Photography (and neither painting nor film) is the nearest artistic source of contemporary conceptions of the natural sublime.  And with good reason:

This image just about stops my heart.  It is majestic and serene, austere and wild, menacing and yet perfectly balanced. And far more than its informative caption: “Icebergs float in the calm waters of a fjord, south of Tasiilaq in eastern Greenland August 4, 2009.”  (To get the full effect of this Arctic vista, see it at The Big Picture.)  The broad, encompassing horizontal field seems to expand infinitely, and yet the sharp angle of the berg in the foreground is paralleled by the ominous thunderhead on the left, as if they were two tectonic plates shearing across each other.  Between them the light of a fading sun recedes to the vanishing point.  Could Valhalla be too far beyond that horizon?

This scene is so elemental–water, air, earth, and fire–that it seems to bring us to the edge of reality itself.  And yet we are the supernatural beings here: for we see but are not seen.  And we can view the cold, harsh elements at the world’s edge because we stand safely on some unseen platform–most likely, on a boat.

This photograph of the port of Nuuk on July 6, 2009 is in many ways the opposite of sublime.  Instead of elemental and awesome, it is crowded, busy, varied, jumbled–even when stilled, supposedly at rest, it is a riot of color and variation.  Boats of every size, shape, and purpose are wedged together.  Nature’s dangers are still implicit in the scene: the boats huddle together because the barren hills will provide little protection from northern winds whipping down a narrow channel.  But this is an image of vitality, of life thriving far beyond moss on a wind-swept rock.

Although no people are visible in this picture, we are everywhere: bustling and creative, but still having to hug the shore.  The welter of masts, poles, cranes, and wires makes a mess of the visual field, but those boats are the only basis on  which we can even see other images of natural beauty.  One problem is that these two visions are kept apart, even though they come from and need to coexist in the same place.  There are many factors in this enforced separation: social, political, and economic practices not least among them.  We need to consider, however, how the artistic medium itself is part of the problem.

It remains easy to see nature in one place and human activity somewhere else as long as each is sequestered within its own visual field.  To have both–in reality, not merely as images–we have to think carefully about how we use our images.  Without images of natural splendor, an important incentive for conservation is lost; without sustainable economic and social practices, the natural environment will continue to be ruined while images serve a psychology of denial among those otherwise separated from the leading edge of destruction.

Fortunately, photography also can be a part of the solution.  Just as the individual photograph can both inspire (think of the image of the whole Earth floating in space) and mislead (as when nature and culture are placed in separate still images), photography can help lead the way to imagining how to integrate separate visions.  Sound ecological design has to include both the sublime and the practical, but not in separate places.

Photographs by Slim Allagui/AFP/Getty Images and Bob Strong/Reuters.

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You might wonder what you are seeing in this photograph:

Look closely, and you will see a clump of trees.  Some might also recognize the even rows of high-tech, monocultural agriculture stretched across the plain.  But I’ve given too much away, as you also could have seen a clump of mold or cells bunched together in some microscopic field.  Beneath the surface, one might also “see” some more elemental social form such as herd animals pressing together for warmth or even an ark adrift in barren sea.  Whatever it is, it is visually striking: one blot of rich green on a uniformly reddish-brown background etched with small modulations in black.  Scale becomes elastic while form and color dominate in any register.  There is something basic here, but what?

Perhaps some content would help.  The caption in the New York Times read: “Small islands of forest dot the landscape of farms and ranches, fulfilling regulations to maintain percentages of native forest on agricultural properties. Driven by profits derived from fertile soil, the region’s dense forests have been aggressively cleared over the past decade, and Mato Grosso is now Brazil’s leading producer of soy, corn and cattle, exported across the globe by multinational companies.”

