NEW TERRAIN.

The title of Richard Baron's 1997 landscape 100 Years reflects the timeless, ethereal quality of the image. The rising full moon and twilight atmosphere speak of the tranquility of a natural world far away from the machinery and complication of modern life. But it's not.

100 Years is a computer-generated image constructed from mathematical models and vast amounts of satellite and aerial data. Baron wanted to show the effect large timber cuts would have on a forested mountainside after one century, so he chose a fictional date and determined the time of day, season, state of vegetation and the weather conditions to help him construct the image. Terrain images look like objective landscape photographs, but they actually represent processed data manipulated to depict a time and a condition of the land that never was.

In The Imperial Landscape W.J.T. Mitchell describes a number of social functions that landscape art serves, noting that "landscape is a medium not only for expressing value but also for expressing meaning, for communication between persons." [1] The present article examines how two genres of landscape depiction at either end of the twentieth century construct the relationship between viewers and the land within the ruling ideology of the dominance of nature, while at the same time eliding that inherent hegemony. Both fin de siecle pictorialist photography and contemporary computer-generated terrain images construct their audience to some degree--that is, the images posit a viewing subject that represents a constellation of opinions, beliefs and ideologies. The viewing subjects constructed by pictorialism and by terrain imaging express a specific stance toward technological power and operate within a regime of truth that supports the hegemonic aims of those who produce--or pay for the production of--the image s.

For both pictorialism and terrain imaging the viewing subject's attitude toward technology is paradoxical. The subject is aware that technology produced the photographs and computer images, while at the same time remains naive of the maneuvering of power and wealth needed to make technology possible. Moreover, the domination of nature makes such technology possible and the viewing subject remains naive of that relationship too. Such an implication in technology, plus a negation of relevant power relations, are found in the naive technological subject--the viewer of landscape images.

Michel Foucault describes a regime of truth as "the types of discourse which [society] accepts and makes function as true. " [2] Dominant political entities ordain what counts as truth in order to support ideologies that give them power. Foucault describes knowledge in similar terms, as chosen types of information that justify the hegemony of the ruling powers. The naive technological subject for both pictorialism and for terrain images is implicated in regimes of truth that determine which discourse is legitimate and which is not. These regimes of truth inform contemporary western culture's approach to nature and to environmental issues: Victorian beliefs about how nature should be best understood and contemporary beliefs about the proper relationship between technology and nature.

Precedents

European landscape paintings established hegemony over nature in the cause of royal, national or commercial power while American landscape painting traditions such as those of the Hudson River School appropriated nature as a path to transcendence. However, after the Civil War, the United States government and the national railroad companies used landscape photography's imperialist function to affirm their possession of land in the western territories. Here, the gaze was deployed with machinery--the camera--and it implicated the viewer in technological culture. Mid-nineteenth-century citizens generally engaged in politics without irony, and the territorial photographs served as documents that institutionalized hegemony over the landscape by the democratically elected government. This hegemony was sanctioned by an ascendant authority, namely science. The precision, clarity and supposed objectivity of the images established photography as a standard for validity in a regime of truth that valorized scientific pre cision.

By late in the nineteenth century, pictorialist photographers were in pitched battle with the "purists" who complained that "there is getting to be too much 'Bunthorne and the Lily'. . . too many 'twenty lovesick maidens' hanging on the accents of a few photographic Oscar Wildes."[3] Pictorialists' romantic images eventually triumphed and, though their otherworldly themes would dominate art photography for four decades, they would never be free of the tension inherent in the project of expressing spiritual values in a regime of truth where science is considered the only valid source of knowledge.

