vacation

via Pruned (one of my favorite blogs of the mo'), the series, Vacation from photographer John Brinton Hogan, who says about this work:

Much of the American self-identity [sic] has been informed by its perceived relationship with the landscape. From the beginning, representations of the West have always been a type of sales pitch: a dream to believe in, a commodity to be sold on – an advertisement for an idea. The attraction to these untouched lands lay in the fact that most humans were never meant to see them, much less inhabit them. The idea was the promise of conquest, of asserting our will over places so inhospitable nothing there dared exist.

Scattered throughout the West are numerous sites where the chance still remains to experience those grand vistas the way they existed before our arrival. However, when an individual considers the banal infrastructure created to appreciate those vistas, they’re confronted with a markedly different experience: the illusion is exposed– the only unspoiled view is the one created for our entertainment. An opportunity to behold the bleached bones of Manifest Destiny fulfilled.

It's amazing to me that this photographer makes a point in his work that he himself seems to miss, if you take his statement to be all he understands consciously. You can see the infrastructure as "spoiling the view", as "bleached bones" of Ozymandias, or whatever ... evidence of hubris, etc.

But through these photos you can also see that "the view" doesn't exist without the infrastructure. The "bleached bones" are also simply picture frames, dropped there, originally, in the early twentieth century (remember the teddy bear's namesake?) through roads and campsites, and refined throughout the following decades by the develoment of "tourist infrastructure".

These pictures are worth a thousand words of art criticism about why even today most landscape photography and painting is so clichéd, so stuck on forms and views that have been rehashed a million times over; why tourists' photographs are so easily identified as such, why people choose the pictures they do when they're on vacation.

The tourist infrastructure is a didactic tool in a way unforeseen (except perhaps, by its literal architects): it has taught us how to see our landscape and also trapped us in the lesson. We can't escape this mediated view; we're not allowed to leave the road, and it's dangerous to stop anywhere but in designated viewing pull-offs. At the same moment in history that we are waking up to our impact on the environment---at the moment that our understanding is reaching the twentieth century (for us to reach the twenty-first century, we'd have to move to Scandinavia)---our vision of our land is still firmly mired in the nineteenth.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but how can we avoid delusions of grandeur of our role in the world, when our view of our nation's corpus is only a stand-back view of its grandeur? There are lizards and scorpions in those deserts, mud and mosquitos in those forests, but we never get anywhere near them. The view is clean and distant, and we are too obese and out of shape to hike. So those of us who do go abroad see landscapes of other nations differently, without the frames and swelling music and air conditioning, and assume that no one is as grand and beautiful as we.

Comments

[anon]

Ummm... are you making the suggestion that we should allow people to freely wander these areas? Granted, there are snakes, spiders, rock falls, and various other natural forms of ridding the good ole US of A of its obese and closed-minded populace, but, then again, do you really want hundreds if not thousands of fools traipsing around these areas stomping on or picking wildflowers, scaring wildlife, and, in general, wreaking havoc simply to impress upon them how un-grand we and our country are? The most obvious point you seem to miss is that by herding vacationers into these trite, vistaed spots, we also protect these scenes of grandeur from ourselves. Maybe the hackneyed photos, prints, and paintings that you refer to are the result of people who should have been office workers who are happy to be office workers and not unhappy, unfulfilled 'artists'.

I know it is very PC to slag off America and its populace but insensitivity, stupidity, naivete, hubris, and an endless list of epithets is not something peculiar to America or Americans, it is a human fault which has been repeated throughout history across many cultures, continents, and races.

[claire]

anon, i made no suggestions whatsoever. i made a comment, or an observation. i know it's fun to put words in my mouth and then argue self-righteously against them, but you're really just arguing with yourself.

also, using "pc" as a negative term gets no traction down atlas(t) way. there's no value, good or bad, on political correctness. sometimes the politically correct line is proven out by history, and sometimes it's not. sometimes people adopt the politically correct line because it's politically correct, and sometimes they arrive at it through thinking.

yes, it's politically correct among liberals and lefties to feel free to critique american culture and politics, rather than blindly express a vague sense of loyalty by never criticizing, always hysterically defending. yes, often this critique is knee-jerk. but when you're a liberal or left citizen of a powerful country at war with a radically less powerful country, and when your own government makes no apologies for rape, torture, and other abrogation of geneva convention rights, criticism is pretty damn allowable and critique is absolutely necessary.

yes, it's very easy to say that all humans are subject to hubris, stupidity, etc. very easy. it's easy to let yourself off the hook like that. it's hard to recognize that you yourself, and your country, and your culture, by virtue of your dominant position in the world, are most guilty of these things.

and it's hard to remember that, although other people and other countries might be guilty of bad things, you can't change them. you can only change yourself and your own country. your first and last responsibility is to honestly evaluate and improve you and yours. you have no duty, and no right, to change what's not yours.