Human + Nature: the myth of the nonhuman wilderness
Humans, it turns out, are a fascinating species. Over millennia, we have evolved from a simpler animal and constructed an incredibly complex society with many social norms, mores, and cultures depending on location, upbringing, and tenure. Depending on who you ask, we are a part of nature but also from a common, western viewpoint there exists, in our minds, an inherent difference between humanity and nature. This concept, that we are both a part of and separate from nature, is what I explore with my photography.
I am fascinated by the great history of western landscape photography. Photographers like Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams (to name a few) were pioneers – great western explorers capturing the immense beauty and sublime ‘truth’ of the landscape. These photographers, mostly intentionally, contributed to the idea of wilderness that ultimately led to the creation of the National Park Service and the 1964 Wilderness Act. No one can deny they did a remarkable job of showing us the beauty of the natural landscape of the American West.
From this tradition, I explore the beauty of the landscape in the black and white format while investigating the imaginary boundary between humans and nature. I seek to expand on those early traditions but expose their ‘wilderness’ as a manufactured illusion.
There are no people without nature, and there is no nature without people. Nature requires an observer who labels it as such. This label serves as a construct that we can drive to, that we can hike and camp in, that we can idle away our hard-earned vacation time in, and yet we view as separate from us. William Cronon wrote in his controversial essay entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”
“The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation — indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization.”
So, what exists at this imaginary boundary? Is it even possible to identify? In an obvious sense it could be a road, a trail, or a sign, or, really, it could be the fact that we are looking at it at all that it exists. There is truth in that we find the natural world to be attractive, scenic, beautiful, sublime; isn’t our involvement, our participation, with nature just as beautiful?