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Book Review
| Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform. By Finis Dunaway. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xxiv + 246 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth $37.00.
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| With all of the attention environmentalism has garnered from scholars, surprisingly little has been devoted to the power of its images to inform, convince, and persuade. A trio of books by Derek Bousé, Gregg Mitman, and David Ingram recently explored wildlife films and "green" Hollywood movies, and Kevin DeLuca has analyzed the "image events" of postmodern environmental activists, but until Finis Dunaway's Natural Visions, no one had yet produced a history of the camera's effect on environmental politics. |
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A valuable addition to this growing literature, Natural Visions places a carefully chosen set of images in their cultural and political context and does so with great success. Beginning in 1900, when artists and activists first began to use the camera for political ends, Dunaway examines photographs and films produced during three periods of reform: the Progressive era, the New Deal era, and the 1960s. His approach is selective rather than encyclopedic, focusing on key national figures and their interaction with the larger culture. But even with this case study approach, each of the book's chapters inform subsequent ones, and Natural Visions gathers momentum as it proceeds to its conclusion with the first Earth Day in 1970. Several themes also help to unite the book, including the ways that activists used the camera to "create visual monuments to vanishing places" and "challenge the utilitarian calculus of American politics by infusing public debate with beauty and passion" (xviii). |
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The first of the book's three parts, "Transcendental Vision," consists of a single chapter devoted to Herbert Gleason, whose spiritually inflected photographs Houghton Mifflin used to illustrate its 1906 edition of Thoreau's writings. Part 2, "The Nature of the New Deal," tells the story, now largely lost, of the upward battle Pare Lorentz and other government-sponsored filmmakers faced in trying to document the farm crises of the 1930s. When Lorentz sought to "explain in visual form why Americans should replace the reckless behavior of the pioneer with the rational planning of the New Deal" in The Plow That Broke the Plains, he had to confront objections from leaders of the film industry, who didn't like the competition, and critics of the film, who labeled it propaganda (p. 44). Finally, in part 3, "Picturing the American Earth"—the book's most compelling section—Dunaway explores the Sierra Club's Exhibit Format books, which paired photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and other artists with texts by Thoreau, Wallace Stegner, and other nature writers. Created by David Brower, the series "presented consumption as a form of politics," Dunaway argues (p. 120). |
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Well written, and at times even poetic, Natural Visions is a compelling study with much to offer both general readers and specialists in environmental representation. Dunaway makes especially good use of reviews and archival letters to gauge the response of audiences to the books and films he examines, and the text's forty-four black-and-white illustrations and eight color plates effectively illustrate his claims. Although Dunaway does not explore the technological aspects of photography and filmmaking in detail, he deftly captures their cultural power in all its fascinating complexity. |
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Daniel J. Philippon is associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he teaches courses in environmental rhetoric, history, and ethics. He is the author of Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (Georgia, 2004) and co-editor of Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (forthcoming from Georgia, 2007). |
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