Revisiting places back in old times
IN 1842, while visiting the US, Charles Dickens took a train north-west from Boston to the industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts. He wasn’t impressed by the scenery: “Mile after mile of stunted trees: Some hewn down by the axe, some blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their neighbours, many mere logs half hidden in the swamp.”
Everywhere he looked, the English author saw signs of “decay, decomposition and neglect”. This is not the New England inscribed in popular memory, from the writings of the American Transcendentalists to the paintings of Grandma Moses or Norman Rockwell.
But one does see many images reminiscent of Dickens’ description in “East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography,” a revelatory and fascinating exhibition of early photography at the National Gallery of Art that opens on Sunday. The show has gathered 175 photographs, from early daguerreotypes to mass-market stereoscope cards, including some of the earliest photographic images ever made of the US.
Visitors primarily interested in history will find here a record of this country’s early infrastructure – its canals, railroads and dockyards – as well as the calamities of the Civil War, the development of Eastern cityscapes, and a record of American architecture both rural and urban. The opportunity to stare into the reflective abyss of a watery daguerreotype and move about until the light hits at just the right oblique angle to reveal an 1840 image of Niagara Falls, is alone worth the visit.
But the larger drama of this exhibition is its restitution of memory. American landscape photography is dominated by photographers who worked in the West, capturing its large vistas and sublimity, and advertising its economic potential. But photography arrived in the East well before intrepid photographers began lugging large-format cameras across the plains. In fact, it arrived with astonishing alacrity. Within a year of Louis Daguerre’s announcement of his namesake photographic process in 1839, scientists, tinkerers and adventurous amateurs were reproducing the technique in the US. A British scientist named Hugh Lee Pattinson went to Niagara Falls – already a popular subject for painters and printmakers – to produce some of the earliest extant daguerreotypes made in America (and the earliest extant images of the falls). They aren’t in great shape, but it’s a wonder that they still exist and are still legible.
The Adirondacks of upstate New York, the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Hudson River were popular subjects.
Perhaps the most interesting room of the exhibition juxtaposes paintings and photographs made at the same time, in some cases by artists within the same family. In Albert’s painting, readily identifiable objects cast clearly articulated shadows, such as a broken tree stump that leaves a perfect dark shadow on a sunny rock beneath it. In the photograph, the shadows are not nearly so delineated, but appear merely as dark patches. And where Albert paints a tiny patch of sky visible through the trees, a perfect shade of sky blue, in the photograph made by his brothers, the sky appears as a blur of white light. The painter, it seems, used a set of visual cues to orient the eye, to let the viewer know where the light is coming from, which in turn heightens the illusion of verisimilitude. These are signs that refer to visual ideas, rather than a transparent record of the things themselves.
Throughout the exhibition, the dialogue between painting and photography is recorded mainly through the development of a specifically photographic aesthetic of photography. But as early as the 1850s, in a magnificent winter landscape by Josiah Johnson Hawes, you see photographs doing things that would spur a small revolution in how painters depicted the world. In this case, a delicate screen of snow-covered branches all but obscures the image of a building in the distance. It would take years of seeing the world in this photographically determined way, and seeing it in a similar form depicted by Japanese printmakers, before this kind of thing would crop up on the painted canvas.
The emergence of a photographic aesthetic wasn’t the same as the adoption of painterly techniques by photographers. Blue-tinted cyanotype images by Henry Peter Bosse in the late 1880s and ‘90s, showing bridges, dams and waterways, live in the photographic world, full of detail and incident yet also open to the large, engulfing vista. Bosse is one of many happy discoveries in this exhibition, along with William Rau, Seneca Ray Stoddard and James Ryder.
By the late 19th century, nostalgia and regret creep into the aesthetic. The Eastern landscape was looking more and more like Dickens’ infernal wasteland of the 1840s. Beloved places were being encroached on, and destroyed. Infrastructure that had been lovingly photographed decades earlier no longer read as a light harness or gentle guiding hand on the wilds of nature. Train tracks didn’t cut narrow tracks through the primeval forest, but blighted wide swaths of the landscape, and the cleared field was no longer bounded by the infinite wood. Photographers who had popularised the landscape for tourists were increasingly worried about its preservation. The caption of an 1880 heliotype made near Niagara Falls is self-explanatory: Disfigured Banks: Repulsive Scenery around Visitor Approaching Goat Island Bridge for First View of Rapids, from “Special Report of New York State Survey on the Preservation of the Scenery of Niagara Falls”.
Now, as the country flirts with undoing its environmental protections, unleashing the pure and predatory power of capitalism, the show could not be more timely. The essence of photography, fixing an image in a matter of moments, is to say: Look what we’ve lost. Now it’s time to look again. – Washington Post