Revisiting the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Roger Fenton, Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855; Courtesy Getty Museum

Often cited as the first war photographer, Roger Fenton was dispatched to photograph the Crimean War in 1855 at the behest of publisher Thomas Agnew. Documenting a widely unpopular military campaign, Fenton avoided turning his lens upon the destruction produced by the theater of war. The slow exposures and photographic technology of the time were prohibitive in freezing any motion and actions, making depiction of actual scenes of battle impossible. But whether by editorial bias or his general Victorian sensibilities, unlike his counterparts in the American Civil War, Fenton declined to make images of the dead and wounded. The resulting exhibition of photographs from over 300 wet plate negatives primarily depicted portraits of soldiers in camp, as well as the barren plains upon which they pitched their tents.

Fenton’s most famous photograph, Valley of the Shadow of Death, of which there are two exposures, was taken in the Crimea. A Martian landscape recedes before the camera, the packed dirt road winding to the distance, pocked by scattered cannonballs lying in the ruts and gutters. No tree breaks the horizon, no solitary figure wanders the road. For a photograph of a war zone it is remarkably silent; I imagine not the sound of cannon fire, but perhaps merely the low whistle of the wind. It is an image of a landscape devastated, admitting no life. Fenton adopted the soldiers’ name for the valley, evocative in its Biblical associations. The 21st century viewer might call to mind Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic settings in the American west.

This image has captivated subsequent historians and photographers alike (witness Errol Morris’s recent investigations into Fenton’s “stagecraft” of the photograph), so it is worth considering what about the image is noteworthy. As suggested earlier, Fenton’s work does not easily fit into a modern conception of war photography, marked as that genre is by notions of the event and action. Instead it is truly a landscape photograph, conforming to certain conventions, and suggestive of an archetypal quality even in its specific elements. It is exceedingly spare and elegantly composed, seeming to admit no extraneous details in order to communicate an idea of the landscape through a great economy of means. This restraint, I believe, is what makes the image so iconic. Thinking reductively, the contents of the picture can be cataloged thus: earth, horizon, road, cannonballs. Its very title speaks of death, and of an epic suffering, but also of divine faith (23rd Psalm).

Joe Deal, Road Cut (Homage to Roger Fenton) Diamond Bar, California, 1984; Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery, New York

Spare and understated, formally precise by with a minimum of inflection, and certainly depicting a “Man-Altered Landscape,” it comes as no surprise that Fenton’s picture was echoed over a hundred years later by one of the principal artists associated with the New Topographics style. Working on his surveys of suburban development in Southern California, Joe Deal made Road Cut (Homage to Roger Fenton) Diamond Bar, California, 1984.

Deal’s homage shares many of the same elements as Valley of the Shadow of Death, so it is illuminating to see where they differ, and how Deal’s citation of photographic history suggests the stakes of his own project. As with Fenton’s photograph, Deal’s relies on information provided by the title to endow the image with meaning, both in the invocation of Fenton and in the naming of the “road cut.” Deal replaces the cannonballs of the 19th century with the moist dirt clods of suburban development—his is not a landscape that bares witness to violence, it is a landscape under attack—the “cut” of the title a scar across a hillside, marked by human disturbance. In Fenton’s picture there are artifacts of violence whereas in Deal’s there are traces.

25 years after Deal plodded the subdivisions around Los Angeles, the political contexts of the work of Sophie Ristelhueber and Guy Tillim are considerably different, but they also make use of the iconic status of Fenton’s photograph in order to buttress their own notions of landscape and war.

Sophie Ristelhueber, WB #48, 2005; Courtesy Blancpain Art Contemporain, Geneva

Ristelhueber’s series WB depicts roadblocks in the West Bank. A number of photographs in the series resemble Valley of the Shadow of Death, but WB #48, 2005 most explicitly echoes the composition of Fenton’s picture. Like Deal’s photograph, cannonballs have been replaced by earthen matter, here rocks and boulders lining the road and finally piled into a barrier. If Deal’s image depicted a landscape disrupted by human development, here human action has folded the landscape back upon itself, negating the earlier action that created the road. But if it is a return it is hardly an innocent one. One hardly needs the presence of cannonballs to understand (again aided by the knowledge that this is the West Bank) that this is a contested landscape. In this sense we can also consider Ristelhueber’s well-known photographs of scarred human flesh to be landscape pictures.

Guy Tillim, Game of petanque, Porto Novo, Benin, 2007; Courtesy Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town

Guy Tillim’s photograph Game of petanque, Porto Novo, Benin, 2007 comes from the series Avenue Patrice Lumumba. With this body of work Tillim photographed across Sub-Saharan Africa, where many avenues, streets and city squares are named after the assassinated leader who remains an icon of post-colonial nationalism. In many ways the citation and relationship of this image is an inversion of the negative connotations at play in the previous photographs. It shares many of the pictorial conventions again, but with significant reversals. Notably the landscape is urban, rather than suburban or rural, and depicts a person, barely encroaching on the edge of the frame to let us know this is a scene that is unquestionably populated and existing in a specific moment. Also of note is the motion blur of one of the petanque balls; whereas the photographs by Fenton and Ristelhueber suggest stasis, crucially this is a landscape as yet in motion, dynamic and unfolding in its potential. (Deal’s landscape seems a fresh wound, not entirely realized, and speaking of further disruptions to come.) While the cannons, dirt clods and roadblocks are explicit in their forms of violence, the petanque balls are much more ambiguous. On the one hand they evoke play and forms of conviviality and leisure. But also lurking is the subtext of colonialism, the game itself a legacy of French rule in Benin. For all of the promise and subsequent strife of post-colonial African politcs, this is a landscape still very much open to determination.

