Professor Rachael Z. DeLue contributed to the six-episode podcast series and catalog framing Carnegie Art Museum's Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape exhibition, on view May 11, 2024 through January 12, 2025.

The exhibition features nearly 100 works by 19 artists who prompt visitors to reflect on their relationship to the environment and explore an alternative future through photography. Organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography, with Keenan Saiz, Hillman Photography Initiative project curatorial assistant, the exhibition, podcast and catalog examine "inherited narratives about people and ecology to offer audiences multiple points of entry into landscape photography.”

Excerpts featuring DeLue's podcast interview are included below. 

Reposted from carnegieart.org:

Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape

A Podcast from the Carnegie Museum of Art

Hosted by tennis champion, entrepreneur, and arts advocate Venus Williams, each of the six episodes spotlights different facets of the relationship between photography and the environment.

The podcast features artists, writers, poets, philosophers, and environmentalists in dialogue alongside archival audio, historical anecdotes, sonic experiences, and curatorial interviews.

Episode One: The Archive

June 26, 2024

Landscape photographs contain a multitude of stories about natural spaces and the people connected to them. In the first episode of Widening the Lens, archaeologist Rachael Z. DeLue and historian Tyler Green critically examine dominant narratives about land, identity, and history generated by early landscape photography, and artist Sky Hopinka considers creating alternative archives that combine the personal with the poetic.

VENUS WILLIAMS: Landscape photography has created more awareness about the impact of human activity on the environment. It has helped us see and hopefully start to understand new places that move us, or that need our attention and care. Landscape photography has also created a critical record of what we have lost. And maybe even asks us not to take for granted how fragile the environment is—and how powerful our actions really are. But how does one begin to parse all of this? And if photography helped get us here, what role might it play in helping us envision where we might go next? This is where we can turn to artists—artists for whom the tradition of landscape photography is an archive to be unearthed and disrupted, and a practice to be evolved, dismantled, and remade. Artists are reframing things—quite literally. They’re posing new questions. And they’re drawing on their talents, their lenses, their communities, their memories, their fantasies, their journeys, their research, their personal archives, and all their senses to chart the past, present, and potential futures of this complex relationship between photography, ecology, and land. In these six episodes, you’ll hear from some of the artists whose forays in and around the land have caught our attention. But also from some of the writers, scholars, and scientists who have inspired their work. First, let’s hear from two historians who consider the origins of landscape. And how it became such a central part of photography and, subsequently, the United States. 

Rachael Delue: My name is Rachael DeLue. I'm a professor at Princeton University, and I am jointly appointed between the Art and Archaeology Department and the Effron Center for the Study of America. So that means I'm an art historian and a scholar of American studies, and I work mostly on material in the 19th century. I also spend a lot of time thinking about the intersection between the history of science and the history of arts. And of course, I have written a lot and I teach a lot about landscape representation. 

I think humans are curious creatures and that curiosity manifests in wanting to see and wanting to go places and look. And I think images of place arise from that. And I think they also arise from the fact that people really do develop strong senses of place and connections to the places where they grew up, to places where significant events happened. And so this happens on a local human level. It also happens on a regional and national level. 

Regions, nations, cultures develop really strong associations with place, and those places come to take on, those landscapes come to take on, a certain set of meanings. And I'm really interested in those meanings in and of themselves, but I'm also interested in how artists translate those meanings, translate those deep associations—individual, regional, national—into images of the landscape. And also what happens in the act of translation because it's never a one-to-one translation. I'm really interested in the transformations that come when someone takes a landscape with these deep associations and makes a picture of it. 

Photography as a technology, when it came into being in the 19th century, was received in a really interesting way. People thought it was a marvel. But people also found it mysterious and odd and strange and weren't necessarily convinced at the outset of photography that it was a scientific or objective medium that would show the world as it really was—that idea came a little bit later. But I think photography with regard to landscape is interesting precisely because there's a sense that a photograph of the natural world shows the natural world as it is. It is objective, it shows simply what it is there. And of course, that's not the case. A photograph produces an illusion of the real, but photographs often distort the real, and sometimes they're pure fictions. 

In the years after the Civil War, so in the 1860s and the 1870s, the U.S. government sent several surveys to Western landscapes, what it understood to be its public lands to figure out what was there, who was there and how it could be used, both to expand settlement, but also to utilize and exploit resources to amass capital. In the case of several of those expeditions, photographers were on board. 

VENUS WILLIAMS: These photographers included Timothy O’Sullivan, who accompanied geologist Clarence King beginning in 1867 on an expedition surveying eastern Colorado to the California border. And William Henry Jackson, who, in 1871, accompanied geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden to what is now Yellowstone National Park. And the photographs they took of these mountains, rivers, and lands are striking. But they were also taken—and composed—with a particular agenda in mind. 

Rachael Delue: And so the photographs they made were choreographed in order to tell a story. And that's really, in the end, what I find interesting about the relationship among photography, landscape, and the environment is the fact that a photograph can tell a story about landscape and sometimes that story is true, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's somewhere in the middle. And that means photography I would say probably from the 1860s and 1870s on, photography has been a really useful social, political, and economic tool. And it's related to environmental history because as a social and political and economic tool, it made a case for the exploration and the settlement and the development of Western landscapes. And it did this under a veil of objectivity. And that veil of objectivity allowed the lands to be described as welcoming, as inviting, as habitable, and also empty. Which of course they weren't, because there were hundreds of thousands of people, indigenous communities, living in them, but by and large, the photographs didn't show those communities. So photography told a story in the 19th century about western landscapes, which ultimately created the conditions of, let's just say it, environmental catastrophe that we’re facing today. 

