Human/Nature: Photographers Constructing the Natural World

Pasadena, CA—The Norton Simon Museum presents Human/Nature: Photographers Constructing the Natural World, an exhibition of 24 works that demonstrate how photographers in the 1960s and ’70s approached “nature” and “culture” in their images, not in opposition, but rather in dialogue. Up until then, landscape photography had mostly minimized evidence of human presence; indeed, the most renowned images in the genre presented pristine vistas that photographer Lewis Baltz wryly characterized as “the privileged world of pure nature.” The 10 artists in Human/Nature play with and against this tradition, treating signs of humanity, and our activities, as essential elements of their image-making practice.

Against the Modernist—some would say, Romantic—tradition of canonical figures like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, photographers in the 1960s and ’70s began to focus on landscapes beyond “pure nature.” During this period, photography that included and even emphasized human alterations to the landscape became a legitimate avenue for artistic consideration. Baltz, whose studies of California tract houses exemplified this new approach, recalled that “my life very rarely involved going to Yosemite [National Park in California]. My life was about going to shopping centers, being in a town, an urban situation, which seemed to me was also a landscape, but one that no one had any interest in looking at. But I was interested in looking at it.” Along these lines, Baltz, Victor Landweber, Robert von Sternberg and others pictured landscapes marked by urban and suburban life, tourism and industry. 

While such transformed landscapes are distinguished by their innovative subjects and their formal beauty, they also invite critical conversations around the impact of our interactions with the non-human world. In his Auduboniana series (1998–2001), Landweber superimposes etched birds from John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827–1838) over modern urban architecture, creating suggestive contrasts between pre-industrial and contemporary American life. Passenger Pigeon, Federal Building, Oakland CA (1998) is especially poignant. From a population of billions, over-hunting and habitat depredation drove the passenger pigeon to extinction in 1914. In another striking juxtaposition, the bright orange traffic cone that punctuates Von Sternberg’s Columbia Ice Field, Canada (2009) may be a playful, unexpected splash of color in an otherwise stark landscape, but it is also a reminder of the many snow coaches that carry tourists as far as the remote Canadian Rockies.

A number of artists in Human/Nature explore a particular paradox: photographers must use uniquely human technologies in their representations of the non-human world. These artists revel in scenarios where the natural and the man-made meet and blend. Darryl Curran, Robert Fichter, Kenneth Josephson and other artists place trees, plants and vegetables in communication with innovative technical processes, from the flatbed scanner to the smartphone. The lush, tactile surface of the tree trunk in Josephson’s Chicago (1964) pays homage to Modernist formalism, but its nested composition is conceptually complex: Chicago is a picture of a tree within a picture of a tree within a picture of a tree. Josephson here probes the camera’s mediating role between natural and human artistry. In his use of snapshots, Josephson also gestures to the proliferation of instant photography, most famously the Polaroid. In more recent years, Fichter has photographed landscapes using another cutting-edge, instantaneous process with widespread appeal: the iPhone’s panorama mode.

Two artists in the exhibition, Curran and Jane O’Neal, use flatbed scanners to capture their compositions. Curran’s flattened arrangement of colorful cabbage leaves, delicate baby’s breath, thorny rose stems and a serrated knife on the surface of the scanner links Savoy Cabbage, Baby’s Breath, Blade (1995) to the photograms and cyanotypes of early photography, in which objects were arranged on photo-sensitive paper, and which likewise often featured a blend of natural objects and man-made artifacts. The inclusion of a knife among the cut leaves and stems signals human presence—and, perhaps, humanity’s power to destroy as well as to construct.

From subtle to arresting, lyrical to critical, the photographs in Human/Nature present a world mediated by human activity. This exhibition is on view in the Museum’s small rotating exhibitions gallery on the main level from March 6 through Aug. 31.

Cited: Lewis Baltz, Oral history interview, 2009 November 15-17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Image credit on previous page: Auduboniana: Passenger Pigeon, Federal Building, Oakland, CA, 1998, Victor Landweber (American, b. 1943), Digital pigment print, 19 x 13 in. (48.3 x 33 cm), Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Alan, Shelley and Lucinda Stamm. PH.2010.3.2, © Norton Simon Museum