Print this page
Last July, when a group of veteran environmental campaigners got together in a Carlton pub, the beer and reminiscences flowed, old songs were sung and no doubt a few nostalgic tears were shed. These hardy souls had good reason to celebrate. Twenty years earlier, on July 1, 1983, the High Court of Australia had ruled against the Tasmanian government’s plan to dam the Franklin and Gordon Rivers in the state’s south west. That decision, while it brought to a close one of the biggest and most influential environmental campaigns in Australia's history, may also be seen as the symbolic birth of the political green movement in this country.
The Franklin campaign, says Karen Alexander, the Wilderness Society's Victorian campaign coordinator at the time, 'was the first ... to really work with the media professionally, using powerful imagery. That was necessary to really show the public what we were fighting for.'1 Bob Brown, one of the protest leaders, quickly grasped the importance of such imagery, 'and there was no better way to get the river to speak for itself', he realised, 'than through the lens of Peter Dombrovskis.'2
Dombrovskis, who had been photographing the Tasmanian wilderness since boyhood, already enjoyed a considerable local reputation. At the height of the Franklin campaign, Bob Brown visited the young artist's studio to look at the photos he'd taken on a canoeing expedition down the river. 'He was showing me the images on his lightbox,' Brown recalled later, 'and he put up the picture of Rock Island Bend, and this was it! This was the Franklin River. This was the photograph that would convey to Australians the beauty of the Franklin ...'3
As indeed it did. Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, South West Tasmania became the icon of the campaign and must now be regarded as one of the most famous, and most reproduced, photographs in Australian history.
But why, out of all the images Dombrovskis put on his lightbox that day, did this one stand out? What was it, exactly, that was to make it so iconic? Certainly it shows a place of spectacular natural beauty, but so do countless other photographs. From a technical point of view, it can hardly be faulted, although this is true of all Dombrovskis's pictures. When Rock Island Bend appeared in national press advertisements with the caption 'Could you vote for a party that would destroy this?', it awakened some deep-seated anxiety among the coffee bars of Melbourne and Sydney. What was at stake wasn't just this precise place. After all, few people even knew exactly where it was, let alone ever having been there. No, at stake was an ideal: one that was cultural as much as it was about the natural world.
In the National Gallery, London, hangs a painting by Claude Lorraine entitled Landscape with Hagar and the Angel.4 Painted in 1646, it follows principles of landscape construction developed earlier in the seventeenth century by artists such as Annibale Carracci and Domenichino. Claude's placid scene, viewed from a slightly elevated position, is carefully balanced, with banks of foliage forming a frame on either side. In the middle distance, a lake, backed by a stone bridge, leads our eye through to a vista of far-off, mist-shrouded mountains. Just to the right of centre, Claude situates a jagged rocky outcrop crowned by an ancient castle. The pale sky contrasts sharply with the darkened, crisply detailed foliage in the foreground.
Were we to superimpose this painting onto Dombrovskis's Rock Island Bend, I think we'd be struck by the similarities (allowing, of course, for differences of format). Claude's framing trees become Dombrovskis's foliage-clad rock walls, the ancient castle a group of gnarled bushes clinging to their rocky island, the stone bridge a natural gap in the cliffs through which the Franklin's waters flow. Mist-shrouded mountains are there in the background of both works, as is the high-keyed arc of sky. The main difference is that the human figures occuping the foreground of the Claude are nowhere to be seen in Dombrovskis's picture.
There's no reason to believe that Dombrovskis was familiar with Claude's painting, let alone that he set out to emulate it. When he stood on a rocky bank in the rain, lining up his shot in the viewfinder, he was trying only to get the composition 'right', probably with no deliberate thought as to what that actually entailed. Unwittingly, he was evoking compositional conventions that are part of the collective consciousness of all the inheritors of the European aesthetic tradition. Similar Picturesque compositions characterise Australian landscape paintings by artists such as John Glover, William Piguenit, and Conrad Martens, as well as almost every amateur tourist snapshot and travel brochure illustration today.
So one of the reasons Rock Island Bend effects us so immediately is that it conforms very closely to our expectations of what landscape 'should' look like, based on artistic precedent. 'We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art', as Joseph Addison observed some three-hundred years ago.
Nevertheless, although the form of Dombrovskis's photograph conforms to centuries-old traditions, its effect is quite different. Whereas Claude's painting is placid and pastoral, Dombrovskis emphasises wildness. His Tasmanian landscape is inhospitable, mysterious, uninhabited. Yet both artists hark back to an idealised past: Claude to the Classical world, a pastoral arcadia of harmony and order where human beings lived in peace with nature; Dombrovskis to a primeval new-world arcadia, apparently innocent of human interference.
