We ’ ve lived for generations in America with our promising tomorrows waiting for us precisely up ahead. Despite populace wars and ceaseless war, despite arduous ( for some ) economic depressions and recessions, despite a history of slavery and genocide and being plagued by regular flare-ups of malfeasance and corruption in government, despite the oceans of filth and poison that hang menacingly in suspension in our air travel and urine, we continue to believe in rescue. We believe in the eventual victory of broad values—the passage and enforcement of equitable laws, comity in all our daily affairs, low-cost education, probity from our politicians—the full embrace of which will allow us ultimately to dismantle entrenched bigotry and injustice .
As I write these words I ’ thousand compelled to say that I see no polarity of such a redemption on the horizon. This is not to imply that the situation in the United States is hopeless—even considering the wealth gap, widespread environmental degradation, institutionalized cheat on in business, the many biological and economic problems associated with advancing climate breakdown, and the social unfairness created by, say, male privilege—but only to suggest that we have been kidding ourselves about there being, fair up ahead, a unclutter path to the other side of all this. Our children and grandchildren, seeing how probationary our reply has been to ball-shaped climate disorder and to whatever else might conceivably be coming along—the sudden collapse of an international fiscal mental hospital like Deutsche Bank or a pandemic for which there is no immediate cure—have framed already their objections : Why did you not prepare ? Why were you indeed profligate while we still had a chance ? Where was your wisdom ?
many of the pictures in american Geography speak to questions about our survival as a species. Some reflect our sense of grief about what has happened. In others you can feel the photographer ’ south bewilderment at the lapp fourth dimension as his or her curiosity. For some viewers, these pictures might prompt feelings of anger and disapprobation. If you imagine the exhibition as a hale patch of fabric, you could say that the larger question here is, what have we done ?
For me, who began my professional life as a photographer a good as a writer more than fifty years ago, American Geography ’ sulfur stance is one of direct confrontation. The show dispenses with sentimentality and nostalgia about our once-primal landscapes and is, far, not compromised by iconic photograph of the beautiful. besides, for all of its pictures from the 19th and early on twentieth centuries, the exhibition is much less about our past than it is about our future. The show persistently questions the measure of the “ fruits of advancement ” ( or the miss of them ) and besides the putative ethical initiation for Manifest Destiny. To go on like this, the exhibition suggests—to continue to applaud the individual quest for substantial personal wealth at the expense of others, and to continue to promote the puerile dream of some to secure positions of social and political advantage over others—would be suicidal .
When Sandra Phillips first invited me to discuss with her the ideas behind this show, I urged her to consider, along with the pictures of cultural imposition she had already located—the boot prints, if you will, of the colonial invader—other, possibly more welcome photograph of the enduring biological, geological, and botanical integrity of American landscapes, pictures not marred by clearcuts, toxic settle ponds, transmission towers, contrails, receptive pit mines, stalled traffic, sprawling feed lots, and the pillow of humanness ’ mho infrastructure. These pictures of unmanipulated land, I thought, would contrast precipitously with scenes of economic hardship and the heedless marauding that drove the Westward Movement. They would make the ethical debacle documented in many of these photographs more apparent .
I object to the profanation of what is beautiful, to the celebration of what is corruptible, and to the ethical dullness of the king ’ second adoring enablers. I object to society ’ randomness complacency .
But I came approximately to her point of view. Crudely put, it is that we can no long afford to carry on in a elongated era of polite mirror image and ineffective electric resistance. An era of Emergencies is bearing down on us. We must now consider, for model, how to organize the last industrial extractions of oil, fresh water, natural gas, timber, metallic ores, and fish in decree to ensure our own survival ; and we must consider, of course, what comes after that. We must reckon with the Sixth Extinction, which will remove, for exemplar, many of our pollinators and one day, probably, many of us. We must invent overnight, figuratively speaking, another kind of refinement, one more aware of limits, less avaricious, more compassionate, less bigoted, more inclusive, less exploitative. It is startling to encounter in some of the earlier photograph in american Geography the capacity of women and men, many decades ago, to recognize and capture on film juxtapositions that expose the likely for lifelike and cultural catastrophe in what, for sol long, we had considered the normal order of western advance .
