|
|
|
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, $37.00, £26.00.)
|
|
In this well-written book, Finis Dunaway "seeks to understand why the camera has played such a crucial role in American environmental politics and how it has shaped modern perceptions of the natural world" (p. xvi). Through several case studies, he argues that twentieth-century environmental reformers used photography to bring emotions and aesthetics into politics. He suggests that these photographs give us a way of tracking shifting environmental debates and help us understand the history of emotions and the evolving historical character of the ecological sublime. |
1
|
|
Dunaway begins his book with a study of Herbert Gleason, a latter-day Transcendentalist who left the ministry in 1899 to pursue a career in landscape photography. Gleason illustrated an edition of Thoreau's works (Boston, 1906), developed a series of slide lectures, participated in the debates over Hetch Hetchy, and eventually found work as a photographer for the National Park Service. Dunaway argues that Gleason laid the groundwork for subsequent photographers by fusing words and image in a new kind of visual advocacy. Perhaps. But this is one of the moments where Dunaway's decision not to consider nineteenth-century photography (on the grounds that the conservation movement was not yet in place) makes it difficult to show how Gleason and his later twentieth-century counterparts actually drew upon older aesthetic traditions, both in terms of their reliance on descriptive captions and their visual preference for unpopulated landscapes that concealed the impact of humans on the natural world. |
2
|
|
The second part of Dunaway's work focuses on three of the great films about the American environment produced in the 1930s: Pare Lorentz's The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), and Robert Flaherty's less well-known film, The Land (1942). Reconstructing in wonderful detail the production and reception of these films, Dunaway argues that they collectively represented a very different version of the American landscape. By suggesting how technology could be used to help solve ecological problems, they provided a "meeting ground between science and sentiment, reason and emotion" (p. 85). Though a reader might wish for a fuller discussion of how movies function differently than still images as tools of political or moral suasion, Dunaway clearly conveys how these films harnessed visual imagery to promote a New Deal political agenda. |
3
|
|
In the third and most original section of the book, Dunaway looks at the Sierra Club's development of the "environmental coffee table book" in the 1960s. Dunaway takes a close look at Ansel Adams's This is the American Earth (San Francisco, 1960) and Eliot Porter's In Wildness is the Preservation of the World (New York, 1967), showing how Sierra Club director David Brower worked with the photographers to craft particular environmental agendas. While Adams worked in the grand landscape tradition developed in the nineteenth century, Porter's color images of smaller fragments of the natural world drew attention to less remote places, reflecting and stimulating a growing environmental concern for more vernacular landscapes. |
4
|
|
Although Dunaway argues for the emotional and even spiritual power of photographs, he implicitly argues that photographs gain in persuasive power when accompanied by words—in books, in film scripts, on exhibition walls. By revealing how a key series of books and films on environmental themes were carefully constructed to convey particular political messages, he makes a valuable addition to our understanding of photographic history as well as the history of environmental reform. |
5
|
| Martha A. Sandweiss
|
| Amherst College |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
ISSN 1939-8603
|