The Image of Environmental Harm in American Social Documentary Photography

Chris Balaschak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000349276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

With an emphasis on photographic works that offer new perspectives on the history of American social documentary, this book considers a history of politically engaged photography that may serve as models for the representation of impending environmental injustices.

Chris Balaschak examines histories of American photography, the environmental movement, as well as the industrial and postindustrial economic conditions of the United States in the 20th century. With particular attention to a material history of photography focused on the display and dissemination of documentary images through print media and exhibitions, the work considered places emphasis on the depiction of communities and places harmed by industrialized capitalism.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, photography, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, media studies, culture studies, and visual rhetoric.

1America Begins Again

Waste and Social Documentary

Despite its currency, Katherine Glover’s 1939 book America Begins Again: The Conquest of Waste in Our Natural Resources has been overlooked in histories of American environmental visual culture.¹ Focused on the issue of soil depletion – the exhaustion of fertility due to intense cultivation – Glover’s book connected the environmental impact of industrialized agriculture with an emerging conservation movement and the nation’s social injustices. For Glover, the agricultural industry was only the most visible way in which American capitalism extracted value from the land. As Glover wrote in the book’s introduction, “The American Pattern,”

In the production of wealth the sources from which it came seemed to be forgotten. The soil was overplanted, squeezed for profits, as were the forests and the mines. Farming was done with machines and became a business. The love of the soil, the intimacy with the natural world began to wane. Men took without sufficient thought of renewal, in order to feed the factories and to earn more and more money with which to buy things the factories produced. This waste of the land, the trees, the rivers, the mines, was a break in the pattern which was weaving in America, a break like the injustice to the Indians in earlier days.²

Reinforcing Glover’s polemic were the book’s extensive illustrations, drawn from publically available photographs. Amongst other archives, Glover’s book drew upon Roy Stryker’s Information Division at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and incorporated images of land and labor from the likes of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. However, the FSA photographs were minor amongst Glover’s selected imagery, which likewise pulled from the archives of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Rural Electrification Administration, and numerous governmental Bureaus: such as that of Mines, Fisheries, Biological Survey, and Reclamation. The result was an argument against industrial exploitation of the American landscape, coupled with a survey of the ways in which government-funded documentary allowed one to see the extraction of nature resources.

Typical of America Begins Again is Glover’s ninth chapter, “The Last Frontier,” which focused on population migration to the Pacific Northwest, and the use of natural resources (rivers and forests) to fuel the region’s growth and productivity (Figure 1.1). The photographs Glover used in the chapter include several images of period damming projects – the Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams specifically – representations of agriculture and federally funded irrigation canals, a photograph of a family from the “Middle West… seeking new lands in the Northwest,” and an image of man on horseback in “one of the most scenic sections of the country.”³ Glover never directly addresses the photographs, nor does she provide any rationale for the illustrations, other than a short admission that her argument is told “with the aid of a few pictures.”⁴ Nevertheless, the variability in the images she uses is notable. As in the examples above, we have governmental documentation of ongoing public works projects, photographs of families, laborers, individuals, who populate “The American Pattern,” and the occasional photographs of the “The Mothering Earth,” to use Glover’s catch-all for the natural world. The photographs thus ranged from the informational to the social to the aesthetic, and the assortment of imagery displayed implicitly asks us to consider how we see and represent the social and ecological “waste” stemming from American industrialization. Do we see it through the labor in and around natural and agricultural resources, and in the communities directly impacted by infrastructure? Or is the “waste” of industrialization best reflected upon by imaging the pristine, untouched, “last frontier,” the wilderness of the American mind?⁵ The image of Nature as an abstraction, viewed through the mode of “the sublime,” has dominated histories of American environmental visual culture.⁶ Glover’s volume offers alternatives, and the possibility of seeing “waste” from a social perspective. What would the history of American environmental visual culture look like if it were rooted in imaging the social harm resulting from industrial capitalism? In addition to the sublime landscape, how might the language of social photography, as Glover’s book implies, make visible the consequences of exploited natural resources and the impacts of American industrial infrastructures? This book attempts to answer these questions.

