Linda Connor
Linda Connor
Linda Connor, Ingrid Sischy, and Frank Gohlke are late arrivals to the conference. Striking a very different tone, Linda's presentation begins.
CONNOR: Why were there no nineteenth-century women landscape photographers? Why is there not a single twentieth-century woman whom you would label as a landscape photographer?
These two questions have made me very curious about the historical development of landscape imagery in Western art and photography, and the differentiation between the sexes in relationship to our environment. It’s a complicated issue, but there seem to be three major points. Men have shaped and written our Western history. (Men own the land.) Men constructed the myth of a separate nature and land—a myth that attracts primarily the male psyche. There appears to be a difference in the use of land and the relationship of territory between the male and female. I believe this has innate behavioral roots, but it also has been strenuously culturally reinforced.
Think of Columbus— the image in your history books—claiming land, marking it with a flag. As Susan Griffin writes in Women and Nature;
He draws a map of his way across this land, and he charts the shape of the place. Behind the mountain range. On the other side of the valley. Down the riverstream. Across the gorge. He finds the unknown irresistible. He believes what is hidden in this land calls to him ... On the bluff high above the sea, he leaves a flag. This land will bear his name. After him will come other men who will pronounce the syllables and acknowledge his ownership.
Is it too farfetched to link man’s passion for new lands, high places, the challenges of nature, landscape photography with pissing? This is territorial claiming and marking at its most basic. And what better place to piss off of than the top of a mountain—marking a vista?
Take a male dog for a walk, for example, and you’ll discover that its territorial pissing habit has not totally disappeared in modern homo sapiens. With all the rocks in the Southwest to leave your name on, why do you find “Bob loves Ginny” etched into a thousand-year-old pictograph? It’s territorial oneupsmanship. In the cities we have street gang graffiti.
Concerning the myth of our relationship to land in Western culture, we can—despite its complexities—put it briefly: Man feels estranged from nature and his environment. The Fall, the expulsion from Eden. This estranged nature was associated with woman (also seen as “other”) and her generative ability. Nature was seen as a female alien force, attracting and terrifying to men. They are forever trying to conquer and control it, rather than simply see themselves as part of it. Terms like virgin territory, Mother Nature, Mother Earth all speak clearly of this association.
The relationship of woman to the land is basically different. It is internalized and incorporated into the individual life— the challenge aspect is not a driving force. Women define territory and protect it by their presence and their experience; absent is the need to explore, transcend, and possess.
Concerning ownership, it doesn’t surprise me that the first landscapes to appear in Western art coincided with the discovery and exploitation of the New World. Colonization and private ownership of land ushered in this new type of image.
Getting back to photography, and examining nineteenth and twentiethcentury landscapes, we find that even though nature is the same our perception of it has changed radically in the past one hundred years.
The nineteenth century was an era of idealism, truth, description, realism, measurement, exploration, expansion, manifest destiny, the height of empires, gold rushes, and railroads. Philosophy, science, nature and religion dovetailed. Romanticism equalled the vanishing natural environment. Man saw himself squarely in the landscape: confident, dominant, ordained.
In talking about nineteenth-century photography, one of the things I’d like to point out is the use of the figure in the landscape. There also is the Renaissance perspective and the idea that you can virtually walk over the frame line and into a beautiful photograph. When I was going to school, l was always told: “In the nineteenth century, they were involved with scale and documentation and making things look realistic,” and that the male figure was always there for scale. Certainly this is true. But I would suggest that he’s also there for a sense of dominance and control. That civilized man, Western man, is now standing squarely and flatfootedly in that place.
Wherever you find nineteenth-century photographers, you find these guys. With very, very few exceptions do you ever find an image of a woman within the landscape. It’s not until the twentieth century and then you have the sexual implication of the nude within the landscape.
Earlier, for example, there’s William Henry Jackson, a macho character, and a fine photographer. His was a very aggressive use of image within the landscape—whether it was a man or a puffing railroad car set in the mountainside. The fact that they could build up there was seen as great progress, and proof of man’s conquering nature. A funny photograph, obviously set up as a joke, by William Howard Russell showed the arduous ness of these photographic parties. I’m glad that they did have a sense of humor about it, but it does resemble a fraternity. All male. A Russell, taken of the rails, excludes the Chinese workers who actually made this railroad possible. There’s not one woman in the picture. I read recently that Calamity Jane was the one woman who worked for the Pacific Railroad during its construction. And here’s an interesting aspect of this picture The Marriage of the Rails. No women. So obviously these men are marrying the land and that driving of the stake was the consummation— the marriage and the dominance.
There’s a radical difference in the twentieth century. And these differences, I think, are very complicated and interesting. For one thing, artists were no longer just the operators of the cameras, but realized that they had individual voices capable of independent photographic expression of ego and ideas. The land was seen differently in the twentieth century. Where the land was simply shown in the nineteenth century, we now find the land expressing other ideas as it is filtered and interpreted by individual visions. Symbolism, formalism, abstraction, political and social concerns, spiritualism, sexualism, urban expansion. Men and women photographers found expression of great variety in the land and in nature, even though the myth of dominance carried over from earlier times. Indeed, that idea of territory still exists.
I would say that these different interpretations— by Steichen, Strand, and others, like the earlier development in landscape work, came from other forces. There was, for example, the breakdown of colonial rule throughout the early part of the twentieth century. Global expansion had been completed. It wasn’t until they set out for the moon that this urge resurfaced. (The flag they sent had a rigid arm, allowing the stars and stripes to wave in the airless atmosphere of the moon.) I think the urge is a behavioral one. Darwin was an important character in breaking down the basic construct of manifest destiny and the white man’s burden, which were aimed at dominance of the third world’s peoples and land.
