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"Questions of Seeing": Images and the Culture of Environmental Reform

American reformers have often used visual images to spotlight their causes, sometimes with tremendous effect. Think of Lewis Hine's images of children in textile mills and Jacob Riis's pictures of crowded tenement rooms during the Progressive Era, Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" during the Depression, and the images of African American schoolchildren facing water cannons and attack dogs in Birmingham during the civil rights movement. But perhaps no reformers have relied more on images, argues Finis Dunaway in Natural Visions, than environmental reformers of the twentieth century. This held true, he stresses, not just in the fledgling years of postWorld War II environmentalism, when Ansel Adams's grand vistas of the U.S. West and NASA's Earth shots gained iconic status, but also during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, two pivotal earlier moments of environmental reform. Using both still and moving images to create a powerful new form of environmental storytelling, Dunaway contends in this carefully researched and elegantly written book, these reformers transformed key environmental issues into "questions of seeing" (xvii). In Natural Visions, Dunaway takes us on a cultural tour of many of the most politically powerful environmental images of the twentieth century, using a richly biographical approach to situate images within their full contexts. He focuses mostly on highbrow image makers and art meant to transform spiritually and politically, not the popular visual culture of everyday life; Natural Visions is a study of professional artists who care primarily about nature, not of Disney films and the millions of images of nature made by everyday Americans using inexpensive cameras. Dunaway's tour emphasizes figures familiar to anyone who has studied environmental politics such as filmmaker Pare Lorentz, director of The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), and Sierra Club