Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (review)

In this tidy exposition of the visual culture of American environmentalism, Dunaway demonstrates the extent to which 20th-century photography taught Americans how to “see” nature. The work of photographer Herbert Gleason early in the 20th century, documenting national parks and monuments for the federal government, set the stage for New Deal and post-war jeremiads to follow, like those of Pare Lorentz and Eliot Porter. Color reproductions and discussion of Porter’s work are especially valuable, as Porter has received little scholarly attention. Dunaway explores a welter of photographers and filmmakers, government officials, activists and writers, attempting to set Americans on what they believed was the right (and righteous) path to harmony with the natural world.

Dunaway’s main claim is that the use of the camera has been central in Americans’ emerging environmental politics over the last century. From documenting national parks and monuments to Glen Canyon before it was flooded, from 20th-century reappropriations of Thoreau and Emerson to the work of Rachel Carson and David Brower, from the imagined past of the grasslands in Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains to the first image of earth transmitted from space, Dunaway shows us how important photographed images have been to educate and motivate people environmentally.

The contrast between New Deal and 1960s images is striking, but so is the similarity of purpose. Dunaway reveals photographers’ and filmmakers’ belief in the redemptive power of a right relationship with nature in both eras. They excoriated industrial abuses of land or called for the preservation of wild places, but did so through the technology of photography and the mass production of images—part and parcel of the society they critiqued. Dunaway reminds us of many such contradictions, including the fact that “the land” was used to unify particularly white Americans in national feeling in the 1930s, and that what was photographed as “wild” had extensive histories as inhabited places. Images of nature could be bought and sold by environmental advocates without disrupting the industrial consumer culture and regime of “taste” in which they were produced.

Dunaway’s book is a deft contribution to cultural history beyond its central argument. If you can intone by memory the cadences of The River, it’s pleasant confirmation to know that Walt Whitman’s poetry informed both the script and the images of that film. Dunaway neatly compares the aims and Cold War context of Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition with another exhibition of the same year, “This Is the American Earth,” which opened in Yosemite National Park and featured the work of Ansel Adams and others. Dunaway shows how deeply ecological insight, environmental politics, and aesthetic judgment can shape one another, from large-scale Darwinian and Romantic teleologies to more recent glimpses of the particular and the random. Dunaway says much about abiding visual cues in American environmentalism, while saying a great deal as well about American traditions in literature, visual arts, ecological thought, and consumer culture.