In the Tradition

So, as I whined in “Three Strikes,” I feel like the craft of straight color landscape (aka “nature”) photography has largely been shoved into a weedy, muddy ditch that’s parallel to—but fenced off from—that high road of “serious” work in most museums and galleries.

As if all landscape shooting is just half-aiming and clicking with a phone while strolling through a national park and eating frozen yogurt with one’s free hand…? “Ah, more pretty pictures. You’re just looking, you’re not making.” How yawningly quaint, right? Or: “It’s all been done before.” And/or: “We’re always separate from the world—why pretend we’re not?” Plus, of course, the ever-popular: “We all see in color. That’s not a craft.”

Sorry, but FWIW, I don’t buy that stuff. I think there’s an art of discovery and inspiration and reflection and of craft and presentation—no matter the subject.

I’m also a big believer in what might be called, to invoke Emerson, the “integrity of natural objects.” And in the aesthetics of moving through open space. Looking for roots. Finding that anchor in the outside world while scraps of Anthropocene angst, like windblown food wrappers, rustle by. All the lots and fields may have been sold off to “landowners," but as Emerson and Thoreau both wrote, “None of them owns the landscape.”

The idea behind the Sierra Club’s ground-breaking Exhibit Format series—and the photo books and calendars that followed—was that if you learned of a wild place and saw the very best of photos—printed as beautifully as possible—you would fall in love with that place and strive to save it. This was about building community. Sharing news from the original world…via an eyewitness…one set of eyes…one moment in time…sensibility moving through a real, but endangered, world. Charting the map for Wallace Stegner’s “Geography of hope.” With a craft worthy of the finest production values.

To me, that thread begins in the 1920s and 1930s with the 8x10 contact prints of Edward Weston—especially those luminous views of Point Lobos. This was also the heyday of the Sierra Club’s High Trips, the annual summer outings aimed at seeing how much firewood one large group could possibly burn. Those base camps fueled the black-and-white rise of Ansel Adams, Cedric Wright, and others. (And the radiant paintings and woodblock prints of Chiura Obata!) They also included club members like William Colby and David Brower, who championed that work and helped it grow.

The first volume in the Brower-edited Exhibit Format series was ‘This is the American Earth,” by Adams and Nancy Newhall. I recently re-read that one, and I was struck by how it is now even more topical than it probably seemed when the original show was hung in 1955, or when the book was published in 1960. Same old story. The war on trees marches on. Those pages overflow with many of what were to become AA’s most iconic images.

And what an epiphany to re-visit Eliot Porter’s “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.” This volume, third in the series, which paired Porter’s images with Thoreau’s writings, was originally published in 1962, then re-issued in a second 1988 hardbound edition with all-new color separations. This is the watershed moment for color landscape work. Porter’s 4x5 Linhof described in almost infinite detail a new world of shimmering shadows that are not just black…and highlights that are not just white. Those “intimate landscapes” are each alive throughout with color…which is the subject and form…and not just window dressing. As he later wrote: ”I began to appreciate the complexity of the relationships that drew my attention; and these I saw were more clearly illustrated in color than in tones of gray.”

Then there was Philip Hyde, who, like Porter, also began with black and white and moved to color. Hyde was the most prolific and most published of all the photographers in the Exhibit Format series, and he became the model for a photographic lifestyle, a practice, that was fully dedicated to the outdoors and to conservation. His work was typically more “pulled back” than Porter’s, more documentary in feel, and aimed at faithfully showing—without adornment—both the “big views” and the small details that added up to a place.

And there were others, too…who all then inspired an entire new generation of landscape photographers…who in turn became examples for the next…including me.

My own time with the SC began in the early 1990s. The calendar team needed a photo editor…they’d already published a number of my own images…and they knew I’d also been both a writer and photo editor for Sunset. In those days of “open” submissions, anyone on Earth could send in up to 100 images—which might mean as many as 75,000 transparencies a season. That part was brutal, but for 30 years straight, I also had the privilege of studying the original work of all my heroes: first, back in the film days, with my right eye pressed to a 4x Schneider loupe atop a huge bank of light tables; then while transitioning those skills to on-screen digital files; wading into the world of color separations and corrections; and winding up with live overseas press checks. Like in the Exhibit Format years, no time or effort was too much for our team.

Some days when editing I would look for hours—at many, many images—and just not find the thread. And I’d always ask myself: “Is it just me?” And then I’d open yet another package and BANG: There it was! There’s something that goes beyond a slide at rest on a light table…that can instantly telegraph a real presence—someone who is looking with their own, unique eyes and emotions. To me, the best landscape images are a rendering of a dialog between both inside and outside—and the bridge between them is at the heart of what I’m trying to paint here.

The revelations of Weston; the grand musical scores of Adams; the intimate landscapes of Porter; the dedicated practice as lived by Hyde. Foundations. As I’ve said before, it’s about community and a conversation…which leads to conservation.

And the thread of love—a search for beauty—runs through it all. OK, there, I’ve said it. That search is, to me, just as valid as plundering—or inventing—the “depths” of creativity in some other more deliberately dark or alienating way.

These days, I’m back out there myself, schlepping my camera pack and tripod, walking the trails, watching the light, talking to bobcats. Still looking to see. And listening for the whispers, the words of that older story we’ve bulldozed and buried.

Still trying to render a moment that makes a world. Still hoping to share something small that might serve as compost…and help others to bloom…?

Again, it’s a tradition. It’s a practice. It moves people. It’s an art.

By Scott Atkinson

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