Picturing America

In researching the work of Mark Klett, a contemporary photographer working on a project entitled, “Third View: A rephotographic survey of the American West,” I came across a new initiative from the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Picturing America.” I was surprised that “Picturing America” was a link on Klett’s resource page, although Klett and the NEH’s projects contain similar subject matter—American history and the landscape—these two projects use images in very different ways and have different expectations about how images, whether photographs or “American masterpieces” can function, educate, and serve an agenda. Both projects make me wonder, what can we hope to teach through images? What questions need to be asked of a viewer? How can critical discourse be created around/through images? What is the power of an image, particularly in an image-saturated world? We are inundated with images from print media, television, and the internet— images that are easy on the eyes, easy to digest. So what kind of image (or perhaps, what kind of discourse and critical thinking skills) does it take to make a viewer stop, pay attention, and most importantly, ask questions about what they are seeing?

Although both have educational missions and resources, “Picturing America” is a program that aims too high by making blanket statements about the power of art to “tell the story of the United States through forty of its masterpieces.”

“Picturing America is an innovative program that helps teach American history and provides students with a gateway to the entire universe of the humanities.”

“Perpetuating democracy is difficult… Picturing America conveys our common heritage and ideals by bringing us face to face with the people, places, and events that shaped our country.”

“The selected works of art are accessible yet challenging… Placed side by side around the classroom, they can be grouped to show many perspectives on American history.” The works represent a select demographic of artists and their perspectives—generally educated, upper to middle class individuals. These fixed vantage points encapsulated in each work of art may collectively begin to tell stories, and I can’t argue that showing students art and talking about images isn’t a good thing, but to marry grand narratives about history with individual artworks, symbols and icons seems far reaching and simplistic.

At the same time, it is also a very “safe” program. Like many government funded arts initiatives, “Picturing America” beds art with some other subject matter (here it is history) in order to sell it to policy makers and fiscal agents. Aligning art with anything else, but particularly the “core” subjects—science, math, etc., where quantifiable learning outcomes can be measured through test scores—instantly earns more cache. Now, aligning art with American history and giving it a shot or two of nationalistic and patriotic overtones makes it a sure bet to get funded.

After getting fired up about the “Picturing America” site, I returned to Mark Klett’s work on the American landscape. In contrast, I found the work of Mark Klett to be captivating and elegant, if perhaps a simple conceit— observing places as dynamic and shifting sites transformed by both natural processes and human intervention. For the past thirty years, Klett and a team of photographers have been re-shooting turn-of-the-century American landscape photos. Retracing the paths of photographers such as Eaedward Muybridge, Timothy O’Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson, Klett’s personal investigations of these sites trace what were typically government commissioned photographs by the early U.S. Geological Survey during the years of westward expansion. Klett and his team took care in photographing the sites from the exact same locations, perspectives/point of view, and time of day. His team took a set of photographs in the 70s (Second View) and have been photographing these sites again (Third View).

Rephotographing and revisiting sites for documentation is a trend I have also come across in the work of artists who are interested in the landscape and particularly climate change. I found a book at the Iowa City Public Library (which I cannot recall the name of) in which a photographer traveled throughout the Arctic documenting receding glaciers over a span of several years. The images were strikingly beautiful—crystal blue icebergs floating across a milky green ocean, twisting glaciers at sunset. He clearly stated in the introduction that his hope was for this book to raise awareness about climate change—to visualize the real effects of climate change. I return to the questions about the power of an image and our expectations for what an image can say or do, particularly when it seems that most artists’ impulse, perhaps a result of formal training perhaps the influence of art history, is to make “good looking” images—melting glaciers and seas of ice may be a terrifying reality of climate change, but they can make for beautiful pictures and paintings. Hello sublime. Hello romanticism.

There are many similar projects, like the one of David Buckner, who sailed on a 100-year old Dutch schooner with a dozen artists to make work about the changing climate. Buckland was quoted in an interview with NPR:

“The problem with scientists is that they make these [statements]—you know, the Greenland icecap is going to melt, or the sea level is going to rise, or the temperature is. They are very abstract concepts. But I think what artists did is to find a way of making the stories personal. So if you see a glacier crumbling in front of you, then that is your story—your personal story—that you bring back.”

Just a few days ago I was walking down the sidewalk with someone and we were both admiring the clouds and sunset when he remarked that the effects of global warming on the atmosphere is probably going to be very pretty. Scientifically, I’m not sure if it will spur Turner-esque sunsets and skies, but the landscape and the skies are certainly going to keep shifting and changing, just as the stories we embed into the landscape will keep shifting and changing, and the ways we picture our experiences and make pictures about them keeps changing. Even if an artist works with the intent of documenting the landscape or history or an event, he or she is always narrative-izing it, particularly when done in retrospect, as with “Picturing America.” To neatly fit something as abstract as the story of an entire nation into forty pictures asks an awful lot not only of pictures but puts a lot of power into the hands of all those picture-makers.