Each of the photographs by Deal, Ristelhueber and Tillim builds upon the citational politics of Fenton’s Valley of the Shadow of Death. But taken as a whole, they each propose politicized views of landscape through their pictorial means. At the heart of these images is the road, a social space constituted by bodies in transit. Formally it introduces depth, and according to a classical pictorial conception of landscape allows the viewer to follow a path into the picture, and ultimately into the world created by the camera. In Fenton’s version (and according to his narration of the day) the road was too dangerous to admit passage. Deal’s subdivision speaks of the inevitability of more roads, more houses, and more development, and eventually those families who will make their homes there. Ristelhueber’s landscape has already foreclosed admission; it denies movement to marked bodies. Finally, Tillim shows a public space still carrying the legacy of its past, but with a potential for advancement into the future, a battlefield morphed into a public space of convergence. Each picture is therefore a question of passage and the politics of movement within a landscape: at the most basic, who can go where? It is a small leap to then consider border disputes as well as notions of property and sovereignty, urban planning and ecology, as being related to notions of landscape. In introducing questions of violence and access into the discussion of landscape, we can begin to examine the political potential of the genre.

Neo Topographics

Lewis Baltz, "Tract House #6, 1971"

Those who spend their caffeine-fueled dawns and beer-thirsting dusks swaying along the New York MTA subway organs are no doubt familiar with the quote, “History is like that, very chancy,” from the intrepid Samuel Eliot Morison, he of the Trains of Thought ad series lining train interiors. Which is a roundabout way to introduce that unlikely touchstone in the history of photography, the now seminal (gender appropriate) exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape that opened in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Featuring Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, the exhibition became the brand name for a full-blown genre of photographic investigation.

Twenty-four years later, the exhibition is being recreated, and curators Britt Salvesen of the Center for Creative Photography and Alison Nordstrom of George Eastman House clearly have an art historical ax to grind. The press release is full of lofty prose and direct rhetoric. A selection of excerpts:

Arguably the last traditionally photographic style, New Topographics was also the first photoconceptual style…

As evidence of its influence, it is considered the second most-cited photography exhibition in the history of the medium… (Aside: What’s the first? Family of Man? Update: Upon further consideration, probably New Documents.)

The influence of New Topographics can be traced by looking again at the original pictures and at the circumstances in which the 10 artists were brought together. At the core of this re-examination will be the works from the 1975 show, which was curated by William Jenkins in collaboration with the artists. Jenkins’s concept achieved currency primarily through the exhibition catalogue (which today is being sold at rare-book sales for upwards of $1,000, far beyond its original $6.95 price tag). “By revisiting the photographs, we can assess their cumulative effect and consider their impact as objects,” Salvesen said. “This reprise also provides a unique opportunity to assess the original exhibition’s aims, consider its influence on young photographers today, and examine the international implications of an American impulse in photography.”

This presentation of New Topographics will also include prints and books by other relevant artists to provide additional historical and contemporary context. Timothy O’Sullivan appears in his role as a 19th-century precursor cited by both Adams and Baltz, while Walker Evans illustrates the idea of “documentary style” that he introduced to American photography in the 1930s. The conceptual aspect of New Topographics is illuminated by the photo-based books of Ed Ruscha, a key figure in Jenkins’s catalogue essay; Robert Smithson’s Instamatic snapshots of defiantly anti-monumental sites; and Dan Graham’s magazine layout/slide show Homes for America; and the groundbreaking 1972 study Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour.

In the coming weeks and months I hope to examine many of the topics and concerns that the exhibition raises, including the following:

• What is at stake in “re-creating” an exhibition? How might this be compared to the revival of the theatrical play or dance? In other words what are the temporal dimensions proposed by an exhibition as a specific time and place, and what does the contemporary viewer then bring to the re-creation?
• What relationship can we decipher between the “style” of the New Topographics and the “artists using photography” of Conceptualism? Text to revisit: Jeff Wall’s “Marks of Indifference.”
• Was New Topographics truly a paradigm shift, a full aesthetic break, or rather a form of atavism to the land surveys of a century before? in which case, what are the power dynamics implicit in the photographic “critiques” and strategies of refusal employed by the Topographic photographers? In other words, what are the politics of style at work? In this regard I will consider Jenkins’s original catalogue essay as well as the writings of artists included in the exhibition.
• What might is the influence of New Topographics today? How might we identify another generation of artists expanding upon the legacy of that exhibition. In particular can we expand the horizons to include greater diversity in gender and topography? How might globalization be considered to affect this aesthetic condition? What is a “Man-Altered Landscape” in the 21st Century?

