A Guide to Landscape, Power and Climate Change
By: Colin Pantall
Tags: Issues, Mapping, Landscape, Photography, Climate Change

When I was in primary school, my favourite subject was geography. I knew the countries of the world, their capitals, their rivers and their mountains. I knew which continent they belonged to, I knew which oceans they bordered.

My knowledge was based on maps; the maps provided in school geography textbooks, the maps we had in the world atlas we owned at home, the 1,000-piece wooden jigsaw of the world I was given for Christmas one year, the map poster I had on the wall.

To me these maps gave neutral, unambiguous, objective facts about the world. They had sections labelled political and geographical, one part showing the man-made borders of the world, the others the physical features. And one map reinforced the other, giving the semblance of consistency and truth.

Of course there was nothing neutral about these maps. They were politicised both by what was marked on them and what was left out. For example, I knew which countries ‘belonged’ to Britain. They were colored pink on the map, a marker that they had once been part of the British Empire, a colonial state that was normalised (and psychologically still present) through being benignly coloured pink on a series of maps.

The marking of borders, the division of countries into nation states is political, and often arbitrary. It’s only when you see an alternative version of events that the politicisation comes through.

This is a map of Africa from 1710. It shows a continent that has not yet been divided into European colonies, marked by rivers that encroach into the lands beyond. There are mountains, ports, settlements, and—most importantly—references that refer to the kingdoms and people who are already present.

Jump forward 200 years to 1898 and the map of Africa looks like this, the continent divided into countries that, with the exception of Ethiopia, are ruled by European powers.

It’s a European map of Africa then, colour-coded by coloniser. Names have changed, borders have been added and there’s been a curious addition of colour. British possessions are in yellow, French possessions in pink, Belgian in orange, German in green, Portuguese in purple, Italian in striped pink, Spanish in striped orange, and Ethiopia is independent.

The decisions for how these borders were drawn were arbitrary, made around a table in Berlin in 1885 and in subsequent negotiations, conflicts and land grabs. Maps show political and geographic interest. They can, like this Korean map made in 1402, show the edge of trading routes (that’s Africa on the far left).

They can be centred, like this recreation of a map centred on Arabia showing trade and religious centres in an orientation that is confusing unless we turn the map around to what we think of as the right way round (that’s Africa in the top right).

How a map is centred, scaled, and oriented are not arbitrary then. The borders they show are manifestations of power. You’ll still see these manifestations of power in maps from India, Pakistan, China, Palestine, Syria or places that don’t theoretically exist, such as Kurdistan.

If maps are manifestations of power that reveal both through what they don’t show as well as what they do show, then so are photographs, especially where land is concerned. Google landscape photography and you will get an awful gallery of synthetic, unpeopled landscapes more notable for what they don’t show than what they do. They’re a contemporary equivalent of the old colonial map of the world, a world defined by rock outcrops, waterfalls and mountain peaks all bathed in a synthetic HDR light. Whole nations get reduced to a series of physical features in this scheme of things. Kenya is the savannah of the Serengeti, complete with trees and giraffes in profile. China is the karst rock formations of Guilin, with fishing cormorants optional. Canada is lakes and snow-topped peaks and nothing more.

What they don’t show are land grabs and forced evictions, deforestation and climate change, or even the inexorable concreting over of the landscape. It’s a natural order where bad things don’t happen. And when bad things don’t happen, you don’t have to do anything about it. Even when you do see bad things shown, very often they are reactionary, showing things happening to the land on a superficial level without going into why or how it happened. The picture might show a disaster in the offing, and still be as superficial as the HDR mountain lake.

But photographs of the land can contain as much political content as maps and serve very similar purposes. Photographs can define a country by creating a terrestrial identity, by creating borders and reinforcing ideas of nationhood and land ownership. Photographs can reveal military, political, environmental or emotional connections to the land. They can help us make aware of how the world works or, conversely, they can help create a false image of the land both through what they do show as well as what they don’t show. And in photography, it’s the not showing that is the thing.

A member of Clarence King’s Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel is surveying from a rock. Shoshone Canyon and Falls, Idaho Terr., in background. © O’Sullivan, 1868, Public Domain

You can see these political layers in the work of 19th century photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan. His survey photographs of the American West show a land that is an almost empty wilderness. We get high viewpoints of mountain ranges, waterways, plains and forests. They are beautiful pictures, a kind of American sublime, but they were commissioned by the military and were an advertisement for mapping the land, for uncovering its potential for exploiting the forests, minerals, the grasslands, and doing this in the service of the American military. Just like the maps I looked at when I was a child, these are not benign pictures. They come with layers of meaning attached.

These layers of meaning also come from what the pictures didn’t show: the people who were already living on the land. This is not a land that is already populated by Native Americans, with a history of its own. It’s an empty land that is deliberately represented as a wilderness waiting to be organised and exploited by European America.

The high views of Timothy O’Sullivan find a contemporary echo in the work of photographers like Trevor Paglen. “Timothy O’Sullivan was to the 19th century what contemporary spy satellites are to the 21st century”, says Paglen, a photographer who works with different forms of imaging, data and surveillance to reveal what is hidden in the landscape.