And both suggest transcendence. Claude includes a (quite anachronistic) scene from the story, told in Genesis 16, of an angel appearing to the girl Hagar in the wilderness to tell her that Abraham's child, which she bears, is destined to found a great tribe. Dombrovskis, on the other hand, following the Romantics, presents us with nature itself as a redeeming force: what Americans like to call 'the natural cathedral'. His ancient trees clinging to their rocky island are the exact equivalent of all those monasteries and fortifications perched on cliffs above similar river bends in more settled places on the other side of the world. They, and the mists that rise behind them, help to make Rock Island Bend a religious icon for a new, secular society.
Although this particular image may be exceptional in its fidelity to European artistic and cultural precedent, Picturesque conventions determine the composition of many wilderness photographs.5 They are a way of relating the unknown to what is graspable by giving it a cultural frame.
At the same time, it's for this reason that all those snow-covered mountains, glowering skies and placid lakes start to pall after a while. There's a sameness about them. It's for this reason, too, that wilderness photography (in this country at least) is so characteristically a Tasmanian preoccupation. It's not that Tasmania has more wilderness than other places (after all, the deserts, the oceans and the northern rainforests fit the usual definition just as well), but because it has the right kind of wilderness and the right kind of weather: the kind that links us to both the Classical arcadia of Claude and the restless rapture of the German Romantics; the kind that, with a little selectivity, may be loaded with portents of death and transfiguration.
In fact, a great deal of wilderness photography is haunted by death, if only to the extent that it invites us to see the places it depicts as part of a vanishing world. Rock Island Bend's effectiveness as a campaign image depended on our realisation that this beautiful untamed river was destined for destruction: knowledge and power destroying innocence in the Garden of Eden. (Dombrovskis's mentor, Olegas Truchanas, included his young children in the foregrounds of some of his Lake Pedder photographs to make the point explicit).
Not all wilderness photography aspires to such sublimity, however. The fiery sunsets, the jagged peaks, the giant rocks and gnarled trunks, the gathering storms and crashing waves, all find their more intimate counterpoint in the unfurling frond, the frosted branch glowing in the morning sun, and the rhythmic pattern of water on sand. The Tasmanian photographer, Dennis Harding, for example, contrives beautiful close-ups of dead leaves on rocks, the mottled bark of gumtrees, and the sparkling surface of icy water, which seem to aspire to the condition of abstract paintings. While the big, sublime panoramas may be seen as the aestheticisation of fear - the death principle - these small details represent the aestheticisation of delight - the life principle. Yin and yang.
The close-ups usually emphasise pattern and harmony - the natural order which underlies apparent chaos. Such photographs are the modern equivalents of embroidery designs or, perhaps, botanical illustrations (although usually without any scientific intent). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the ordering of natural forms, often assumed to be a domestic and feminine interest, served as confirmation that, no matter how small and insignificant a thing may be, it must conform to God's pre-ordained design, taking its place in the grand scheme of things (which may help to explain its association with women). Today, the miraculous design of a spider's web or the veins of a leaf, the multicoloured brilliance of a butterfly's wing, or the delicate traceries of grasses against a blue sky, still evoke wonder, although probably of a more secular kind.
Therefore, while wilderness photography is art in the service of nature conservation, it is also very conservative art. This, of course, is enough to damn it in the eyes of the contemporary art establishment. The genre's unapologetic traditionalism (along with its wide public acceptance) is a slap in the face to those who cling to a fantasy of endless innovation and deliberate obscurity. Yet wilderness photography's very lack of conceptual originality, it's constant retelling of the same fundamental cultural myths, might well be its greatest strength. For its strong links to the past are not sentimental or nostalgic. Nor are they any self-congratulatory game of appropriation. This is, in fact, nothing less than a modern utopian moral project, drawing on historical precedent entirely unselfconsciously so as to effect change for the future.
In modernity, writes the American critic Geoffrey Hartman, culture, 'although protective of a disappearing mode of life, also identifies with “civilisation” or civil society and seeks to influence the public realm. The forms of art, beginning with romanticism, reflect a deepening tension between something elegiac - their sense of a mode of being that is lost, or deeply privatized, and to be recovered only by a retrospective as well as introspective method - and culture as a creative and contestatory force, helping to cancel old and to form new institutions ...'6 Nowhere is this tension more thoroughly explored than in the phenomenon we know as wilderness photography.
Search 'wilderness+photography' on the net and you'll find any number of (mostly American) sites offering workshops under the tuition of experienced practitioners. The Canadian photographer Rob Stimpson, for example, will take you to the shores of Lake Superior, where you can admire the vistas from a specially equipped lodge offering motel-style accomodation, a large relaxation area with stone fireplace, and three hearty meals a day. Four rolls of film are included in the cost.
