Land as History’s Witness: On “American Geography” and “American Silence”

Sandra S. Philips and Sally Martin Katz, eds. | American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present | Radius Books | 2021 | 372 Pages | 345 Images

Sarah Greenough, Afterword by Terry Tempest Williams | American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams | Aperture/National Gallery of Art | 2021 | 304 Pages | 225 Images

About 60 years ago I arrived home on the afternoon school bus to find several small sedans parked in our driveway. The green cars carried government officials from the state of Oregon who had arrived to tell us they were taking our land to build an Interstate highway.

The state offered $900 an acre for nearly half of our 80-acre sheep and hay farm. My parents objected to the pathetic offer and sued. We children dressed for the trial. My parents got a bit more money from last minute pre-trial hallway bargaining, but the outcome was never in doubt. For just $55,000, the state took our land through the process of eminent domain to build part of Interstate 205, a bypass for chronic I-5 traffic congestion in downtown Portland.

My wooded childhood refuge—swampy, with a meandering creek—was soon buried under boulders, concrete, and culverts. Joni Mitchell’s lyrics: "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot” from her 1970 song “Big Yellow Taxi” seems fitting for the memory. Seeing my small wild home buried under a multi-lane highway illustrated the high price people and nature pay for “progress.” No amount of money can compensate for paradise paved.

Seizing land from others has been central to the story of the United States since European colonists arrived on the East Coast and migrated West across the continent toward the Pacific Ocean. This conquering and exploitation of the land underpins a pair of recent books of photography that interrogate the history and present of land use in the United States.

American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present traces the imprint of America’s westward expansion under Manifest Destiny,a widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America.Curated, edited, and complemented by an overarching essay by Sandra S. Phillips, American Geography visually traces the history of U.S. development from the invention of photography through the present, using images drawn primarily from the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams surveys a half-century of work by the influential western photographer and writer, whose work has focused on the effects of human presence: fragmented prairies, rampant suburbanization, and clearcut old growth forests—themes that also flow through American Geography. 

These books make American history vivid by showing a range of landscapes that we have created, shaped, abused and abandoned, as well as continue to inhabit to support everyday life. While American Geography presents a timeline of our sweep across the continent since the mid-1800s, American Silence offers deeper, more personal statements on the residue of colonization and development of the West.

American Geography presents a visual chronology of America’s colonized landscape with well-known and lesser-seen images by historic and contemporary photographers. A preface by late essayist and author Barry Lopez characterizes these images as documenting “the boot prints, if you will, of the colonial invader.” He sets the stage for us to confront our continental occupation from the mid-1800s until now. 

Comprehensive photographic records of manifest destiny’s boot prints are not plentiful, perhaps because pictures of domesticated land don’t hold the same appeal as more popular images portraying wild, undamaged mountain, desert, and coastal landscapes that perpetuate narratives of America’s exceptional grandeur.

American Geography brings the fragmented photographic record of continental colonization into focus by assembling photographs by region and era. As noted by Lopez, the range of subjects selected by Phillips includes “clear-cuts, toxic settling ponds, transmission towers, open pit mines, stalled traffic, sprawling feedlots, and the rest of humanity’s infrastructure.” These scenes are not the stuff of chamber of commerce campaigns.

Originally intended as a 2020 SFMOMA exhibition, the American Geography show was canceled due to COVID-19, and show elements were integrated into this expanded book of sweeping scope, which presents 94 images and a visual listing of 165 images intended for the show. Besides Phillips’ main text, essays include those by Richard B. Woodward, Hillary N. Green, Jenny Reardon, Layli Long Soldier, and Richard White as well as a poem by Beverly Dahlen. A final chapter highlights 23 other photographic books illustrating aspects of American land use. Among them, Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present is a precursor volume by Phillips from a 1997 SFMOMA show which laid groundwork for American Geography.

American Geography opens with images from the 1800s showing trains clinging to narrow ledges on steep mountainsides, huge Tinkertoy-like timber bridges spanning vast chasms, water-powered factories standing mid-river, massive hydraulic hoses eroding Sierra Nevada foothills in a quest for gold, and ancient earthen mounds being dismantled to build railroad beds. As the images trace the trajectory of colonization and varied patterns of landscape domestication, they are organized by broad geographical regions: the Northeast, Midwest and Plains, South, and West.

We see images of booming eastern cities and fertile farmsteads, suburban New York neighborhoods dominated by blinding lights from the prison next door, graveyard headstones overlooking convenience store gas pumps, Detroit automobile plants in heyday and in decline, and downtrodden Midwest coal towns after the mines have played out. There are empty granite pedestals where Confederate general statues once stood, power plant cooling towers looming over small-town backyard gardens, monumental remnants of rail trestles, glistening grain storage bins after prairie rainstorms, bomb craters on Nevada desert test sites, mile-long oil trains crossing fragile estuaries, and barren Oregon mountainsides after timber clearcuts. 