OK, it is a photograph of trees in a field.  Trees saved to maintain a forestation quota, in a field of soybeans produced for the international commodity markets.  The additional information and the political subtext are helpful, but a problem remains.  Note how the photo’s ambiguity in scale is also there in the text.  We are seeing something “small,” and also something that extends “across the globe.”  And, sure enough, the story behind the picture is one that identifies the tension between localized benefits and global costs.  Life might be simple if one could focus exclusively on one dimension or the other: manage the forests for the planet, or allow economic development wherever possible.  But, of course, the problem is that both are needed.  One has to be able to see both locally and globally, a bifocal vision that itself does not come cheap.

Some might argue that the picture is unfair.  It looks as if only the trees are natural, whereas in a few months the entire field also would be a vibrant green.  Frankly, “nature” is becoming an outmoded term, and protecting nature or biodiversity or carbon dioxide levels or any other ecological value involves both technological savvy and a recognition that life is everywhere, even in burning forests for commodity cropping.  The photo is not so much fair or unfair, however, as it is profound.  It captures something essential, a sense of what is at stake.  That small island of trees can stand in for everything from a tiny cell to the planet itself, and the point is always the same: no matter what the scale, life on earth is a small, precious island amidst a void.

The image is ironic as well: trees having no need of human intervention evoke something like sympathy, whereas the field is an achievement of human productivity that will produce historically astonishing yields capable of feeding millions. But, of course, it’s not that simple.  The fields will wither if the carbon dioxide levels get out of whack, and the deeper irony is that what feeds us can kill us.  Just as indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin learn to discriminate poisons, medicines, and foods carefully in the forest, moderns need to learn to do the same in respect to their remaking of the forest.  In each case, one needs to learn to see, but not in the same way.

In this case, the photograph provides one lesson in how to see modern development: as if cultured for observation, both up close and from a distance, on behalf of sustainable growth, and capable of extinction.

Photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times.

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One of the attractions of the beach is that so many distinctions seem to melt away into the broad expanses of  sun, sea, and sand.  Nature offers the same three elements to whoever is there, and there seems to be room enough for everyone, and–for the day, anyway–what more does anyone really need?  But, of course, even when life’s a beach, it is a life lived one way rather than another.  This image from the Hamptons is one example of what I mean.

I had to stare at this image initially to make sure that it was a photograph.  The pictorial values are evocative of the seaside reveries that were a favorite subject for painters around 1900.  (For one example having a tone similar to this scene, see Calm Morning (1904) by Frank Weston Benson.)  But if life is following art at the Hamptons, the closer source might be a J. Crew catalog.  The causal wealth on display here reflects that narrow niche of class and ethnicity, starting with the gorgeous blue and white beach towels.  The rest of the scene is more subdued, but the pattern continues: her pink and white shirt, the white breaker of the emerald wave,  white umbrellas on orange or yellow poles, the green chair between sand and sea foam.  Somehow this world is both colorful and very white.

The blue and white towels create a space of privileged intimacy within the scene, one mirrored by the second couple as well.  One member of each pair is eating and listening, savoring, as if there is no hurry, no need to worry about running out of time or anything else.  We see them from behind, while standing at a respectful distance, as if servants waiting to be summoned.  The photo depicts a summer idyll and also the image of an ideal life, but only for the few.

It should not be surprising that people of wealth can seem so at home in an image that appears to be an oil painting.  The photographer’s achievement has been to capture a representative moment in a social stratum by evoking the appropriate pictorial tone from another art and time, albeit while also channeling the commercial iconography that defines that way of life the present.  There is more than one beach, however, and more than one way to use a camera.

The caption in the Times (the source for both photos) read, “An early arrival at Orchard Beach in the Bronx staked out his territory on Saturday.  Estimates put the crowd at 59,000 by 5 p.m.”  I think this shot is hilarious.  It might as well be Rodney Dangerfield taking a break from Caddyshack.  The guy is a scandal according to the social and aesthetic values of the other photo: damn near naked, exposed to the world, but not before drawing a line in the sand that serves as a big “Keep Out” sign.  He looks like a beached whale with attitude, and instead of being huddled in luxury he’s stripped the day down to its essentials: bike, just enough clothing to be decent, a towel just big enough for his body, and a poor man’s moat to keep the 59,000 other people out of his face.