'Real' wilderness photographers, of course, will scoff at this sort of thing. The whole point, surely, is the difficulty, danger and discomfort involved in recording these remote and hostile places. One of the great attractions of photographing the wilderness is the opportunity it provides to pit yourself against nature, enduring the hardships and perservering.
'I am determined to stay put in my campspot despite being constantly harassed by these punishing fronts ...', wrote the Tasmanian photographer Chris Bell during a wintry hike through the Tasman National Park. 'Relentlessly, the sea rolls in against the monstrous cliffs, sending great blobs of foam up into the casuarinas ... I try exploring the plateau with its delightful chaotic trees but give up after being constantly blown over.'7 Worthwhile results, it is implied, can be achieved only by those who've battled the full force of the elements. Indeed, some of the most impressive photos in Bell's book, Primal Places, are those that appear to have been the most dangerous to achieve.
To succeed, writes Dennis Harding, 'one must have more than technical skills and vision. One must be willing, physically and mentally, to carry heavy photographic and survival gear into the wilderness for long distances. On some such expeditions one's endurance will surely be tested - particularly in south-west Tasmania, notorious for its bad weather at any time of year.'8
It is usually men who choose to test their endurance in this way. They are more likely than women to see nature as a competitor. This is why men, rather than women, like to hunt. It's why ads for four-wheel drive vehicles are pitched to rugged males, despite the fact that, as often as not, it's women who use them to take the kids to school. And it's also why men prefer to go into the wilderness on their own, to meet their symbolic adversary one-on-one. The photographer of wild places presents an interesting Freudian case study. Indeed, part of the mystique surrounding Peter Dombrovskis and Olegas Truchanas is that both men died while photographing alone in the remote south-west, succumbing in the struggle against what they loved and in some sense feared.
Camille Paglia has suggested that all acts of artistic creation are, in essence, a symbolic challenge to nature - a shaking of one's fist at God. This, she says, helps to explain why there have been so few women artists.
The wilderness photography camps that Truchanas organised in the early 1960s offered young men of sensitive and creative disposition, for whom the somewhat stultifying social climate of Tasmania at that time offered few outlets, an ideal opportunity to express their creativity without sacrificing their masculinity. The lively combination of 'canoeing, water, photography and adventure' (as Truchanas's wife, Melva, puts it)9 promised a life of artistic creativity without the stigma.
One photographer I spoke to recently questioned my ability to write on this subject, given that I have not trekked the south west, braved its wild rivers or camped alone in its soaking forests. For him, the subjective experience, rather than any objective interpretation, was what mattered. Very little has been written about wilderness photography, in fact, other than descriptive accounts by the photographers themselves and environmental polemic that uses their subject matter as illustration. This paucity of critical commentary can be put down not just to a lofty lack of interest from critics and art theorists, but also to an innate distrust of analysis on the part of practitioners.
Much is made of the fact that Dombrovskis and Truchanas, for example, were just ordinary blokes, doing what they loved doing, recording the beauty of the natural environment without artifice or pretention. Today, the artists who follow in their footsteps happily embrace the image. A certain disdain for self-examination probably suited young Tasmanian artists in the early sixties, who had relatively few opportunities for intellectual development and were, in any case, resigned to being on the margins. It was a way of asserting their non-conformity to academic expectations. But it is making it harder for young photographers today to escape the influence of their mentors, Truchanas and Dombrovskis, who still cast long shadows.
The climate of anti-intellectualism now enveloping the whole genre, while limiting its acceptance as an artform, has at least created a bulwark against any pressure to conform to those false ideals of innovation and novelty that have had such a trivialising effect on contemporary art practice generally. It has helped maintain the integrity of the artform. The cost has been a certain degree of stagnation, resulting in a reluctance to respond to changing perceptions of the natural world. Even utopias, inasmuch as they are critiques of the status quo, have to be adaptive.
At a time when the very notion of the benign wilderness (which is, in itself, a product of modern urbanisation) is subject to fierce debate, when the consignment of certain supposedly untouched areas to natural ghettos is being challenged, and when European Romantic ideas about the unity and sublimnity of nature appear increasingly out of step with 21st century antipodean realities, it is necessary for wilderness photographers to come down from the mountains to think about how they might address more broadly our interactions with the land. Not to do so is, as John Berger wrote in another context, 'to deny the value of too much history and too many lives. No line of exclusion can be drawn across history in that manner, as if it were a line across a closed road.'10
If the fruitful dialogue with the past that has so far enriched the genre of wilderness photography is not to degenerate into habit, if its relationship with history is not to simplify itself into nostalgia, artists need to take what is strong in that relationship and to keep developing and strengthening it.
