographed dead animals and mating Galapagos turtles, but Barry Lopez, who himself once photographed animals, noted: “In the 1970s came, ironically, a more and more dazzling presentation of those creatures in incomplete and prejudicial ways. Photo editors made them look not like what they were but the way editors wanted them to appear—well-groomed, appropriate to stereotype, and living safely apart from the machinations of human enterprise.” A kind of inflationary process has raised the level of purity, of brightness, of showiness each image must have. Some of this may be about the continued evolution of technologies; with improvements in film and cameras and innovations like Photoshop, more technical perfection is possible now than in Porter’s time. And images that were relatively original in his work have now become staples, even clichés.

The thing least like an original is an imitation; they look alike, but they are not akin at all in their function in the world. Porter’s work is innovative, responding imaginatively to a new medium and the new way of representing the world that the medium made possible. Imitating Porter is not responding to the world but to a now-established definition of it. As the decades go by, these images tend to look more and more like each other and less and less like what we actually see most of the time we go to natural places. The photographers who are most like Porter in their innovations of composition, their definition of nature and the human place in it, as well as the role of photography in the preservation of the world, may be those whose work looks least like his, who make work that responds to their beliefs, the crises of the day, and their outdoor encounters with the same imaginative integrity as Porter did to his. But Porter’s primary legacy may not be photographic but something far more pervasive, a transformation of how we see and what we pay attention to.

Eden is the problem, of course. Eden stands as the idea of nature as it should be rather than as it is, and in attempting to make a garden resemble Eden, the gardener wrestles the garden away from resembling nature—nature, that is, as the uncultivated expanses around it, the patterns that would assert themselves without interference. If gardens were actual nature, we would just have a plot of land outside, left alone, that wind and birds and proximate plants would seed and rain would water. Even in the humid temperate zones, let alone in America’s desert Southwest, a good deal of manipulation of soil and water is necessary to make something nonnative grow. Eden serves as the phantasmagorical plan, as the ideal nature, to which every gardener cleaves. But no two gardeners have quite the same vision of it, and some versions of paradise are very fabulous and unrestrained indeed. There are both individual variations and historical evolutions in the ideal of the garden as an improved nature, a paradise; and of course paradise itself originally meant an enclosed garden, the kind of formal Islamic garden whose floor plans can be seen on most Persian carpets.

We love nature as a child loves a parent, but gardeners love their gardens as parents love children, with a preoccupied, hectoring, imposing love, not unlike that of museum curators, editors, animal tamers. Thoreau fretted over it in
Walden
, writing of the crop he grew with gardeners’ contemplativeness:

I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should I
raise them? Only heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer,—to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil. . . . My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. . . . A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead.