Consuming the American Landscape.CONSUMING THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN GANIS, POEMS BY DR. STANLEY DIAMOND Stanislaw (Stanley) Allen Diamond a.k.a "Stanley", born c.a. 1930 Irondequoit, New York was an American-Jewish mob associate of the Lucchese crime family and a suspected nephew of composer David Leo Diamond. , INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT SOBIESZEK, AFTERWARD BY GEORGE F. THOMPSON STOCKPORT (ENGLAND): DEWI LEWIS PUBLISHING, 2004 /144PP./ $50 (HB) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "[...] it has become increasingly obvious that the human conquest of nature is not the cause for celebration it once was, nor can we in any way or with any complacency view wilderness as a phenomenon isolated from the effects of our culture. Our expanding presence in and impact on the land has become so pervasive that the boundaries between nature and culture have all but been utterly eradicated." These are the words written by Robert Sobieszek in his introduction to Ganis's book. "The Machine on the Verge On the Verge (or The Geography of Yearning) is a play written by Eric Overmyer. It makes extensive use of esoteric language and pop culture references from the late nineteenth century to 1955. : John Ganis and the New American Pastoral." The machine, in fact, remains the omnipresent om·ni·pres·ent adj. Present everywhere simultaneously. [Medieval Latin omnipres symbol of Man's destructive presence in the landscape throughout this dystopian dys·to·pi·an adj. 1. Of or relating to a dystopia. 2. Dire; grim: "AIDS is one of the dystopian harbingers of the global village" Susan Sontag. Adj. book. Many of the images that Ganis took during his 19-year-long project borrow from an almost 50-year-old tradition defined by contemporary American landscape photographers before him: a vision defined by such "New Topographics" as Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams-a color version of them as far as Ganis is concerned-to Pfahl, Misrach (Hoh Valley Rain Forest, WA), Sternfeld's wry humor ("Mine Tailings Tailings (also known as tailings pile, tails, leach residue, or slickens[1]) are the materials left over[2] after the process of separating the valuable fraction from the worthless fraction of an ore. , Bingham Canyon Mine For the former city at this location, see . The Bingham Canyon Mine is an open-pit mine extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, in the Oquirrh Mountains. , UT," "Cement Moose, AK), or more recently Burtynsky. And a European-trained eye could almost see John Davies in "Meadowlands, NJ," or Cartier-Bresson in "Junkyard and Passing Train" and "Car/Target, NM." The proportions of the images, 2X3, are those of 35 mm film which, along with the mid-day light reinforces differences with the photographers named above who, and this is typical of Misrach and Pfahl, have a tendency to look for the particular quality of light that can be recorded early and late in the day. There are some true master-pieces in this book, and one of course is its cover, "Family at Badlands National Park Badlands National Park: see under badlands. , SD," followed by "Water Slide/Mountain, TX" or "Plastic Cow, Buckhorn buck·horn n. 1. The horn of a buck. 2. The material of such a horn, used especially to make handles for knives and tools. , PA," or even "High Meadows Subdivision Near Columbus, OH." Poems by Dr. Stanley Thompson add to the metaphoric dimension of the photographer's work. Consuming the American Landscape will leave its casual reader with a sense of threatened future redeemed by the irony/humor of a few images whereas the photo-amateur will see in it an interesting testimony about the current state of American landscape photography. |
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