land

Last night I responded to a post by a very bright and creative person in England. She had made a comment on Ansel Adams photos of Yosemite... something about how she had never seen the place, and thus they didn't move her. Which got me thinking, because I have been to Yosemite. Several times. And it isn't the same place I've seen in pictures.

I first saw an Ansel Adams photograph when I was in my early 20s. It was at an exhibit at Northwestern University; I remember being in awe, looking at these big, beautiful prints of the western landscape which seemed to glow, to give off a light of their own. At that time, I hadn't yet visited Yosemite; but the prints were inspirational, bits of technical virtuosity.

Odd, but it wasn't until last night that I realized... the prints were so good, that they transcended the landscape they were intended to capture. The "art" was in the two-dimensional piece of paper, and it had little to do with the landscape.

Ironic, because Adams was a central figure in what is sometimes known as the transcendental school of thought on landscape photography... basically, the landscape as spiritual experience. He was, of course, an important figure in the progression of photography, the modernist counterpoint to Mortenson and the expressionists. The razor-sharp images of Adams and his friends raced past the soft and romantic fantasies of Mortenson, and brought photography into the modern era.

There was a day when I would perhaps have sided with Adams, seen things in much the same way. But landscape photography has continued to evolve, as have I. My current viewpoint depends as much on my training in ecology as it does on anything related to photography. It is also based in part on the days and weeks I've spent at Yosemite... mostly more than ten years ago.

I've looked at those famous scenes, and I know what Adams cropped out. There is no sign of human influence in most of those images, but the human presence in Yosemite is relentless, impossible to miss, while you're actually standing there. In the valley at least, it's difficult to get very far from roads, cars, buildings, and people.

But whether in the valley or in the more remote high country, something else is wrong. When I look at those prints today, I see a dense conifer forest, an artifact of fire suppression, of the Smokey-theBear mentality that was just coming into its own in Adams day. With the absence of the fires that had burned for 10,000 years, the trees closed in. The earliest photographs of Yosemite show a much more open place, with widely spaced trees, savanna-like. No longer.

This change itself is one part of a sequence, a progression. Once, there were glaciers, then came grass and flowers and trees. The native people burned the woods for a variety of reasons, and their population was perhaps once greater than we now know. After 1500, those people were decimated by diseases introduced from Europe, their numbers much reduced. The fires continued, but perhaps not as frequently. Then, with western settlement, after a brief period of increased fire to burn off logging slash, the fires almost ceased. For more than 100 years in many places, the cleansing fire ceased to burn.

Today, Yosemite burns again. The fires of today are carefully managed by park staff, constrained by the buildings and the people and by smoke regulations. They may have checked the encroachment of trees, but they have little effect on those already in place. The structure of the forest depends on the patterns of decades, of centuries. The landscape is constantly shifting, it is temporally and spatially dynamic, and it always has been. But it operates on a scale not readily apparent to impatient human eyes.

The forests are not real, no more than bambi in real. We have imposed them on the landscape, as we have altered the processes of millenia. We are newcomers, and we do not understand this land we claim to own. But is it possible to own something that has existed for billions of years, may exist for billions more after we are gone?

In my own photography, I've moved away from the myth of the pristine landscape; because it's been a long time since anything has been pristine, and the myth is a dangerous one. I no longer crop the human influence out of the picture. Often, it's the central subject of the image. Now, I'm interested in the human elements within the landscape, the ephemeral presence that, in our arrogance as a culture, we falsely believe is of such great and lasting importance.