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Reframing the Last Frontier: Subhankar Banerjee and the Visual Politics of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
- American Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 58, Number 1, March 2006
- pp. 159-180
- 10.1353/aq.2006.0023
- Review
- Additional Information
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Reframing the Last Frontier:
Subhankar Banerjee and the Visual Politics of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Finis Dunaway
"Cast your eyes on this," implored Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, as she stood on the Senate floor and showed her colleagues a picture of a polar bear (fig. 1).1 A clear blue sky delineates the top of the image, while below, a polar bear lumbers across the ice, its large white figure strikingly reflected in the water. Taken by Subhankar Banerjee in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the photograph, according to Boxer, offered compelling visual evidence as to why drilling should not take place in this remote Alaskan landscape. President George W. Bush and leading Republicans hoped to open the region to oil development, but Boxer maintained that such actions would threaten the habitat of the polar bear and other Arctic creatures. So on March 19, 2003, in the midst of a heated debate, she continued [End Page 159] to display Banerjee's photographs and to urge her fellow senators to vote in favor of an amendment to prevent drilling. Just before the vote was taken, Boxer held up a copy of the photographer's book, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, and recommended that everyone visit an exhibition of Banerjee's "breathtaking" photographs, soon to open at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.2 The Senate, much to the dismay of the Bush administration, approved Boxer's amendment by a vote of 52 to 48, thus forestalling, at least temporarily, plans to drill in ANWR.
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Subhankar Banerjee, Polar Bear, Bernard Harbor. |
Yet strange reports began to surface a few blocks away, as officials at the Smithsonian decided, only a few weeks before the show's debut, to eviscerate the captions and relegate the exhibit to an obscure location. Their actions, clearly made in response to Boxer's speech, triggered an unexpected controversy.3 Before it subsided, a relatively unknown nature photographer would find himself embroiled in the culture wars that often erupt on the National Mall, a debate over visual politics that intersected with a range of issues of interest to scholars in American studies, environmental studies, and visual culture. Banerjee's photographs, which thus far have been exhibited in twenty U.S. cities, with several more shows planned through this year, raise important [End Page 160] questions about environmental aesthetics and the idea of wilderness, about the relationship between texts and images in visual culture, and about the ongoing contest over how to define the Arctic in the nation's spatial imagination.4 For Bush and other drilling proponents, ANWR represents a frontier of economic possibility, a terrain filled with valuable oil reserves; for most environmentalists who oppose drilling, the wildlife refuge signifies pristine nature, a sacred space far removed from the problems of contemporary life. Banerjee's images, paired with selected nature writings and other environmental texts, clearly draw on the latter tradition. Yet they also gesture toward an alternative way of viewing the region: not as separate and remote, a faraway land disconnected from the rest of the United States...
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