Freud is obviously a very important character here, allowing us greater access and knowledge of our internal emotional landscape. In the twentieth century the sense that we know ourselves is always being questioned. This, l think, is very different from the nineteenth-century view. Mankind, Western mankind, really thought they knew what they were doing, and they thought they were doing the right thing. Twentieth-century man is much more neurotic. Molecular physics turned solid objects into spinning particles, made up almost entirely of space. World War l showed us our ignoble nature. World War II gave us an image of our doom. The twentieth century is a whole other kettle of fish and the way photographers envision the world has been shattered from the concrete notions of the nineteenth century. So you encounter a picture by Edward Weston, and you hardly know what substance it is. It’s symbolic, it’s sexual, it’s abstract, it’s metaphoric. These are qualities that did not enter landscape photography until the twentieth century.
Now, women and landscapes. Lady Clementina Hawarden is the only nineteenth-century woman photographer that I know of who did landscape of her estate, though she is most well-known for her interiors with female figures.
Getting onto the twentieth century, let’s start with Annie Bergman and her self-portrait in the cleft of the rock, a very poetic, very romantic, sexually suggestive image of the female figure in association with the earth.
Women have territory also. It’s strongly felt and expressed. We are nature, so why venture very far? The territory of women photographers tends to be the place we occupy, rather than the search for new places and spaces. In fact, one idea that I’d like to suggest is place rather than space. It is intimate, close, it revolves around us. It is defined by us. The plant forms Imogen Cunningham made during the period when she had three small children at home and could no longer carry on her commercial portraiture magazine work I think are very important in terms of the natural world and how we think about it.
Laura Gilpin comes closest to being considered a landscape photographer. She is one of the few women who has taken a traditional stand using photography. She was a great admirer of Edward Weston and she did a good body of what we call traditional landscapes. But if you’re looking for a sense of wholeness, of entirety, the bestrealized is the work that she did with the Navajo people and their relationship to the land.
Women have made a great contribution to our sense of the social landscape, but this is usually excluded from most landscape collections. John Szarkowski did a book called American Landscapes, which came out many years ago, I believe. There are two women represented in a book of thirty-nine landscape photographers. One is Dorothea Lange and the other is Gilpin, and you could hardly call Lange a landscape photographer— but I’m pleased at least a couple of women were included.
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GRIMES: Where do you draw the line on landscape?
Connor: I’m trying not to draw the line hut expand it.
METZKER: Yes, but wait. There's a basic argument of why weren't women in the nineteenth-century landscape. That's one issue. And then, maybe, there's another question of what is the male sensibility and what is the female sensibility. Go back to the nineteenth century and you can say there was man taking territory and there was man dominating. But on the other hand, you're overlooking the whole idea of protection. You can talk about men in the nineteenth century as dominating, or you can talk about men as being expendable. Men went to war. Women never went to war, that I know of. Women were protected. It wasn't simply that they were subjected. Was it? You're claiming some things for which I'm not sure there's even a solid base.
Connor: Well, one of the things that perhaps I didn’t make clear was that the twentieth-century male view of the landscape has altered radically, from the nineteenth century.
METZKER: There also was a sense of protection, I think, in those earlier mores.
CONNOR: The national parks were set up in the nineteenth century. There will always he two sides of the coin. There’s the sense that partially the cause of that celebration is the loss of it.
METZKER: When you take any major project, whether it's the development of the Amazon or building a major bridge in the United States, there’s a death associated with almost every one of those. It's almost calculated into it. We do this and we're going to lose lives. And usually it's male workers.
liebling: There’s an interesting film, I think John Cochran had something to do with it, concerning the survey photographers. The thesis concerns aggrandizement and how the photographer was used. You are talking about exploitation, I’m afraid, in one form or another. And the continuation of exploitation, even onto the moon, which is something you referred to. I easily accept that. I go along with the thesis. However, it can get murky.
GRIMES: The place I’m getting confused is the part of women being systematically not interested in landscaping, not representated in landscaping in the nineteenth century. But let’s look at non-landsc ape—
Connor: I think women have had a much more active role, certainly in portraiture and social photography.
CRAVENS: It all comes down to an artist, any artist, who says, “Hey, I'm going to go photograph this!" The thing is, women have chosen not to make this decision. Women have chosen to photograph other things. If there's one thing that stands out in my reading of the history of photography, it's that the women in it have been an extraordinarily independent, gutsy group of people. I don't get the impression that Dorothea Lange or Julia Margaret Cameron were going to be threatened if somebody came up to them and said, “You're excluded from taking landscapes." They've made very assertive and confident choices about what they've done and I don't get the feeling these women were excluded or pushed by anyone.
CONNOR: My feeling is that landscape photography would be a more wellrounded art form if we could ask the question, “Why weren’t women involved?”
METZKER: Why were they excluded from the nineteenth century? Why were women excluded from the armies of the nineteenth century?
CRAVENS: I think to say they're excluded is a very arbitrary way of putting it. Why did they not choose this as a subject?
Linda Connor received her education in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Institute of Design in Chicago, where she earned her M.S. She has taught in numerous programs including the University of California at Berkeley. Her photographs have been widely exhibited and published throughout the country. She currently teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.