The courage behind curating american Geography, for me, is the decision by Phillips to address unflinchingly the trouble future, to prompt a reconsideration of what will work for us now, what we will freely abandon, and what we will hold onto at any price. In contemporary artwork today, internationally angstrom well as here in America, I have noticed opposition to entertainment for its own sake and a burgeoning desire to create art of consequence, artwork that does not trifle with us or exploit our grief. More big in the arts now than the desire to inform and to illuminate our predicament, or to indict its causes, is the desire to probe it, and to identify previously inconsiderate approaches to managing it, to offer metaphors that open out onto feasible solutions. With this different kind of orientation it is then possible to regard the dark underbelly of the Industrial Revolution and understand that that free radical switch in social organization, alongside the absolute scale of industrial production, is now presenting us with a aesculapian bill for all this change, for the treatment of mesothelioma, black lung, befoulment cancers, and the rest. To consider that the honey bee and the angry knight have their own integrity and possibly even their own aspirations, and can no retentive be viewed as subjects, volition to participate in the structure of a world built to serve the needs and desires of human beings alone.
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At the center of the lifework of many artists I have known is a simple but fundamental affirmation : “ I object. ” I have studied what we have done to the planet and I object. I object to the exploitation of, and the miss of deference for, human laborers. I object to the delirious commercialization of the many realms of daily life, I object to the profanation of what is beautiful, to the celebration of what is corruptible, and to the ethical dullness of the king ’ randomness adoring enablers. I object to society ’ sulfur complacency .
As you browse among and study these pictures, I would ask you not to give in to the enticement to despair, not to retreat into cynicism or to settle into disaffection, but to recognize in these photographs the resilience, determination, and concern for the destiny of humanity that these photographers possess. And I would ask you further to consider how integral to american Geography is the estimate of an corps de ballet of cultivate like this. While there is individual flair behind many of these pictures, it is the residential district of artists, the absence of overbearing individual sentiment, that stands out here. It was during the Scientific Revolution that Art as a discrete and enduring form of truth-telling, as important for us to consider as the colossal data sets that Science has produced in its own ongoing feat to plot a viable future for humanness, that the indispensability of the arts began to lose its stature. Since then we have come to regard the articulation of Science as definitive. nowadays, some are saying that we appear to be on the brink of another kind of predilection, resituating the arts in a position of authority. We are seeing this in photography, in musical typography, in fabrication, in dance and field, and in installation and performance artwork and in painting, as artists make our experiential predicament more apparent and point us in the direction of radical social change, for which, frighteningly, we have made about no preparation .
The photograph in american Geography are not an indictment of human enterprise, nor are they a review of industrialization or a arch assessment of world ’ south failures. If anything, they reveal the artists ’ sense of significance in whatever they confront with the television camera, and in some ways the grief that they share with the viewer. In american Geography there is no matchless to blame. The exhibition is an invitation, alternatively, to reimagine our future, to identify a different road than the one that the prophets of technical initiation, or ball-shaped climate change itself, is offering us .
It ’ s the road to our survival .
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text and photograph from american Geography, which is forthcoming from Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2021 .
Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez is the author of six works of nonfiction and eight works of fiction, including Arctic Dreams, which received a National Book Award. His writing appears regularly in Harper’s, The Paris Review, DoubleTake, and The Georgia Review. He is the recipient of a National Book Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other honors. He lives in western Oregon. Barry Lopez is the generator of six works of nonfiction and eight works of fiction, including Arctic Dreams, which received a National Book Award. His writing appears regularly in Harper ‘s, The Paris Review, DoubleTake, and The Georgia Review. He is the recipient of a National Book Award, an Award in Literature from the american Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other honors. He lives in western Oregon .