And what is hidden is the military and surveillance presence that surrounds us all. Paglen uses ideas of “experimental geography” in his work, ideas that seek to help us understand and experience the places where we live in all their brutal glory, and transform that world through the actions that we choose to make. Paglen’s actions are to make us aware of the satellites that track our movements, the drones that survey and kill on our behalf and at our expense, and the web of very physical cables that carry information and disinformation around the world via the internet. You want to know how you are reading this article? Paglen’s probably photographed part of that infrastructure somewhere along the line.

Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, Texas © Mishka Henner

You can find similar ideas of revealing what is hidden used very directly in the work of Mishka Henner. Stitched together from hundreds of satellite images from Google Earth, Henner uses the same God’s Eye view to make images of American feedlots—feedlots that due to US ‘ag-gag’ laws are not readily available for viewing. Examples of this legislation include West Virginia prohibiting ‘access to “nonpublic areas” for reasons other than intent to perform authorized work, including capturing photographs and videos’ or Kansas criminalising “enter(ing) an animal facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera or by any other means.” So again, it’s photography showing us something we wouldn’t otherwise see, with political and economic powers using laws to stop photographs being made.

Randall Country Feedyard, Amarillo Texas © Mishka Henner

Henner’s Feedlots are horrific. They are images where microbe-like cows are surrounded by pools of contaminated waste. They show an industrialised food complex that is toxic, destructive, and cruel in multiple ways.

They are images that reference surveillance and grids and the way that we see the world. But they are also about showing what is hidden, and because they are made on a computer in a studio and then shown on a truly massive scale in a gallery, they are made in a way that reflects how we experience the world. They are photographs where no ‘cameras’ are involved. It’s all data driven. Henner says that he is not a political artist, but with Feedlots he is working with ideas of land, space, surveillance and geography that shows the viewer the harsh realities of beef production.

Tacosa Feedyard, Bushland, Texas © Mishka Henner

These are images that are intended to move the viewer in every way, from its use of Google Earth’s God’s Eye view to the way in which the image leaves us quivering with apocalyptic feelings of dread and doom and a little nudge towards vegetarianism. It’s a picture of power that makes us feel both powerless and cruel, but also ties in to historical ideas of the horror and awe of the sublime landscape. This is the digital sublime. It’s the corporate farming sublime and it’s showing us something that we haven’t seen before. So in one sense, Feedlots is an example of Paglen’s ‘experimental geography’ in action, but in another sense it is a very contemporary example of the artist as ‘witness’.

If Paglen and Henner work with landscape centred more on data and surveillance ideas of geography, Esther Vonplon’s beautiful Gletscherfahrt brings a more personal and emotional touch to her images of melting glaciers.

© Ester Vonplon

Again, it’s environmental work that brings to us the effect of climate change on the glaciers in Vonplon’s native Switzerland. In her large-format black-and-white prints, she shows us glaciers in summer covered with sheets to hold back the melting gaze of the sun. But in Vonplon’s world view, these sheets become shrouds that cover these dying glaciers. And the glaciers, rather than being pure and white as we might expect, are gray and murky, speckled with dots of black that visually links us to carbon footprints and fossil fuels that are destroying the planet.

© Ester Vonplon

They are emotional pictures that have a sadness about them, compounded in the requiem that Vonplon commissioned to accompany the images, and the sounds she recorded while making the pictures. These are sounds made under the ice, of the glacier cracking, of water dripping and pouring and flowing. It’s the sound of earth’s tears, of life flowing away, and in accompaniment with the images it makes for a most mournful elegy to what we are losing right now.

There are ways of looking at landscapes that capture through time and photography (and re-photography) either the slowness of geological change, or contrastingly the rapidity of climate change as you can see in NASA’s Global Ice Viewer, but the emotion generated by the music and sound elements of Vonplon’s project takes you into quite a different place. It affects you, makes you remember, and that is an achievement in an area where—the desperateness of the situation notwithstanding—it is a struggle to make memorable images.

Alejandro Cartagena’s interest in the landscape around Monterrey in Mexico is also concerned with the environment, but in a way in which land use, politics, and the language of development combine. It is complex work that emerged from seeing the work of Eugenio Espino Barros, a Mexican photographer who worked in the early 20th century.

“My first approach with landscape came from being a digitiser at an archive and I had the chance to scan the whole archive of this photographer who worked at the beginning of the 20th century. He was basically a landscape photographer but there was this joy about photographing the landscape for him. But for me when I was looking at these images I was living in the landscape he had photographed almost 80 years before and seeing how it had been transformed. I realised that the spaces he had photographed had become suburbs — and I was like, holy shit, when did this happen? Then Wendy Waitriss, the director of Houston Fotofest, came to Monterrey and she said you should look at the New Topographics so I bought the catalogue, the book and I realised that Monterrey was a copy of the US, it was a colonising of the landscape.”