One of the book’s most haunting images may be among its smallest. An 1891 Hutchins & Lanney picture labeled “Comanche the Beef Issue” shows five people among horses and wagons on the Plains as Indians receive beef handouts from government agents. The native people, who had been self-reliant for centuries hunting abundant buffalo herds, were left starving after American military campaigns exterminated plains buffalo to weaken their resolve and force them onto reservations. This was all in service to Eastern settlers seeking to colonize the land under the Homestead Act.

American Geography offers a compelling visual record of land use and abuse. While individual images are memorable, the book’s power comes in the collective by showing what we have done to the land over the last 180 years. It offers a benchmark to help us understand how we arrived at our present environmental predicament and its expanding degradation. Our children, when presented with this damning evidence, could well ask what their forebears were thinking. 

Robert Adams has interrogated land use with a camera since before leaving university English teaching in Colorado a half-century ago. At first glance, Adams’ pictures in his own books and in American Geography document what appear to be mundane scenes, among them an Oregon timber clear-cut and suburban houses occupying a former California orange grove. Close examination reveals a contemplative vision that uses light to bathe damaged landscapes with a sense of grace, and documents places of quiet, seemingly untouched beauty. His poignant treatment only strengthens the lament of what we have lost in transition to a relentlessly urbanized and industrialized West.

His vision is encapsulated in a new survey of his life’s work, American Silence, the Photographs of Robert Adams, released in late 2021 by Aperture and the National Gallery of Art ahead of an exhibition of the artist’s work in Washington D.C. that opened in May of 2022. Edited, and with an opening essay by NGA Curator Sarah Greenough, American Silence compiles aspects of his more than 40 books. It brings the photography of land use to a more personal level by presenting Adams' deeper probes into specific Western places and their condition that is not as easily accomplished in the broad continental focus of American Geography.

Adams’ photographs take an approach to landscape photography that lures us into contemplating the domestic world we have created and inhabit. His early book The New West (Aperture) documents the 1970s transformation of the western Great Plains near Denver and along Colorado’s Front Range from prairie into swaths of seemingly endless housing tracts. 

His pictures were part of an influential 1975 exhibition, “The New Topographics,” at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester that presented an austere, plain-spoken critique of man-made landscape artifacts and how natural landscapes were being eroded by rampant economic development. His writings, including his books Why People Photograph and Beauty in Photography (both from Aperture), provide foundational texts for those trying to make sense of the contemporary American landscape through photography. 

Adams’ photographs counterpoint those of another photographer named Adams. Ansel Adams may be the most well-known photographer of the American landscape, and Robert Adams cites Ansel Adams as an early inspiration for his technical excellence, vision, and activism that helped inspire the modern environmental movement. And while Ansel Adams photographs celebrate the sublime natural beauty of American landscape, it could be said that Robert Adams has turned to look the other way, by acknowledging utilitarian human-built aspects—roads, buildings, and infrastructure—that support society and allow access to places like the Grand Tetons and Yosemite Valley seen in well-known Ansel Adams images.

This book’s three sections begin with “The Gift,” which focuses on the beauty of the nature, trees, and prairie of eastern Oregon and the Colorado high plains. What we have done to land dominates a central section called “Our Response,” which documents the urbanization of Colorado’s Front Range, the ongoing evolution of southern California landscapes into highways and housing tracts, and clear-cut Oregon forests near coastal Astoria—his home for three decades. 

A final section, “Tenancy,” returns to nature’s beauty, with a twist, where he photographs along the Nehalem Spit, a sand peninsula by the Pacific Ocean. Pictures of huge tree stumps washed to sea from nearby clear-cut coastal mountains intersperse with images of the beauty of sand, coastal grasses, and the ocean. The juxtaposition symbolizes the tension throughout Adams’ photographs between plunder and protection of nature as well as awe and lamentation for nature in our modern world. 

A closing essay by naturalist and Western writer Terry Tempest Williams offers sympathetic observations on Adams’ photographs. Well versed in the themes that Adams addresses, Williams grew up in a suburban Utah home like those Adams pictures in Colorado, and her family made its fortune building the infrastructure for western cities and suburbia that Adams documents.

In an era when the history we teach our children is contested, its candor threatened by those who would whitewash the nation’s less than savory past, it’s encouraging to see these books become part of our nation’s visual history. Not meant as escapes or diatribes, American Geography and American Silence elegantly and poignantly offer evidence of the price of progress as Europeans conquered the continent, sacrificing people and nature along the way. Photographs may be silent, but they bear powerful witness if we are only willing to "see.”