America’s Best Idea
A Photographic Journey Through Our National Parks
August 8 – October 4, 2009, The Bell Museum
By Juliet Patterson
Some of the most iconic images Americans have of their native landscape have come by way of photographs. From the early days of photography, photographers have been inspired by land formations and sublime icons of nature, such as vast mountains, canyons and forests. During the last third of the 19th century, landscape photography emerged as a distinct genre and gave us a version of Nature that was seemingly limitless in its variety and space. Then in the 1930s, Ansel Adams produced a Western landscape that was purer and perhaps more heroic than almost anything previously committed to canvas. He focused his camera on the High Sierras and gave us what he called “straight photography,” in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no hint of manipulation. A technical master, Adams developed what he later referred to as the “zone system” of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. While his influence is still largely felt, landscape photography has been through a number of significant changes in the last thirty years. In the 1960s, for example, many photographers began to challenge the romanticized view of landscape photography dominanProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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in the first half of the twentieth century by expanding the parameters of what could be a landscape, how we can view it and how we can photograph it. Generally speaking, landscape photography steadily became more personal, more conceptual, and in many instances, more minimal. Meanwhile, the physical landscape that we photograph has also changed dramatically. The notion of pristine wilderness (such that Ansel encountered) is gone. What wilderness remains is preserved and carefully managed by governments, most notably in the form of national parks.
Dubbed “America’s best idea” by American historian, novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner, the U.S. National Park System’s 58 parks are the subject of photographer Stan Jorstad’s “America’s Best Idea: A Photographic Journey through America’s National Parks.” The exhibit, currently showing at the Bell Museum of Natural History, features panoramic color prints of America’s national parks. They capture the diversity of America’s landscape from Grand Canyon to the Everglades, the Badlands to the Great Smoky Mountains and Minnesota’s own Voyageurs (one of the first images you encounter in the show).
Jorstad, now in his eighties, is one of a handful of photographers who has photographed all 58 American parks. Jorstad’s painterly style of realism shows the influence of Ansel Adams, who was his friend and mentor. Like Adams, Jorstad follows the pursuit of purity in honest, unaltered images. Using large format film cameras, he produces, as he says, “what nature has presented him,” and to this aim avoids any signs of habitation that surround the sites. Seen in a more traditional art history context, Jorstad’s work represents the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape photography but also takes on another aspect of meaning in light of Jorstad’s interest in conservation. Jorstad is an environmentalist and, like Adams, has a preservationist’s interest in the national park system. Jorstad seems to focus on what might be termed spiritual-emotional aspects of the parks and wilderness and, like Adams, he tries to intensify the psychological experience of natural beauty.
Jorstad’s photographs evoke the iconic character of nature in concrete and distinct images, saturated in color and light. For Jorstad, things don’t seem to hurry by in color and abstract forms, but rather unfold in a linear and inevitable way. There’s grandeur in these panoramas that is surprising, but overall, there’s little intimacy between color, time and space, making some of the work somewhat cliché and predictable. For example, Jorstad frequently shoots at sunset or daybreak, which gives his scenes that particular kind of sky. His portrait of Glacier Park frames a sun-stroked slope in a steep valley behind a still glacial lake and above, there’s a bank of dynamic clouds laced with a faint trace of a rainbow. Standing with this photograph, I couldn’t help but think that something of beauty’s mystery had been lost in the banality of the photograph. Something diffused, perhaps in the insistence of Jorstad’s shot. To be fair, Jorstad is an immensely talented technician, and even his most predictable images resonate with acuity and purpose. Still, I couldn’t help but think that his Glacier Park was an ideal representation of what we all know to be beauty. Even if, as Jorstad himself says, he is simply recording what nature presents him, there are still aesthetic choices to be made. Reading the photographs in the context of art, it is sometimes difficult to feel – and further to know – the infinite amplitude of beauty. Instead, we are given exactly what we expect—horizons, waterlines, and majestic mountains—an anticipated catalogue of ideal representation.
By his own accounting, Jorstad’s aspiration for the exhibit (which coincides with the publication of a book of the same title and a soon-to-air documentary) is to spark interest in the natural beauty of our parks, providing a “visual tour of America’s most special natural and cultural places,” and in this context, the photographs are enormously valuable and successful. Still, the work raises questions about how wilderness and art relate; in particular, the stakes of designating something a wilderness and declaring something a work of art. Terry Tempest Williams in her book Leap (2000, Pantheon) raises a similar concern: “We’ve been trying to explain, justify, codify,” Williams says, “give biological and ecological credence as to why we want to preserve what is wild, like art, much more than a specimen behind glass. But what if we were to say, ‘Sorry, you are right, wilderness has no definable function. But can we let it be, designate it as art, art of the wild, just in case one such definition should arise in the mind of one standing in the tallgrass prairies of middle America or the sliding slope of sandstone in the erosional landscape of Utah?’”
Wilderness as an aesthetic, Williams suggests.
In part, Jorstad’s photographs work at this level. His tight focus on Mount Rainier or the Grand Tetons, for example, or the interior woodland shot of the Blue Ridge Mountains resonate with beauty, yet these pictures also somehow remind us of the inherent paradox of wilderness that is encompassed by a fence.
The Organic Act of 1916 created the National Park Service. The Organic Act states that the purpose of the park is “To conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein, and to provide enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for future generations.” In her essay titled “The significance of the National Parks,” Ruth Rudner points out that the phrase requiring the Park Service to provide “enjoyment” has often been read “as a mandate to build even more visitor services—frequently at the expense of wild land and animals.”
“The search for a satisfactory relationship to beauty has given little satisfaction,” the poet Brenda Hillman has written, an apt summation perhaps of how difficult it is to separate beauty from the ideal or as Hillman says, “to rescue the ideal from the ideal.”
In the future, our idea of beauty may take on new meaning in the face of an extinction crisis that will perhaps lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by the year 2100. How do we conceptualize nature and wilderness in the face of loss of this magnitude?
And what are the limitations of art as a response to this present moment, in its brilliance and its violence?
Images
1) Stan Jorstad. Great Smoky Mountains. Panoramic Color Photograph.
2) Stan Jorstad. Isle Royale. Panoramic Color Photograph.
3) Stan Jorstad. Yosemite. Panoramic Color Photograph.
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