Photographers In The 19th Century

Photographers in the 1970s and 1980s continued to grapple with the invasion of modernity affecting the land and everyday life. With progress, photographers’ paid homage to the romanticism of photography of the 19th century, yet showed the tensions that intersect between humanity and the natural environment. Photographers responded by using their camera to revel in the magnificence and power of machines, other photographers captured the inherent beauty and form found in nature and places not yet affected by human presence (Clarke, 1997; Corbett, 2006; Dunaway, 2005; Ware, 2011; Wells, 2011). Photographers of the former photographed technology encroaching on the land from building railroads, dams, to large-scale factories for manufacturing. For
Even though photographing land and nature at this time rejected the pastoral and idyllic, the sublime interjected. What came to be, photographers constructed a new way of looking at land and nature, some refer to this as an industrial sublime, others an ecological sublime. No longer interested in just preserving land and nature separate from civilization, photographers showed the invasion of modernity on land and nature. Photographers like Raymond Moore, Paul Hill and Fay Godwin embraced modernism and abandoned previously held romantic views of the land for a more critical edge. Instead of the traditional pastoral representation of the countryside, Raymond Moore’s photos portrayed realistic depictions of the natural world. His photos depicted human conflict with the material world, though rarely portrayed human intervention with the environment. Many of his images explored spaces void of the picturesque, instead the ordinary made extraordinary through use of black and white photography. Mostly, images were monochromatic and subject to everyday phenomena, with a hint of human activity. Like
Some photographed the demands water imposes on rural and urban development and the value of containment and appropriation of water for energy sources (Corbett, 2006; Cohen, 2008; Ware, 2011). During this time, photographers like Robert Adams, John Davies, Peter Goin, and Terry Evans photographed detriment brought about from modernization with the land as backdrop. For example, John Davies focused his attention on the consequences of industrialization by photographing cities on the edge of valleys and mountain views as well as former mining towns (Davies, 1976-2012; Dunaway, 2005). Robert Adams’s photos emphasize human impact and destruction of land and landscapes of the American West, particularly in Colorado (Art21, 2001-2012; Yale University Art Gallery, 2010). Although his photos are void of human life, they portray the outcome of humanity’s intersection with land and open spaces such as a half-built home, garbage scattered across a an empty road, and land degraded overtime by human