The New Topographics moved the idea of landscape photography (and US landscape in particular) away from the idea of the wild, natural landscape with a background in European ideas of the sublime, beautiful and picturesque. Instead of the grand vistas of Ansel Adams, you got the housing developments of Robert Adams, ‘ruined’ landscapes in which human presence was all too apparent. Landscapes became about the autobiographical and metaphorical as much as the geographical.

“That was a turning point in my work,” says Cartagena, a photographer whose work encompasses the autobiographical, metaphorical and geographical in equal measure.

“It wasn’t just about the landscape, it was about how we use the landscape, and the mechanisms that make it shift into what it is becoming, and who are the people deciding what that landscape is going to look like. That’s where the power comes into play. I was looking at the houses being built and the land being transformed and everybody sees that. The questions that I was asking were who is making the decisions that that land transforms, what is the bureaucracy that enforces those decisions, where are the people who have dreams and desires that are shifting the landscape. It’s not about what’s visible, it’s about the things that make the land change. That’s where I went.”

Carpoolers © Alejandro Cartagena

In his project Carpoolers, Cartagena made a simple series of images of workers travelling from the poorer suburbs of Monterrey to work on the swimming pools, gardens and interiors in the wealthier suburbs of Monterrey. Photographed from a bridge, it’s a series where labour, exhaustion, and sleep are set between two worlds, one of which is wealthier than another, with the bridge providing a metaphorical God’s Eye view. Again, it’s about revealing through photography what is actually there in front of our eyes, which is not a neutral landscape but a landscape that is invested with power structures that trail like tendrils into homes, highways and boardrooms that extend into further political, economic and corporate networks.

Carpoolers © Alejandro Cartagena

“The idea of Carpoolers is the portrayal of this shifting landscape without showing the landscape. Here you have low-cost housing, you have high-cost properties, you have people travelling by truck on the roads that connect the two and those roads exist because of those two points. You have an urban system, you have transport, and then you have politicians who say, “wow, this is business, let’s build the whole system in between and we’re going to make money from both sides.” That for me is where things get exciting in photography; the possibility of making those connections. Anybody can photograph, but when you find something that opens up dialogues between things that are happening in the world, that’s when photography has something to say. It’s the connections that are the poetics of documentary photography. I am not a believer in the landscape as something beautiful or awe inspiring. It’s not. Even the most beautiful landscapes, the Ansel Adams landscapes and the great American parks are a construction, a system of power to feel in a certain way.”

Rivers of Power © Alejandro Cartagena

“Landscape is a cultural construction. It isn’t natural. It’s something we’ve constructed in order to understand how we transform space, and by calling it landscape there’s a sensation of no guilt — it’s there to be transformed, to have a purpose in our culture. I think it’s a construct that makes the shit that we’re doing invisible. We’ve been building the idea that the landscape is something natural, something renewable, but all these things are things that lower our anxiety about destroying the place we live. Because we don’t see ourselves as bad.”

© Alejandro Cartagena

The idea that landscape is something constructed (a verb rather than a noun) is an idea that Cartagena explores in his project, A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption. It’s the idea that landscapes reflect social and economic relations, and that to understand the landscape you need to examine the relationships that are contained in the landscape. In this case, it’s the landscape of bridges and roads that have been built around Monterrey in the name of ‘development’.”

© Alejandro Cartagena

“Infrastructure and corruption is about how the government has found a system to make money,” he says.

“It is almost propaganda with the message that development is something that we need. It makes a feast and shows it off to everybody and it uses photography to do this. It makes a huge fuss about this bridge, this road, it tells us that they are doing good. But ultimately they’re screwing up the bridges. Nobody around the bridge has been consulted, it’s an imposition, but it looks good on paper, it’s visible. It’s a perfect system to say I’m a good politician, I do things for the people who voted for me. Here’s the bridge I built, and heres the evidence of my contribution to you as citizens, a photograph.”

© Alejandro Cartagena

“But there’s no talking about the effect this infrastructure has on the immediate environment. And I wanted to talk about that. The last part of that book is an epilogue on how the mafia here, the narco world, has used that infrastructure to show their power by hanging people from those bridges. Here’s the government building these monuments of power. And then here’s this other power using those monuments to show off their power against the government and their other rivals. It’s like, wow, this is super perverted. It’s almost like one power is crushing another power. The government crushes the citizens because we don’t have a say in these massive constructions, and then the illegal power crushes the official power. It’s ironic, it’s perverse, everything is happening at the same time.”

From A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption by Alejandro Cartagena

It’s work about barriers and borders then and the rhetoric of development. It’s also about cutting through this rhetoric to show the very visible effects this construction has on the communities it has been imposed on. And for different layers of rhetoric, there are different forms of photography. There are Cartagena’s images of blocked-off pathways and the social and environmental violence of concrete, there are publicity images of road openings, of meetings being held and ribbons being cut, and finally there are images of violence, screen grabs of hooded bodies hanging over bridges, of broken necks and blood stains.

It’s a destructive vision of a world, and a flipping of the language of development, but there is hope for Cartagena in the ways in which awareness of urban development is mobilising activists across borders, making visible what is there in plain sight.

“There are many examples of this happening,” he says.