Editing Nature in Grand Canyon National Park Postcards

Visual representations of nature influence our expectations of scenic beauty and dramatic vistas in national parks. Representations embedded in popular media often serve as the primary source of information for park visitors. Before making the journey to Grand Canyon National Park, tourists probably have seen the canyon in movies, in television commercials, in magazine photographs, or at Internet Web sites. These easily accessible visual encounters are part of a larger cultural practice; they are a "medium in which lines of power organize and propagate themselves" (Dorst 1999, 97). Applied to national park landscapes, popular visual representations shape environmental policies and management schemes as they inform our expectations of nature in these protected lands. An exploration of the social, cultural, and historical contexts that created, manufactured, and disseminated popular visual representations of national parks enhances our understanding of how places become inscribed with meaning. In this article I explore ideas of cultural landscapes, environmental perceptions, and visual representations of nature in national parks through a content analysis and an interpretation of 259 Curt Teich Publishing Company postcards manufactured from 1936 to 1955). (1) Four themes emerge--scenery, vegetation, water, and animals--that reveal the structure of Curt Teich Company's visual representation of the Grand Canyon environment. Citing archival purchase and work orders, I go behind the postcard scenes to assess and interpret the social and cultural influences that shaped the creation and manufacturing of these images. Additionally, through a combination of archival evidence, extensive fieldwork, historical landscape interpretation, and the results of the content analysis, I suggest some symbols and meanings embedded in the postcard representation over time. There are multiple ways to approach postcard research (DeBres and Sowers 2009). Some scholars consider postcards to be factual representations of landscapes and environments. Other scholars assess postcards as landscape representations created through complex and contested social and cultural processes (Isenberg 2004). In this article I blend aspects of both interpretive approaches to postcard analysis. This work draws on archival research supplemented by long-term fieldwork and personal observations. Standing at a Grand Canyon location comparing the postcard in my hands to the rim, trail, or river scene before me revealed valuable insights into the images that are overlooked in other studies that rely solely on archival or secondary sources. Additionally, these assessments inform a deeper understanding of the dialectical relationship between "actual landscapes" and symbolic landscapes in popular visual representations (Meinig 1979, 175). CULTURE, VISION, AND NATURE National parks are landscapes invested with conflicting meanings of nature and culture. In one sense, national parks are wilderness preserves often viewed as pristine nature, devoid of human modification. This nature-culture dichotomy is a staple of National Park Service (NPs) and concessionaire promotion, although interpretation is changing on this front. Ever since 1872, when Yellowstone, the first national park, was created, boosters and managers have constructed and commodified parks as artifacts of national pride and wilderness monumentalism (Runte 1997). Yet national parks are also cultural landscapes replete with a rich array of significant themes, ideas, events, individual personalities, and group identities that have created the fabric of America as a nation (Cronon 1996, 2003; Nash 2001). A cultural landscape is a physical articulation of multiple, sometimes competing discourses about nature and culture as well as a symbolic medium that is in a constant state of revision, negotiation, and contestation. Donald Meinig encouraged geographers to explore how "actual landscapes" become symbolic landscapes, noting that the sources of information for this work must consider a broad range of materials, including "landscape depictions in all kinds of literature and other visual media" (1979,175). …