I first began to think seriously about landscape when I moved from my home in southern New Hampshire to attend college in central Iowa. Never in my life had I felt so rejected by a new environment, as though the land had drawn back in aggression into a limitless horizon of row crop fields, leaving me exposed and unsafe.
Learning to see the beauty in my new Iowa home -- as a New England native and a lover of traditional landscape art -- was a challenge and a process. The challenge was to enlarge my conception of the beautiful to include things about the land that I couldn't see: the extensive roots systems characteristic of Iowa grasslands, the soil held more tightly in a field of native grasses verses a monoculture row crop. The process was learning to recognize evidence of functionality in the landscape, and let that information compliment my visual reading. Once aware of the land's ecological processes and evolutionary heritage, I could temper my anxiousness in the grassland expanse, and the Iowa landscape looked very beautiful, indeed.
A later move to Louisiana made me aware of numerous parallels between the wetlands and prairies. Both lands were generated out of a series of ecological processes that took thousands of years to realize, resulting in the nutrient-rich soils, natural flood barriers. Like Iowa's grasslands, what makes wetlands beautiful is not only their variety of forms but their ecological functionality: both systems buffer storm impacts, absorb nutrients, store floodwater and sustain high biological productivity. Learning to appreciate the complex ecological dynamics occurring beneath the visible vegetative layers of the landscapes in both Iowa and Louisiana transformed them from what J. Baird Callicott terms "aesthetic non-resources" to rich, beautiful places.
The need for an art that introduces ecology into the language of form and composition has been a topic of concern for many conservationists, most notably environmental philosopher Aldo Leopold. In his collection of essays, A Sand County Almanac, Leopold introduces the notion of "land aesthetics" as a compliment to his revolutionary concept of the "Land Ethic." He believed that the accurate portrayal of landscape must integrate references to its history, its life as an active entity and its ecology.
Thus, this thesis serves as a proposal. It is divided into three parts, where each discusses the specific qualities ecological photography must present in order to properly portray the respective landscape: interconnectedness, dynamism within the frame, and human positioning within the biotic community. Using the selective focus capabilities of the large format camera and subject matter representative of the land's ecological functions and natural history, I direct my viewer to perceive movement and sense that they are viewing an active portrait of the grassland and wetland environments. By composing my images without traditional horizon lines, I ask the viewer to think about how they visually position themselves in relation to the landscape.
As less than 0.1% of virgin prairie remains in Iowa, and Louisiana’s wetlands are being lost at the rate of approximately one football field every thirty-eight minutes, the changes needed to counteract such degradation may not be achieved by small-scale wetlands and prairie restorations. As a scientific discipline, ecology has begun to realize the importance of reconciling human enterprise with the uncompromisable realities of ecological sustainability. For either region to support a truly sustainable future of landscape use, this culture of reconciliation ecology must be extended to our entire society, as well. Landscape artists are in a unique position to promote Leopold's Ecological Conscience through a novel, integrative presentation of the land, but we must in turn incorporate knowledge of ecological processes and evolutionary history into art.