More recently, terrain imagery has allowed timber companies and forest management agencies to render the forests under their purview into large-scale images. World War II era aerial photos allowed forest managers to survey forests from the air, and 1970s resource maps allowed dozens of land features--natural and artificial--to be processed in mainframe computers and then manifested as maps expressing values that would allow for more profitable timber cutting. By the 1990s forestry technicians had developed terrain images in response to increased public participation in decisions concerning logging public forests. According to Hans Zuuring of the University of Montana School of Forestry, "All planners need is the numbers, but the public needs the maps."[4] And since the images were made for an audience, a viewing subject was constructed, somewhat aware of the technology needed to produce the images, yet mainly naive of the power relations necessary for the production of those images. By the early 1990s, terra in images would elide that power dynamic even more by obscuring the images' numeric origins and the power relationships that make their production possible.

The naive technological subject

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was the dominant personality behind the pictorialist movement, which sought to establish photography as an art form. Using the vehicles of his 291 Gallery and the journal Camera Work Stieglitz followed strategies that not so much blurred the Victorian distinction between art and science as they asserted photography's place in the art world. While Stieglitz himself produced no natural landscapes until his later years, he promoted photographers like Anne Brigman, George Seeley and Edward Steichen, whose landscapes helped define a naturalistic aesthetic in photography.

Though the images began as photographic negatives, pictorialists often altered their landscapes with techniques such as drawing, painting or scraffito on the prints or negatives. George Seeley's 1909 photo, Untitled (Winter Landscape) is perhaps the most striking example of the pictorialists' painterly modifications. These techniques subverted the cultural position photography had claimed in the late nineteenth century, by pronouncing objectivity as the central criterion by which to judge a photograph's validity. The post-exposure manipulations of the pictorialists not only placed the images in the verdant, symbolist space of Victorianism, but also asserted that the artist's inspiration was the form of truth superior to a mere recording of the effect of light on light-sensitive materials.

This displacement of science from its position as the sole source of knowledge ran parallel with the willful suspension of disbelief necessary to appreciate pictorialist photos as valid expressions of human experience. This willful naivete regarding the technological source of images remained an assumption that would inform the problematic nexus of art and technology.

However, pictorialism's program was to deny the dominance of the technological gaze-an integral part of its construction in the public perception. One way landscapes did that was by depicting mainly unassuming, unspectacular scenes of nature such as ponds or rock outcroppings rather than mountain ranges or river valleys. In choosing these diminutive vistas, the photographers also imparted a sense of intimacy in the photos in their attempts to simulate dreamscapes or the unconscious. By eliding the technological gaze the pictorialists constructed a viewing subject naive to its complicity in the cultural power necessary for technological development.

Terrain images similarly construct a naive viewing subject by concealing the hegemony of science over nature that is necessary for the production of digital landscapes. The images resemble late-twentieth-century landscape genre photographs with the cool clarity typical of a Sierra Club calendar. Such images are consistent with the currently dominant "peak experience" construction of nature, wherein the natural world exists mainly as a backdrop to recreational adventures marketed in the language of conquest. The epic scale of the images helps construct a viewing subject unaware of the smaller scale, ecosystem level features of the land that comprise the landscape.

In contemporary western culture, intimate knowledge of the land is primarily based on scientific knowledge. Today, biologists are presumed to have the most relevant knowledge of the land and environmentalists mostly defer to conservation biology rather than invoking more lofty criteria. But the grand scale of terrain images denies such intimacy and, by implication, denies the data of which the images are constructed. Individual viewers may have some awareness of the data, the data processing machines, the numeric models and the imaging programs that produced the image, but the rhetoric that informs the viewing subject implies that technology is only minimally present.

The "peak experience" construction of nature is very forthright in its hegemony over the land. The journeys of personal power and transformation promised by magazines such as Outdoors and Sierra would be prohibitively onerous if the dangerous indigenous species and peoples had not been eliminated or subdued, if air flight with its ecological costs weren't frequent and cheap, and if rangers and rescue helicopters weren't vigilantly waiting for the next emergency. However, a central element in the rhetoric of contemporary landscape photographs is the presence of an all-powerful nature to be subdued by, in this case, the professional class that consumes "peak experiences." Terrain images mimic the "peak experience" photos in their elision of the power relationship between technological culture and nature.

