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183 5. DIALOGICAL LANDSCAPES “Outsider” Photography of the West There are a lot of things that Americans live with that they never really see, because they are such a part of their culture. . . . As an “outsider,” however, I can drive around the desert southwest and get excited about miles and miles of telephone poles— telephone poles that the average American might take for granted. Ridley Scott Surmounting the Epic West Joel Meyerowitz has written of how he believes photographs work: “You picture something in a frame and it’s got lots of accounting going on in it—stones and buildings and trees and air—but that’s not what fills up a frame. You fill up a frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there. . . . A photo must have room in it for entrance by outsiders, so that the photographer himself or herself hasn’t built a structure that keeps you out, but instead has left some crack that allows you the freedom to enter.”1 His emphasis on the “entrance by outsiders” interrupting the “frame” and the “built . . . structure” of the image is a useful summary of the kinds of photography I wish to examine in this chapter. In some respects the works I will discuss are those with “cracks” that allow the fixed ideological frame to be interrogated and critiqued. The “photo-grid” of the West, going back to the nineteenth century, forms “a matrix of other visual and literary ways of narrating stories” (such as Albert Bierstadt or Owen Wister), contributing “potent bits of pictorial shorthand” shaping a powerful regional imaginary.2 In a similar manner into the twentieth century, the work of Ansel Adams presented a monologic, monumental vision of a preserved wilderness devoid of humanity (except the photographer) and culture, echoing Rosalind Krauss’s definition of modernist “grids,” discussed in the introduction, “crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface” of an idealized, “pure” West.3 Indeed, Martin Stupich has written that Adams’s photographs are like a “long monologue of brilliant diction and linguistic arabesque . . . [like] photography made to celebrate photography. The pictures dialogical landscapes 184 were whole, conclusive, final—each glorious print was a complete and clear answer, but to a question I would never ask.”4 This heritage has cast a monologic shadow over western photography , creating what Bakhtin would term an “epic” vision, “already ready defined and real . . . already finished, a congealed and half-moribund genre,” looking backward to “[t]he epic absolute past” as “the single source and beginning of everything good for all later times as well.” As in Adams’s West the past is sacred, complete, and untouchable, “as closed as a circle” and with “no place . . . for any openendedness, indecision , indeterminacy . . . no loopholes in it through which we glimpse the future; it suffices unto itself.”5 The photographers I discuss in this chapter “reframe” the West to break open this “closed circle,” reinvoke the “Other,” and challenge epic distance with the details of the everyday, thereby questioning, as Giles puts it, “alignment with such ‘monolithic’ national narratives.”6 The “new” photography of the West, post-Adams, explores these “loopholes” to present an “anti-epic,” anti-mythic vision created in dialogue with this tradition and its mediations, mutations, and simulations. In Adams’s frozen idealization of place as a myth, as Edenic Promised Land, the West as culturally constructed, social landscape , a zone of contact and encounter where interaction and dialogue takes place at all levels, is, therefore, repressed. The eternal and sacred effect of the epic “grids” of his photographs with their “centripetal” pull to authenticity, origins, and tradition, can, however, be dialogized by the presence of alternative, “centrifugal” forces—bizarre, contradictory , and problematic “intrusions from outside”—always asserting the photographer’s position in the construction process.7 The “closed circle” of representation, like Meyerowitz’s limits of the photographic frame, can be breached and its “inside” turned outward to reconnect with a field of forces and images beyond itself, just as new photography dialogizes “the great drama of meaning [Adams’s] photographs enact” (emphasis added).8 Remember, “outsideness,” as we discussed in the introduction, provides a different lens, confronting the cultural “givens” and myths that have taken on a dominant status, engaging in “a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and onesidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures” with a new form...

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