Take, for example, the melancholic black-and-white images in David Stephenson's Drowned series, which adopt all the Picturesque conventions - the moody skies, placid reflecting waters, framing trees, distant hills, and so on - but turn them to quite unexpected purpose. Stephenson chooses as his subject not some wild, inaccessible place but desolate man-made lakes dotted with skeletal black tree-trunks. Drownings, especially of women, were an important theme in Romantic literature. Think, then, of Stephenson's photographs as a kind of pensive, post-industrial coda to The Mill on the Floss.
In any case, these are images of ambivalence. By expressing the death principle so explicitly, Stephenson strips it of its ecstacy, making its aestheticisation seem an affront. One could almost imagine his pictures as tourist postcards, but not quite, since there is something distressing about their allure. Instead of celebrating the glories of what is in danger of being lost, they show us what that loss entails, even daring to suggest what might also have been gained. In other words, they complicate matters, making it harder for us to settle for easy moral certainties.
'Human endeavour is largely about feeding one another and protecting ourselves from the elements - about keeping ourselves alive', writes Greg French. 'Surely we must be allowed to lead vibrant lives. Surely recreation, creativity and development are critical to the human condition. Can the manipulation of our environment be an atrocity in its own right?'11 That such questions are unanswerable is all the more reason to keep asking them.
Richard Woldendorp, who lives in Western Australia, points his camera directly down on the landscape from aircraft, turning vistas into orderly patterns by eliminating the horizon and confusing our sense of scale. By this means, he reconciles the two sides of wilderness photography - yin and yang, thesis and antithesis - creating a new visual unity. Woldendorp's aerial view of Central Australia's Goyder Lagoon in flood, veined with an infinite number of watercourses, might be a close-up of the veins in a dead leaf: the intricate green embroidery of melaleucas on the shore of Lake Magenta near Albany, seen from a great height, could be a detail of lichens on rock. These astonishingly beautiful, erotic images of wonder are the life principle writ large.
Woldendorp's absorption in the abstract beauty of the Australian landscape is refreshingly inclusive and without stricture. He appears to accept the presence of humans and the changes they have wrought, expressing neither approval nor reproach, asking only that we look at those changes with a more objective, less condemnatory eye. He records the dotted pattern made by termites amongst spinifex with the same innocent delight as the linear rhythms of drilling-rig equipment laid out on the bare soil of Western Australia's Dampier region. The rich green tapestry of a rain forest is at one with the brown filigree of burnt wheat stubble. Cars, roads, houses and car parks find a place in his landscapes, just as, for better or worse, they find a place in ours.
I don't mean to imply that Woldendorp's and Stephenson's works are necessarily better than those of more traditionalist wilderness photographers. However, they do, I think, help to enrich the genre, taking it in new directions without sacrificing its ancestry or compromising its utopian aims. They help us to move beyond lament towards a more accommodating and subtle relationship with our surroundings.
Footnotes
1 Quoted by Suzie Brown, 'Remote Control', in Habitat (the magazine of the Australian Conservation Foundation), August 2003, p. 8.
2 Bob Brown, interviewed for the film Wildness, directed by Scott Millwood, Film Australia, 2003.
3 ibid
4 A reproduction of it may be found on the National Gallery's website, www.nationalgallery.org.uk
5 I am using the term 'wilderness photography' in its commonly accepted sense, to mean the sorts of photographs of specified wild places which take their cue from artists such as the Americans Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, and which are often published in books, on postcards and calendars, or used for environmental campaigns.
6 Geoffrey Hartman, The Fateful Question of Culture, NY, Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 190.
7 Chris Bell, Primal Places, Hobart, 2002, Laurel Press, pp. 44 and 48.
8 Dennis Harding, A Tasmanian Wilderness Experience, Hobart, 1998, Tasmanian Book Company, p. 96.
9 Melva Truchanus interviewed for Wildness, op. cit.
10 John Berger, Pig Earth, quoted in Geoffrey Hartman, op. cit.
11 Greg French, in Greg French and David Stephenson, Skeletons, Hobart, Space and Light Editions, 2003, n.p.
My thanks to Scott Millwood, David Hansen, Chris Bell and Pat Sabine for sharing their ideas and helping me to shape my thoughts.
Reproductions from David Stephenson's Drowned series can be found on the Bett Gallery website
Reproductions of Richard Woldendorps work can be found on the Wildlight Photo Agency website
Note: This article was published in Island, No 97. A version first appeared in Art Monthly, December 2003.