In Response to Place

The relationship between human beings and the natural world has been a topic for artists of the camera since photography's invention in the early nineteenth century. Then, as now, the challenge for the photographer was not only to record the specific character of a place but also to convey its cultural and personal significance. This is the challenge taken on by the photographers commissioned to take pictures for In Response to Place, which seeks to extend an historical tradition of "place photography" into a new millennium.

By asking contemporary artists to visit and respond to what The Nature Conservancy calls the "Last Great Places", I wanted to instigate new ways of thinking about how the camera could depict our relationships to the land, to beauty, and to nature in general. This meant going beyond the known genre of landscape to include, for example, the people who live and work on the land. And it meant redefining the aspirations of landscape photography itself. For most of the twentieth century, the ideal landscape photograph was one in which Man, and any evidence of Man, was expunged from view. Ansel Adams is without doubt the most recognized exemplar of this approach, having photographed Yosemite and other national parks m as if millions of tourists had never set foot in them.

For the last quarter century this edenic vision of unspoiled ecosystems was countered by a more skeptical and arguably more realistic style that dwelt on details of human occupation and on our seemingly irresistible disfigurement of natural beauty. Beer cans in the foreground and toxic waste dumps in the background became standard tropes of this new school of landscape photography, the message of which was that everything human beings touch turns to dross. Bat as radical a counter as this was to the idealism of Ansel Adams and others, it was equally insistent that Man and Nature were discrete, antithetical entities.

How, then, might artists describe what The Nature Conservancy and other environmental groups have come to recognize as a given: that today human beings who depend on the natural world for their livelihoods and sense of well being are the best partners for actively preserving it? How might artists reinscribe our concept of pictorial beauty to allow for a beauty that includes signs of human interpolation? How might Nature's endurance and mankind's presence be seen as complementary and mutually beneficial? And, finally, how capable is the medium of photography as a tool for addressing such questions?

The project's photographers have been selected to reflect a variety of approaches and provisional solutions to these questions; their areas of expertise range from aerial photography to portraiture, wildlife photography to Conceptual art. Their work is uniformly marked by a strong connection to subject matter and by an ability to elicit both the particularity and universality of the human response to place.