BEAUTIFUL LIES : Photography and Wilderness
David Stephenson
School of Art , University of Tasmania , Hobart , Australia
Abstract
Since its inception photography has been used to represent nature. With the rise of wet plate photography in the 1860s, multiple albumen prints could be produced relatively inexpensively, catering to a growing middle class with an increasing appetite for entertainments like photography and tourism. In America the subjugation of the indigenous population and the construction of railroads in the 1860s opened up the western frontier, and for the first time vast expanses of western wilderness were accessible to the tourist traveller. Stereographs and large display prints were produced to cater to this new market, resulting in a previously unseen flowering of landscape photography. The tourism-driven boom in American landscape photography in the nineteenth century was paralleled globally (albeit on a smaller scale), and Tasmanian landscape photographers like Beattie and Spurling were extremely active in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.
Environmental debate of the last thirty years has produced its own visual culture based primarily on photographic representation of threatened wilderness areas, which is culturally disseminated through popular forms such as postcards, calendars, and books. In these popular forms, wilderness is aestheticised and depicted within rigid codes of representation as orderly, benevolent, and beautiful. Wilderness is traditionally defined as land devoid of human impact, but paradoxically in such representations it is symbolically available to the viewer for consumption in recreational, spiritual or aesthetic terms.
However, the specific visual culture of recent environmental debate has received little critical attention. This imagery raises several philosophical problems. First, our experience of nature is far more complex and dualistic than these representations suggest in their avoidance of disorder, death and decay, and attendant cycles of change and regeneration. Second, the denial of a human interface separates humankind symbolically from the rest of nature and perpetuates in the cultural imagination an antagonistic nature-culture relationship.
Photographs of the wilderness currently have a strong presence in Tasmania , where the imagery is used to market the ‘natural' landscape for the local tourism industry. Popular belief holds that wilderness photography, if not actually invented in Tasmania, has at least a unique local character, and some of its proponents have achieved heroic stature. This paper attempts to place Tasmanian wilderness photography in a broader historical and geographical context, and suggest some of the aesthetic and philosophical issues it raises
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