The naive technological subject is unaware of the cost of producing terrain images, which entails massive quantities of data gathering and processing. And, while technology has no inherent moral qualities, the provenance of a technological system, and the function it serves in society, are imbedded in that technology's products. Terrain imaging arose from military surveillance technology and is currently used to sway a skeptical public to favor environmentally destructive timber cutting, but these features are often invisible to the viewing subject. The naive technological subject, as constructed by terrain imaging, remains unaware of the implications of the technology and is free to make meaning in the images unhindered by considerations of power or ecology.

Regimes of truth

Constructing a naive technological subject was critical to the founding narratives of both pictorialist photography and terrain imagery, but was only part of a strategy for establishing the hegemony that the genres sought in their respective areas. The naive technological subject was a necessary advocate for the regime of truth that each genre proposed regarding what constitutes legitimate knowledge about nature.

Pictorialist landscapes were produced in an atmosphere of ideological battle over whether photography could or should be considered an art form. In the established arena of photography, the practicing professionals had already ossified their positions to advocate the medium as the stepchild of science.

The pictorialist landscapes expressed the value of formal qualities that were anathema to establishment photographers. The very vagueness of pictorialist images--a quality despised by mainstream photographers--became a central element in pictorialist visual rhetoric, answering photographers who believed that photography was only legitimate if it accurately copied physical reality. As Susan Greenough notes in The Curious Contagion of the Camera, "Many of the devices that had previously been used to obscure reality and impart a mood--shadows, dusk, mists, reflections or smoke, for example--began to take on a more purely formal quality."[5] And, in addition to using the indistinct features as formal elements, pictorialists freighted them with meaning of universal scope.[6]

Elevating maligned formal elements to the level of legitimate knowledge was an important strategy, but the issue of content was central to the "purist" versus "romantic" debate. While "purists" claimed that legitimate photography was a direct copy of physical reality, the pictorialists loaded their photographs with transcendent and cultural values.[7] This sort of content, not to mention the idea of content in photographs at all, enraged the establishment photographers. But romantic content in photographs persisted as the pictorialists made highly interpreted landscapes, and declared personal inspiration a more important form of knowledge than a literal mimicry of nature. By asserting that such transcendent elements could be transmitted through photographs, pictorialists argued for "the verification of all things through human consciousness, and their statement through human feeling."[8] Of course, as photographs, pictorialist landscapes betrayed their technological origin and an essential connection to scie nce. They denied their artworks' technological origins, while claiming that spiritual revelation was the most legitimate source of knowledge or truth.

Similarly, terrain images were developed expressing a visual rhetoric that contradicted the origin of the images. More than anything, terrain image landscapes are numeric creations. The images are generated by huge amounts of data put into 3-D graphics programs. The programs can construct landscapes at the scale of mountain ranges or small stands where each tree that exists on the ground is translated into binary code, and then digitally re-expressed as the image of a tree.[9] However, the forest simulation programs are most frequently used to construct landscapes at the scale of valleys and mountainsides. The result is natural-looking images in the "peak experience" style that normalizes the effects of timber cutting.

The connection between terrain image landscapes and landscape photos is evident in Blair Allen's British Columbia (1999), which depicts how a mountainside will look after a clear-cut The high nimbo-stratus clouds, calm lake surface and waterfall combine to offer a totalized image of a fresh timber cut. The naive technological subject viewing the scene is encouraged to see the image as a sufficient portrayal of the land. The image's realism implies that it contains enough information to reveal the true state of the land after the cutting and, in fact, terrain imagers do not pull any punches--generally, they accurately depict the size of the planned clear-cuts and show appropriately denuded land. But, for all their candor, the terrain images still elide a power relationship central to ecological concerns: that the viewer, as a member of western culture, is implicated in destroying the ecosystem. Moreover, terrain images initially reinforce subjectivity in the viewing subject, while finally discounting that per spective.

