| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform. By Finis Dunaway. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xxiv, 246 pp. $37.00, ISBN 0-226-17325-9.)
Both enthusiasts and critics of the transcendently beautiful landscape photographs most often associated with Sierra Club calendars (familiarly reviled as "eco-porn") will find things to interest them in Finis Dunaway's book. In this dissertation revision, the author explores the ways that photographic images have played "a crucial role in American environmental politics" and also "shaped modern perceptions of the natural world" (p. xvi). Negotiating a tricky terrain between religion, aesthetics, and environmental politics, he is not entirely successful in melding the three into a single persuasive thesis; but Natural Visions offers some subtle and engaging set pieces along the way.	1
The book has three sections. The first, which most successfully combines all three of Dunaway's announced themes, concentrates on the early-twentieth-century transcendental vision conveyed by the photographer Herbert Gleason. A former Congregationalist minister who became a conservation lecturer, Gleason made the images that illustrate the twenty volumes of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1906). By careful analysis of those photographs (Natural Visions is lavishly and beautifully illustrated), Dunaway succeeds in illustrating his claim that Gleason "create[d] a new secular vocation: an environmental image maker, a reformer who used the camera to search for redemptive hope and preach the gospel of seeing" (pp. 28–29).	. . .

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