Landscape and Images (review)

In the introduction to his recently published compilation of essays, John Stilgoe laments that "just looking around" has drifted out of fashion. As a consequence, our ability to analyze—even to notice—everyday landscapes has greatly diminished. His thoughts on the matter are well worth recording here:

Frenzy scars too many over-long workdays, and high-speed or congested highway traffic makes pleasure driving rare. Cell-phone calls interrupt the walker and distract the motorist and the railroad passenger. Walking and running become merely physical exercise often taken in such harried, collision-prone locations that health-club treadmills satisfy more completely. In sinister ways, suspicion attaches to watchers. The walker stopped to examine an old building, the motorist pulled over to scrutinize the last suburban farm fields, even the shopper stopped to watch playground activity becomes suspect

(p. 1).

This is particularly true today amid fears of terrorism at home and abroad.

Stilgoe is the Robert and Lois Orchard Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Over the course of his distinguished career, he has emerged as one of the foremost authorities on landscape analysis and interpretation. Landscape and Images represents more than 25 yr of what he calls "just looking around." Given the fruits of his labors, so ably assembled into one stimulating and highly readable volume, perhaps "seeing" would be a better way to describe Stilgoe's talent. Whereas Webster's dictionary defines looking as the "exercise of the power of vision," seeing implies something deeper and more meaningful—"to come to know" and "to perceive the meaning or importance of." A careful read of Stilgoe's essays, which span the period from 1976 to 2003, will convince the reader that he is not merely looking around and chronicling that which meets his eye. He is reading the landscape and reporting what he finds with such depth, clarity, and style that it is easy, at times, for the reader—a virtual tourist along for the ride—to be lulled into thinking that Landscape and Images is a finely crafted work of fiction, and not the product of a lifetime spent asking questions and probing for answers.

Relying on a keen sense of sight sharpened by years of work in the field, not to mention frequent trips to numerous archives, Stilgoe manages to see what most of the rest of us fail to even notice. Divided into four main sections—The Deep Past and Images; Rural Looking; Contemporary Space; and Photographed Landscape -the diversity of subjects addressed in Landscape and Images is reflective of the author's nearly thirty years of intellectual, as well as geographic, peregrinations. In the first section, Stilgoe examines how our use and understanding of the spatial concept landschaft has shifted through time; imagines how French voyageurs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries viewed and mapped North America; scrutinizes the landscape observations of such well known travelers as Thomas Cole and Timothy Dwight; and considers the influence of early American land classification systems on landscape perception and aesthetics. Perhaps the most fascinating chapter in this set explores the origins of one of modern humanity's last pagan rituals, the lighting of the jack-o'-lantern—"the enduring effigy of a marker-stealing goblin" (p. 61). The second section, Rural Looking, includes what are arguably the most provocative chapters in the book. Here Stilgoe uses travelogues to make sense of eighteenth and nineteenth century views of Pennsylvania; employs nineteenth century geography textbooks and atlases to track the state of Indiana's rise to national prominence; and calls into question the meaning and value of certain common geographic terms which, upon closer inspection, prove extraordinarily difficult to define. Three articles—"Deep Cold," "Skewing Private Climate," and "Camouflaged and Saving Energy"—resonate today, even though each was written over 20 yr ago. While the first of these contemplates how extreme winter weather conditions can turn a humanized landscape into a terrifying wilderness—giving us a fleeting glimpse of what life might...