VENUS WILLIAMS: And by that, DeLue means development and extraction on a massive scale on and into the lands that European-American settlers used those photographs to claim. 

Rachael Delue: Photography played a really decisive role in getting Anglo Europeans out West. And when the Anglo Europeans went West, they built things, and they dug up things, and they blew up things, and they destroyed things. They also created a lot of really wonderful things, right? I mean, we can't talk about the history of the United States as only a trauma, although there was a lot of trauma involved. But the things that folks did in the West, the development, the creation of railroads, the mining, the fishing industry, the transportation industry, all of these things drastically changed the landscape and in many cases changed it for the worse, at least in terms of the environment. Rivers were polluted, landscapes were decimated and those people who were caretakers of the landscape were displaced. 

VENUS WILLIAMS: It wasn’t just the existence of these photographs—and the perceived authority of those behind the lens—that gave them so much power. There was something specific happening in the aesthetics of these images that accounts for their outsized impact, too. This is tied to the history of art more broadly. And the power of images to tell stories, to establish and bolster empires, and to dehumanize, vilify, and in some cases even justify eradicating those standing in the way of territorial expansion.

Rachael Delue: Photographs can tell us a lot, but there's a way in which photographs only give us the surface and not the depth. They don't give us the depth of history. They don't give us the depth of the many voices that inhabited that space. So when I look at a photograph by Carleton Watkins, I'm interested in what he's showing me, the viewer, but I'm also interested in that landscape itself. Where is it? Who lived in it before Watkins was there? Who lived in it after Watkins was there? What happened to it after Watkins was there? So that's the ‘what’ part. And then the how part is how did the person who made the picture of the landscape go about doing so? What choices were made? What was included? What was left out? Was more attention drawn to a certain thing in the picture than that other thing? 

I think it seems counterintuitive to think of a landscape as being choreographed or a photograph of a landscape being choreographed because, of course, you can't move mountains around, but you can do other things. The photographer can choose where that photographer stands. So the angle of vision from where the photograph is taken is really important. But photographers in this period also doctored their images. We think of doctored photographs as a 20th or 21st century phenomenon. But that's not the case. Photographers, if they didn't like the clouds in the development process, they would eliminate them. If the sky was too dark, if the sky was too light, they would fix that as they were developing it. So they did have their own version of Photoshop. And then the final part is the ‘who’. Who made it, and what might—given who made it—the motivations of that making have been? So Carleton Watkins photographed the Columbia River Gorge for a certain set of reasons, and if we know who made a certain photograph, and it was Carleton Watkins, we have a sense of why it was made. Somebody else might photograph the Columbia River Gorge for a whole set of other reasons. And so knowing the ‘who’ is really important. Another way to think about this is: who makes the picture and who didn't make pictures. In the 19th century, those were people in power, by and large, white people, not people who were enslaved, not people from indigenous communities. These were people who had a relationship of power formed by capital to the landscape. And so it's really important to think about who didn't contribute to this tradition and whose perspective and point of view and ways of seeing weren't included in this tradition. And that again brings us to contemporary photography, which tries to reformulate landscape from an alternative point of view, from a perspective not always represented in this habitual format that has come to be known as landscape capital ‘L’ in the U.S. 

Episode Six: Impressions

June 26, 2024

How can photography help people better understand their environment amidst an era of rapid development and climate change? In the final episode of Widening the Lens, artists Edra Soto, Victoria Sambunaris, and Dionne Lee discuss how photography helps them bear witness to the constantly changing American landscape, and the ways in which art can help us move forward at this critical juncture.

VENUS WILLIAMS: We’re calling our last episode “Impressions” as a way to think about making photographs a bit differently. What if rather than quote “taking” photographs of places, we reframe that process as gathering the impressions they leave on us instead?

Rachael Delue: As a historian of landscape, I think a lot about landscape in the present day because landscape played such a role in the history of environmental devastation. One of the questions I find fascinating is the question of how one might represent something like climate change, which is vast, and infinitely complex. It's cosmic, in fact, you know, it's not a thing that one can locate in one place or one time. And so one of the questions I'm curious about is, is there a way for landscape reimagined or reconfigured to help communicate to people, not just what climate change is but its scope and its effects because I think climate change is a real problem because it feels far away or it feels too big for people. It's been called by one theorist a hyper object, by which one means a thing so big that it's kind of impossible to imagine. Not only representing it, but even conceiving of it. So, I mean, one of the things I think is super interesting about landscape isn't just that it contains a multitude of contradictions. What I like about landscape is its capaciousness. In its broadest definition, landscape is understood as a section of Earth that can be seen from a single point of view. And so, to me, the affordance there is, alright, well, what point of view do we take? Maybe we don't take the human—maybe we take the point of view of another planet, or we take the point of view of a bird, or we take the point of view of a whale or we take the point of view of vegetation on a shoreline and we try to imagine the world and its systems from that perspective.

Credits

Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape is organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography, with Keenan Saiz, Hillman Photography Initiative project curatorial assistant.

The Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape podcast series is produced by SandenWolff, Inc.

Executive producer, writer, story editor: Rachel Wolff
Editing: Jonathan Sanden and Hannah Kaylor
Additional editing: Stephen Parnigoni and Abigail Hendrix
Original music: Noah Therrien