By referring to the aesthetic appeal of "peak experience" nature photos while acknowledging the reality of a clear-cut aftermath, terrain images stake out a paradoxical position. Clear-cutting loses the debate in both aesthetic and scientific realms--they are ugly and they often destroy ecosystems. Terrain images, however, establish credibility with the naive subject in both aesthetic and scientific discourses: they acknowledge the unsightly nature of clear-cuts--which everyone already agrees on--and they trade on their status as a science-based object as having inherent truth value. However, the public mistrusts its own aesthetic judgments of timber cutting on the assumption that subjective feelings are invalid in the face of scientific analyses. There is no debate about how clear-cuts look--even timber industry PR practitioners acknowledge that a clear-cut is uglier than a standing forest By trading on a superficial similarity to "peak experience" photographs, terrain images encourage the viewer to judge t he timbercutting on the shaky ground of their own aesthetic judgments. A political subject standing on a weak argument--like aesthetics--is more easily maneuvered than one standing on a strong argument--such as ecological science.

People in the western U.S. and Canada have become inured to the appearance of timber cuts, in part, because the bulk of the ecological damage is not apparent from just looking at the cut. Clear-cuts spread their damage throughout the local ecosystem by reducing cover for elk herds, eliminating nesting sites for bird species and decreasing the amount of water stored in the soil. In addition, the roads that are necessary for most timber cutting operations cause silt to erode into creeks, harming fish populations. These problems are expressed in the discourse of conservation biology, an area of knowledge/truth not considered legitimate in the world of the terrain image where a naive technological subject judges proposed timber cuts on aesthetic merits. The images impart the illusion of valid and complete scientific knowledge of the land, while at the same time limiting the viewer's assessment of the image to subjective aesthetics.

"Honesty"

Thanks to Stieglitz's maneuvering to establish photography as an art form, the naive technological subject was central to the construction of landscape images in the twentieth century. When pictorialists moved on to more urban images and photographs of landscapes adopted a cleaner and more technological appearance in the 1920s, landscape photography maintained its status as an art form and personal inspiration remained in the medium's regime of truth.

However, a large part of the debate in the formation of Group f/64 concerned the idea of "honesty" in photography. This new value ran counter to the pictorialist practice of altering a photographic image to express one's subjective, internal state. After making his transition from pictorialist to purist, Ansel Adams became one of the central advocates for "honesty" in Group f/64 and opposed "oppressive pictorialism."[10] The new style of landscape appeared as sharp-focus, grand in scale and with no part of the frame obscured by anything, least by post-exposure image manipulation.

The critics of Group f/64 accused the purists of indulging in a "technical obsession" and they pointed out that while darkroom manipulations were considered mendacious, the purists left themselves free to control tonal qualities for "emotional" effect. Regardless, the critics faded away and American landscape photography came to be defined by Adams's meticulous technique.

Adams's works took on a life of their own both inside and outside photography, their fame giving the sharp landscape photo a prominence it might not otherwise have had. Adams reduced the need for darkroom manipulation of images through developing his Zone System for negative exposure and print value, which eventually became something of a fetish among amateur and professional photographers alike. Similarly, Adams's use of his landscapes to advocate the establishment of National Parks gave landscape photographs a much wider currency in the non-photographic culture. Even today, the expansive scope and cool, blue-green color balance of contemporary landscape photos impart aesthetic qualities that parallel the scale, clarity and detail of Adams's monochrome prints.

