Observation Points: The Visual Poetics of National Parks by Thomas Patin (review)

The authors of Observation Points: The Visual Poetics of National Parks understand “national parks and monuments as discursive apparatuses that have produced, limited, and shaped discourses on nature, including human nature, and have justified particular social policies and cultural preferences as natural and necessary” (xiii). In this volume, visual rhetoric is conceived broadly: photographs, pamphlets, documentaries, viewing positions, architecture, paintings, and spaces all receive critical attention. By interrogating the multiple textual, material, and visual rhetorical practices surrounding and producing “national parks,” the contributors demonstrate some ways in which the parks have been invoked in troubling narratives of American exceptionalism. As the essays in this volume reveal, the space of national parks is rhetorically naturalized and made invisible while, at the same time, doing the work of naturalizing cultural and historical narratives.

Although Observation Points lacks any obvious organizational pattern, its eclectic essays can be generatively read with a number of themes in mind. One such theme centers on what Gregory Clark calls “rhetorical experiences,” which he says “prompt particular attitudes” (39). For instance, Clark argues the rustic architecture within Zion National Park provides an aesthetic experience capable of conjuring a “better way of life” (52) based on more primitive and harmonious ways of living. Peter Peters implicitly extends this argument by suggesting that modern transit systems both augment and limit rhetorical experiences by organizing how visitors move into, through, and out of national parks. Building on the idea of rhetorical experiences, Thomas Patin suggests that national parks are designed to “regulate the bodies and organize the vision of visitors,” thus functioning as “essentially museological institutions” (270). Bringing this discussion to bear on the experiences of American Indians, Stephen Germic illuminates the ways in which American Indians create alternative rhetorical experiences by creating monumental memorials that pay homage to the (sometimes violent) displacement of native peoples. In each of these essays, rhetoric operates both visually and materially, shaping the experiences of park visitors in ways that either affirm or disrupt naturalized narratives.

The theme of rhetorical experiences is bolstered in two additional essays that explore how viewing positions are created and challenged in national parks. Robert Bednar examines how “material display technologies and material social practices” (3), such as visitor centers and scenic overlooks, function both as the means for viewing national parks and “the mediums through which national parks present themselves as natural landscapes” (3). Viewing positions function rhetorically to demarcate human spaces and natural places, a distinction important to the mission of the national parks to preserve pristine environments. In his essay, Mark Neumann explores how early discursive formations of the Grand Canyon “put a frame around the experience of the observer” (84), a frame that posited the canyon as a “contemplative retreat” (94). When stunts and spectacles—tight rope walkers, stunt car drivers—are performed in national parks, Neumann argues that sublime vistas are “crashed” or made to seem unnatural. Official rhetorics that mark parks as natural places are thus affirmed and contested at viewing positions.

A third theme emerges around paintings of national parks. Sabine Wilke, Gareth John, and Albert Boime examine how early landscape paintings have contributed to the naturalized view of national parks as sublime places of grandeur devoid of human industrial development. Wilke argues that through their “hyperbolic visual excess and panoramic and telescopic detail” (116), Albert Bierstadt’s paintings underscore the notion of the sublime national park. Similarly, John notes that paintings from the Hayden survey of what would later become Yellowstone National Park served to visualize what words could not satisfactorily describe—“an environment alien to the known world” (154) at the time—and to catalyze efforts to establish Yellowstone as a national park (157). Whereas John praises the role of art, Boime’s critical account of George Catlin’s take on American Indians both points out the artist’s imperialist framework and acknowledges Catlin’s productive contribution to understandings of native peoples...