Figure 1.1Interior spread from Katherine Glover, America Begins Again: The Conquest of Waste in Our Natural Resources (New York: Whittlesey House, 1939): 302–3. The photograph pictured is from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and captioned: “Grand Coulee Dam, a colossal structure, will harness the mighty waters of the Columbia.”

The Image of Environmental Harm in American Social Documentary Photography is an historical study of the ways in which American photographers captured the social and ecological damage that resulted from industrial capitalism. Looking at those places – landscapes and communities – that were exploited and modified throughout the 20th century, the case studies considered here attest to the critical role of documentary practice in conveying the social harm that results from environmental change. Long overlooked in histories of American environmental visual culture, social documentary photography has made adverse ecological impacts visible by furnishing visual evidence (as a document) and embodying harm (as an eyewitness account). As we will see, the photographer’s presence, and ideological agency, is apparent in their projects’ rhetorical structure; that is, the strategies of display and dissemination used to frame their documents’ messages. Photography’s condition as both document and agent is thus vital to its communication of environmental harm, and the photographer’s active spectatorship accrued increasing political importance throughout the 20th century. As this book argues, social documentary photography humanizes environmental degradation, allowing us to see the ways in which the damage wrought by American industrialized capitalism altered both social and natural ecologies.

Aligning American social documentary photography with environmental visual culture will entail several lines of argument. One will be to clarify how social documentary practice, and the myriad forms it has taken, demonstrates the ways in which photography can inform our understanding of environmental harm without deferring to notions of a romantic sublime. On that note, we must also understand the entanglement of Nature and Society as envisioned through photographic practices. Rather than viewing the natural environment as a force or location external to human society, the practices described throughout this book depicted the intertwining of social and natural spaces. The case studies discussed depict this entanglement by focusing on industrial infrastructure, and what we might broadly consider landscape modification, places that have been intentionally, and sometimes intensively, transformed. Be it the machinations of social planning, the energy extraction industry, or atomic and toxic waste, the examples discussed throughout this book show how American industrial infrastructure produced often irreversible social and environmental damage. Finally, we must consider how documentary photography, a tool aimed at conveying facts through a discrete ideological perspective, conveys empathy in the midst of socioecological waste.

The phrase socioecological waste conveys the exploitation of “Nature as a waste frontier,” as Jason W. Moore has shown⁷ (much as Glover before him), and also the manner in which industrial capitalism’s processes of overaccumulation, appropriation, and extraction, undermine and alter both human and extra-human communities. Though it was nearly a century ago, the “pattern” Glover described – capital being extracted from the land – has developed currency in recent discussions of the Anthropocene.⁸ This term, which has come to define the current geologic epoch in which human society has irreversibly altered the Earth’s natural systems, may be less pertinent to Glover’s argument than one of the term’s alternatives, the Capitalocene.⁹ The Capitalocene places emphasis on the role of capitalism in subjugating natural systems for the extraction of value. Moore, a leading voice in defining the term, emphasizes that to understand capitalism “as environmental history” entails “not only massive deforestation, pollution, food insecurity, and resource exhaustion, but also implicate[s] new ways of seeing the world.”¹⁰ These are the same processes that most concerned Glover. In Moore’s argument, furthermore, Nature works for Society.¹¹ The Image of Environmental Harm in American Social Documentary Photography is less interested in naming the global condition in which Capitalism has metabolized natural resources, than to describe the ways in which American photographers have seen the consequences of industrialized capitalism’s alteration and extraction of natural resources.

The prescience of Glover’s work is compelling. Glover’s “pattern” is what John Bellamy Foster, invoking Marx, has more recently referred to as metabolic rift. Marx, as Foster notes, had a particularly protoenvironmentalist concern for “how capitalist agriculture could undermine the conditions of soil fertility.”¹² As Glover argued, the waste resulting from such metabolism is apparent on the land as it is in the people. Mo...