The notion of "honesty," which carried over from the debate that eventually sank pictorialism by the 1930s left a trace in the wider culture. "Honesty" became conflated with the specificity and precision of science, which itself moved into the cultural vernacular as science education expanded. A better popular understanding of scientific research and practice integrated science into the everyday culture and made it less alien and ultimately unremarkable. Despite the rhetorical uses that pictorialists had for such indistinct values as inspiration and revelation, by the 1960s western culture had established scientific knowledge as the central legitimate means of arriving at the truth, which can partially account for the popularity of Adams's images of nature. Such a regime of truth was not limited to a construction of the picturesque in landscapes, but eventually determined how the culture viewed all of nature. Even though constructed as a subset of science, nature remained mysterious, whether it was experienc ed as the course of a disease, invisible damage caused by chemical pollution or highly technical landscape images.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, technical landscape images were packaged with Group f/64's ideology of "honesty" in representation and valorized in the scientific regime of truth for being science-based objects. But as color landscape photographs gained currency over Adams's black and white images, they became, technologically more complex while at the same time appearing more naturalistic. This not only reinforced the naive technological subject, but laid the groundwork for the assumption that terrain images represent the current state of the land.

In the debate over the fate of forest land--whether it will be logged or not-one powerful weapon that the timber companies have is a popular perception of inevitability. Decades of clear-cutting forested areas impart an impression that large-scale felling of the forests is an ongoing process, spanning many residents' lifetimes, and is thus a part of the natural order of things. In recent decades, conservation biology has reinforced a scientific regime of truth, and even the timber industry justifies clear-cuts using scientific rationales, however spurious. Terrain images continue the progression begun when pictorialists established the naive technological subject as a viewer who could live in a regime of truth that embraced a scientific origin of an image while remaining unaware of the power relations that made that image possible. The assertion of an empirical basis for photographic truth by Group f/64 retained that naivete of the power relations inherent in technological society even as it reinforced the s cientific regime of truth that persists in landscape photography today. Modern photographers may frame natural images to present their insights, but it is assumed that there is an indexical correspondence between what is shown in the image's frame and what is being represented.

The assumption of an analogous correspondence between terrain images and the state of the land gives leverage to the timber industry as it counters environmentalists struggling to motivate a public bewildered by the morass of competing claims, and exhausted by years of fighting timber companies and their allies in government agencies. Disarmed by its own naive unawareness of the power relations behind large scale timber cutting, the subject remains generally unaware of its own role in a regime of truth in which the only legitimate source of information about nature is technology or science.

In the eco-political arena the subject encounters a terrain image that trades on the unassailable veracity of the scientific discourse-the common currency in western culture's apprehension of nature. The image asserts that the timbercut under debate has already been executed. The subject may know personally that the ecosystem in question remains intact and therefore is worth defending, but that subjective knowledge is trumped by a technological image of the forest destroyed. The political utility of terrain images emerges when the subject, at some level, asks him/herself: since the timber cutting is completed, why fight it?

JACK THQRNDIKE is an environmental journalist living in Boston. He is currently studying video and graphic design at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

NOTES

(1.) W. J. T. Mitchell, "Imperial Landscape" in Landscape and Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 15.

(2.) Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, C. Gordon, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 131-33.

(3.) Charles L. Mitchell, "A Review of the Philadelphia Salon of 1900" in American Amateur Photographer 12 (December 1900), p. 567.

(4.) Hans Zuuring, Interview with the author, May 15, 1998.

(5.) Sarah Greenough, The Curious Contagion of the Camera" in On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1989), p. 149.

(6.) See Edward Steichen, The Pool-Evening: A Symphony to a Race and to a Soul (1898).

(7.) California photographer Anne Brigman is the landscape pictorialist whose images speak most distinctly to myth and allegory. See her Finis (1908) and The Source (1908).

(8.) Dallet Fuguet, "Truth in Art," in Camera Notes 3 (April 1900), p. 190.

(9.) See "A Typical Stand Visualization System" or "Simple Polygon Texture Mapping Techniques" in David J. Buckley, Craig Ulbricht and Joseph Berry, "The Virtual Forest: Advanced 3-D Visualization Techniques for Forest Management and Research," 1998. See www.innovativegis.com/ products/vforest/contents/vfoverpaper.htm.

(10.) Ansel Adams, with Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: New York Graphic Society. 1985), p. 110.

[Editor's note: The computer-generated images reproduced in this article can be viewed larger and in full color online at www.vsw.org/afterimage.]