"Questions of Seeing": Images and the Culture of Environmental Reform

American reformers have often used visual images to spotlight their causes, sometimes with tremendous effect. Think of Lewis Hine's images of children in textile mills and Jacob Riis's pictures of crowded tenement rooms during the Progressive Era, Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" during the Depression, and the images of African American schoolchildren facing water cannons and attack dogs in Birmingham during the civil rights movement. But perhaps no reformers have relied more on images, argues Finis Dunaway in Natural Visions, than environmental reformers of the twentieth century. This held true, he stresses, not just in the fledgling years of post–World War II environmentalism, when Ansel Adams's grand vistas of the U.S. West and NASA's Earth shots gained iconic status, but also during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, two pivotal earlier moments of environmental reform. Using both still and moving images to create a powerful new form of environmental storytelling, Dunaway contends in this carefully researched and elegantly written book, these reformers transformed key environmental issues into "questions of seeing" (xvii).

In Natural Visions, Dunaway takes us on a cultural tour of many of the most politically powerful environmental images of the twentieth century, using a richly biographical approach to situate images within their full contexts. He focuses mostly on highbrow image makers and art meant to transform spiritually and politically, not the popular visual culture of everyday life; Natural Visions is a study of professional artists who care primarily about nature, not of Disney films and the millions of images of nature made by everyday Americans using inexpensive cameras. Dunaway's tour emphasizes figures familiar to anyone who has studied environmental politics—such as filmmaker Pare Lorentz, director of The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), and Sierra Club executive director David Brower, the main force behind the slew of influential coffee-table books that the Sierra Club produced in the fifteen years before the first Earth Day in 1970—and lesser-studied figures, such as the early-twentieth-century photographer Herbert Gleason, whose work illustrated the twenty-volume 1906 edition of The Writings of Thoreau and became a key weapon in the landmark 1910s battle to prevent the damming of Yosemite National Park's Hetch Hetchy Valley, and Eliot Porter, a postwar pioneer of color photography and contributor to many Sierra Club projects. Dunaway ends by discussing photographers such as Charles Pratt, who, unlike Gleason and Porter, rejected the tradition of celebrating supposedly people-less wilderness landscapes in favor of illuminating human interrelations with nature in cities and rural landscapes.

On his tour of environmental photographs and films, Dunaway is less interested in engaging recent theoretical and methodological debates in visual cultural studies than in showing how taking certain environmental photographs and films seriously as evidence can shift the historiography of twentieth-century environmental politics. Although he offers thought-provoking points about the camera as a "technology of memory" that appeared to capture reality and suspend change, allowing reformers to create "visual monuments to vanishing places," Dunaway devotes most of his energy to contextualizing environmental images culturally and politically (xviii). This is more a cultural history of environmental reform using unusual sources than a historical study of visual culture. That said, Dunaway is not naive methodologically. Indeed, using environmental images and textured biography, he deftly weaves together cultural and political history. On each stop of his tour, Dunaway introduces us to one or more key artists and the issues they engage, draws our attention to the cutting-edge aesthetic features of their images, and, unlike many guides, shows the impact of their work on American life at the time. Placing each image in its full environmental, intellectual, and political context, Dunaway's book is less a tour through a museum of two-dimensional images than a journey through a series of multilayered historical re-creations in which the images and their makers are actors in a much larger and more lively...