This slice of life on the other side of the cabana is presented courtesy of another photographic perspective. Instead of the faux intimacy of the painting, we have a documentary angle, seeing the subject from the side and set in context, as if a subject for sociological study.  And yet the distance is still respectful, allowing him the sovereignty of his temporary kingdom.  Unlike the Hamptons photograph, there is no implicit invitation via the fashion code to wish–or buy–our way into the scene.

One photo is from the beginning of summer and the other comes much closer to the end, but that is the least of their differences.  The question, however, is not which is the better way of life.  I’m not sure there even need be a question.  May you find your beach in what little summer remains.

Photographs by Jemal Countess/WireImage and Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times.

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The national health care debate has received an enormous amount of attention over the past few weeks, but for the most part the focus has had less to do with the state of health care and more with the incivility of protestors. As President Obama put it, “TV loves a ruckus.” Apparently so too does the print media where most of the photographic record has featured groups of protestors and reformers holding signs and/or shouting at one another, town hall meetings seemingly out of control, and the president addressing audiences in what appears to be stump speech fashion. What we have seen very little of has been any visual evidence that might help us to reflect on the actual problem of the health care system itself.

The difficulty is figuring out how to show a systemic crisis. We can display photographs of individuals in need of some, more, or better health care, but in the very process such images typically individuate the problem in ways that minimize its magnitude (we only see one person or family at a time) and mask its bureaucratic complexities (systems, by their nature, are abstract and multifaceted processes that are rarely evident in the individual case). The photograph below wrestles with these problems.

At first glance it might be hard to know what one is looking at. The photograph is shot from above and at some distance, rather like the way in which we often photograph scenes in which too close proximity to an event might put the photographer at risk of bodily harm. As we will see, the photographer’s well being is not at risk here, and so there must be some other function being served by the photographic aesthetic. The key point to note, however, is that the distance from the scene of action is accentuated by the fact that we get a fairly wide field of vision that frames the image as a landscape: it invites us to take in a wide vista, to see the whole rather than to focus on any individual part—to see the forest rather than the trees. And truth to tell, no individual is recognizable as such; indeed, in most instances it is difficult to identify even typical demographic markers as race and gender with any accuracy. There are individuals here, to be sure, but the significance of their individuality is visually minimized in the face of some larger communal or collective quality—whatever it is that they are doing or whatever it is that has brought them all together.

Here the photograph becomes harder to decipher. And so we need a caption to direct our attention: “Thousands Line Up for Free Health Care.” What we are looking at is not an overhead shot of a flea market or a trade show but a makeshift medical clinic set up inside of The Forum in Inglewood, California by Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit agency that provides free medical and dental care to people living in “remote” parts of the United States and throughout the world. One might not ordinarily think of Los Angeles County as “remote,” but therein lies at least one dimension of the systemic problem of health care in the U.S., for many—by some accounts the number is as high as 46 million citizens or 15% of the population—the issue of access is not a function of geographical proximity to medical care facilities but rather a function of the inability to pay for medical services. And in this instance thousands of people stood in line over night—many for more than one day—in order to “take a number” that would allow them access to medical services that their lack of health insurance would otherwise have made prohibitive. What the story fails to note is that when the numbers ran out many were simply turned away.

Much of the current debate over health care has emphasized the question of choice: will health care or health insurance reform effect the private, individual choice of medical services and practices. And no doubt this is a decisive issue for many people. But as this photograph suggests, if we step back to look at the entire health care system rather than the desires of private individuals, we might recognize that a considerable portion of the national community have no real choices at all.

Its all a matter of what we are able—or willing— to see.

Photo Credit: Ruth Fremson/New York Times

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