Frank Gohlke, "Grain elevators, Minneapolis, 1974"

My interest in New Topographics is largely personal. Raised in the West, I was imbued with a certain reverence for the natural world, but a Romanticism leavened by pragmatism and eventually cynicism. My own journey through photography retraced the steps of many of the Topographic photographers, rejecting the sublime landscapes that came before me, the equivalences and transcendentalisms that defined American photography for at least half a century. Even as I no longer make pictures of my own, I certainly see photographs as codifications of social values. No image is innocent or blank: they each belie a world of biases and valuations. In framing the world they saw developing before them, the Topographic photographers gave form to ideas they had about the landscapes they lived in. Landscape, as a physical thing in a world, but more particularly through their aesthetic representation, tell us a great deal about who we are.

In the interests of full disclosure, outside of this blog I have professional relationships with several of the photographers in the exhibition; I hope that if anything this will clarify and illuminate certain ideas rather than cloud them–my intentions certainly aren’t promotional in this setting.

I’ve laid the groundwork with a lot of questions that have been stirring in my head over the past months since I learned about the forthcoming exhibition. New Topographics will be touring for the next three years, so this may be a discussion that comes and goes. The publication is slated to arrive in September.

George Eastman House (June 13–Oct. 4,2009); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Oct. 25, 2009–Jan. 3, 2010); Center for Creative Photography (Feb. 19–May 16, 2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (July 17–Oct. 3, 2010); Landesgalerie Linz, Austria (Nov. 10, 2010–Jan. 9, 2011), Photographische Sammlung Stiftung Kultur, Cologne (Jan. 27–April 3, 2011); Jeu de Paume, Paris (April 11–June 12, 2011); and the Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands (July 2–Sept. 11, 2011); and Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Bilbao (November 2011–January 2012).

Mark Ruwedel: Westward the Course of Empire

Mark Ruwedel: Picacho and Colorado River #3, 2000

Yossi Milo Gallery

Feburary 5 – March 14, 2009

Karen Rosenberg has a nice review of Mark Ruwedel’s exhibition Westward the Course of Empire, and successfully covers the historical and aesthetic context, but the exhibition raises a number of additional questions. Ruwedel re-traces railroad lines across the American West, photographing the deteriorating infrastructure. In many instances the lines are completely abandoned, recognizable only by the scars left by their grading or the splinters of the ties and trestles. Beautifully printed, Ruwedel (I believe) shoots 8×10” black and white film and contact prints, dry-mounting on 16×20″ mat board. The artist titles each work in pencil directly on the mount, describing the name of the railroad line, for example Canadian Pacific #3. Rosenberg makes all of the right references to the New Topographics (in particular Robert Adams) and Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson.

The press release says Ruwedel “acts as an archivist,” but this is not the most accurate term. “Archivist” usually describes someone who organizes an existing collection of materials, whereas Ruwedel is himself creating material—to use the term is to de-emphasize his authorial role. Partially this misuse of terminology may arise due to fashion, witness the outstanding exhibition last year at ICP, Archive Fever, curated by Okwui Enwezor. Rosenberg perpetuates this idea, writing, “The presentation tends toward the archival.” But the photographs are framed and hung on the walls, in a typological style, and the pencil titling is an affected throw-back rather than an earnest attempt at filing and labelling. I’ve read somewhere that the artist considers the landscape as a repository of histories. Is the landscape an archive, or do landscapes simply bare the traces of prior events? Ruwedel is in a sense a person who creates an archive; he is documenting a set of sites that highlight technologic and historic entropy. Is to document the same as to archive?

What Ruwedel is doing may be more accurately attributed to atavism, that is, a reversion to a previous photographic form (a term taken from George Baker, again). As Rebecca Solnit’s book River of Shadows elegantly makes clear, the history of photography and the history of the railroad are inextricably bound as contemporaneous modern technologies at the height of Enlightenment aspirations. But in the American West the relationship is even more explicit, with photographic luminaries like Watkins and Jackson frequently hired by the railroad companies (as well as government land surveys) to document their industrious advances. Some of the most pristine prints from this era survive in large bound portfolios supplied by the photographers to their corporate employers. Photography and railroad were twin pillars of the Manifest Destiny propelling westward development. Ruwedel pays lip service to this spirit – albeit ironically – in the title of the exhibition, and also explicitly in compositions that echo his 19th century predecessors. The artist very deliberately adopts the formal strategies of a previous age, highlighting a genetic connection between photographs.

Baker sees contemporary photography operating between the dialectics of abstraction and atavism. Extending Baker’s argument, Ruwedel clearly operates according the Barthesian this has been. There is a timeliness to such images of collapse, but from a certain liberal or neo-Marxist position such a reading might be inevitable regardless of the S&P 500 rating. Given the formal elegance of the images and their loaded aesthetic history, in as much as they suggest an “infinite return,” they are also an ode to entropy, and therefore point to the future as well as the past.