When this was recommended to me recently I actually Ordered ‘The Machine In the Garden’ by Leo
Marx. This book traces the conflict of
industrial and agrarian world views in 19th century American
literature. Interesting, but not what I
was expecting. Fortunately at the same
time I had ordered Grundberg’s ‘Crisis of
the Real’ for his essay on Ansel Adams and was delighted to find the ‘correct’
essay that refers to photography, in this.
I found the essay quite an eye-opener and I begin to see where my ‘hangout
group’ are coming from when they critique my work.
Unlike Marx’s book, this essay refers to the conflict of the rise
of technology, especially photography, with the world. His subtitle is ‘Photography, Technology and the End of Innocent Space’. He begins the essay in 1859, looking at
Charles Baudelaire’s views on photography.
He felt that rather than being allied with art, photography was ‘part of
the great industrial madness of our times’.
Grundberg agrees with Baudelaire and argues that the 19th century
growth in photography was allied to positivism which is a belief in the
redeemability of man and in the elimination of all social ills and injustices
through scientific systems, mass production, free enterprise and hard
work. Grundberg disagrees with this
point of view and suggests that we cannot expect nirvana to arrive at the end
of a production line. He goes on to remind
us that photography was not born into the world alone; it was not the only
human activity to become mechanised in the 1830s.
Andy Grundberg compares two different photographers form the Victorian
era: Roger Fenton and his romantic, bucolic images against Robert Howlett’s
famous image of Brunel standing proudly by the anchor chains of his steam ship The great Eastern. One references the landed class’s desire for
rural nostalgia, while the other portrays the delight in technology. The gulf between them, he says, is the
creation of a new Eden, one in which the perfect garden is replaced by the
ideal of the machine.
Grundberg
argues that cameras were and still are used to promote the interests of
industry and are themselves the product of an industrial process and produce
images mechanically. He adds that early
practitioners, such as Samuel Morse were both upper-class and male hobbyists,
but by the 1870s it became increasingly mechanised. In 1893 Kodak attempted to make photography
attractive to females by their use of the ‘Kodak Girls’ at the Chicago World’s
Fair, but this was at odds with the lot of the female workers in the Kodak factory.
He
postulates that far from removing misery and poverty in the world,
mechanisation increased it, but photography, he says, was the first means by
which the world was alerted to such situations.
Photographers such as John Thompson in England and Jacob Riis took up
the camera to help expose the unsanitary, debilitating conditions of slum
life. Despite their faults, argues
Grundberg, we have to admire these two because they were pretty much alone in
the 19th century in taking a critical view of the new industrial
urbanized society.
Grundberg
now moves on to the subject of landscape photography. And how in the 19th
century it mirrored what he describes as the ‘innocent space’. He says that around the time of the American
civil war a major change took place in the way the land was depicted and this
happened in the American frontier which attracted those seeking adventure as
well as those seeking an aesthetic sublime.
Two artists/photographers represent the shift well: Hudson River School landscape painter, Albert
Bierstadt, depicted the Rocky Mountains in a totally sentimental and
romanticised manner; more dreamscape, he says than landscape. In contrast was Carleton Watkin’s
photography, which suggests what Bierstadt’s doesn’t, that the natural world is
as likely to be unfriendly as friendly – that, in fact, it has no feeling for
man one way or the other. Timothy O’Sullivan
was another such as Watkins. Grundberg
says of his survey photographs that there was generally no foreground plane to
supply a bridge for the eyes, no sense of inhabitability, nothing inviting
about the site. Grundberg tells us that
O’Sullivan imbued his pictures of the American West with a profound scepticism
about Man’s relationship to Nature. He
tells us that this tradition was continued by the late 20th century
group of New Topographics.
In
England things took a different direction we are told. Rather than romanticise the machine, the
garden was romanticised in the name of art.
He says that to take the curse off the mechanical nature of photography,
photographic-artists manipulated their pictures using platinum, carbon or gum
bichromate to separate the images of art photography from the spectre of
mechanical reproduction. In America
Alfred Stieglitz initially worked in this tradition, but being the photographer
that he was he could not pretend to be innocent of the machine. Eventually, Grundberg argues, there was 180
degree turn from the rejectionist position of the pictorialists and it embraced
the machine and the camera with it. This
came not from Stieglitz, but from a photographer that he promoted: Paul
Strand. In Germany Bauhaus artists and
photographers were also sympathetic to this ideal. We are told the ‘modern’ early 20th
century photographs of cars and trains are not merely documents of machines;
they are pictures with a mission to sell the faith that technological progress
entails progress towards a new social order.
Grundberg
goes on to say that both modernist photography and positivism that preceded it
are faiths based on a belief in progress through the machine. What separates them as faiths is that the
Modernists believed technology and aesthetics to be compatible rather than
rivals, but to make this appear in photographs, they had to eliminate anything
from the frame that would allow the
machine to be seen in context.
Gradually
things changed yet again and people and their plight began to be shown in
photographs. In America Lewis Hine began
to concentrate on the worker instead of the machine. The Farm Security Administration
photographers remind us how bad things could get for the labour force.
Perhaps
the most important sentence in the essay from my point of view is when Andy
Grundberg asserts that today (albeit 1985) photographers can no longer pretend
that the natural world exists in a splendid, edenic isolation, remote from
human culture and human interference, as Ansel Adams was able to do in
1927. Instead, they are trying to
picture the world in a way that conforms not only to our experience of it, but
also to the postmodern belief that what we know of it is known through the biases
of culture – that there is no stepping outside the bounds of our times and our
society. There is, says Grundberg, in
recent (1985) landscape photography a palpable sense of tragedy, of loss, of
diminution and regret.
Towards
the end of his essay Grundberg concludes that today there is no innocent space,
no room to see the garden without also seeing the machine.
So
what does this mean for my photography?
I feel that I have a tendency to try to live in the ‘innocent space’. I enjoy, perhaps wrongly and naively, taking
photographs that make the natural world look perfect to suggest that all is
well with the world. Of course I know
that isn’t the case and like many I am fully aware of the effect of the hand of
man whether it be the building of factories and industrial complexes,
pollution, clear felling of tropical forests for beef cattle, the burning of
fossil fuels and climate change and the damage caused by nuclear power plants
let alone by unrest in the Middle East and other troubled parts of the world. Taking images of a ‘perfect’ world, however,
is seductive, but it is important that someone shows the other side of the
coin. I think that my latest images,
though, go some way to redress that balance.
In my woodland walks I have looked for that which makes me feel less
comfortable, more uneasy, the darker side of woodlands and for evidence of the
hand of man; evidence of the machine in the garden.
