Tasty. Gotta see this. I'm a believer that the witness of beauty is one of humankind's best endeavors, and here's somebody witnessing where he finds it, in all its contradictions.
That clear-cutting photo reminds me of the scenes in David Lowery's recent The Green Knight adaptation: Gawain cuts across a blasted field of felled trees, uprooted stumps, & the rotting corpses of soldiers — and here you realize King Arthur's words to his knights are indeed true: (highly paraphrased) "You have fought my wars & changed the land itself for us."
Sherman's march through Georgia, IIRC trashing the farmland. Wonder whether there were any permanent effects there. I mean, environmentally; hearts and minds-wise, of course there were.
There's some scholarship out there (which I have not yet viewed). I presume the vast majority of change was immediate and localised to agriculture (environmentally degradative in its own right, tho not then as it is now)...
Press release entitled "Historical march of Civil War general [Sherman] had no large-scale environmental impact," from the University of Georgia Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, May 29, 1996; based on a research project by ecologist John Pinder using satellite images, field study data, and GIS technology to identify any residual effects of the march. Pinder concludes his findings with this note: "This is not to say there weren't any lasting environmental effects of Sherman's March. . . . Towns were destroyed and people relocated. But the effects were local, not regional, in impact."
My problem underlying the question is a feeble memory of Team Sherman salting fields. All I know about salting farmland is that it’s bad. Whether it’s permanent or at least long lasting or what, I not only have to idea but I suffice to interest (or a professional reporter level of disinterest) in doing a quick online research. But even at its most benign, Sherman surely pissed off the white natives plenty, ruining farmland or not.
In days of yore, assisting a prof with research, Civil War military exploits became my area of expertise. It was decades ago, so I have lost nearly all knowledge, but I feel confident I can say Sherman did not salt the fields. Strictly from a logistics standpoint, he would not have been traveling with or laid his hands upon a salt supply commensurate with the task, and he was moving too quickly to deploy troops to plow the salt in. He just burned shit down. A lot of it. In a swath 60 miles wide, 250 miles long.
And power to him for it. I love Sherman.
Of course, afterward, in alignment with today's post and Robert Adams quote about your hate growing in the world you have destroyed, some Georgians afterward assuredly did say, and maybe even believed, that Sherman salted the field. It would be a way of looking at the decision they themselves had made -- to spend four years carrying out violent overthrow of the United States -- and then blaming someone else for the destruction it visited upon their home. Heck, why not imagine the destruction was even worse -- there was salt! -- so as to be an even bigger and more blameless victim for the rest of your life?
Thanks for this. The salted fields claim always sounded like rubbish to me but even more so in recent years if only because it fits the disinfo pattern we've all come to know and love.
As I noted somewhere here, I was going by aged memory which is to say I wouldn’t swear I recollected it correctly and may well have been conflating things.
Yeah this. Sherman brought "the hard hand of war"--his words--to people who had up to that point been insulated from the choices they had made. They thought they could be in rebellion, declare war on their government, and sit back comfortably without suffering.
It was also strategic. Atlanta had cannon foundries and was where multiple Southern railroads met. (The city's original name is "Terminus".) Same with Macon on a smaller scale. Augusta was the South's gunpowder works. Savannah was a port still seeing blockade runners. And of course there was King Cotton. Break Georgia's ability to fight, and you break their will to fight. Three years into the war and no one had touched these places. Yet.
Sherman's destruction was limited in scale and scope. It also--although he himself despised Black people--forever ended slavery wherever he went. No salt required.
What *did* do in post-bellum Georgia was going right back to planting cotton, this time on the sharecropping system. Jim Crow was invented to, among other things, ensure a cotton crop. But cotton strips the soil of nutrients. Soil started eroding. They had to start planting kudzu in the 1880s.
Then, at the end of the 19th century, up from Texas via Mexico, came the boll weevil.
A couple days ago I started dreaming up a poem about Lincoln and Grant bantering over a snifter or two. Now I wanna add indecision about the late-1864 campaign and how they eventually decide Sherman is the dude to snuff Georgia.
Others have mentioned the logistical issues with salting the earth. My memory was similarly tickled, but I assume it came from their beloved Bible as a metaphor for the gloom, despair, and agony visited on them.
Nicely done. I didn’t know anything about Robert Adams’ work. Apropos the stump photo, my younger self’s unwarranted assumption that beauty and ugliness were objective realities was upended on a hike in the Marble Mountains of Northern California. Where the trail topped out there was a Visitors Log. I meant to make a comment about the wonder I felt in that old growth forest but was brought up short by the most recent entry. Someone in a family group noted they had come the day before and wrote, “The clear cut on the west side of the valley is beautiful.” You could indeed pick out the brown scar on a distant mountain. Given the many families in the area that sent loggers into the woods, I guess “beauty” includes “cash in hand” for that commentator.
I can't decide between two Tom Stoppard quotes,which is most appropriate.
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Ur onto something there, MM — the sense of nostalgic grievance that undergirds most fascist & authoritarian ideologies is quite often based in a baseless claim of lost home, that which existed before they've laid their own place waste (and are now blaming the other for that loss ore destruction). It's right in the word "nostalgia" -- "pain for homecoming" (νόστος (nóstos), + ἄλγος (álgos)), but the term itself is just a calque for the German Heimwoh, coined by Johannes Hofer, who first diagnosed it as a medical condition in 1688. This is also why the odela-rune is a prominent feature of European fascist iconography.
Any article in the WaPo on climate change draws a pack of the Zero Population Growth guys. I imagine them perched by their computers, like vultures waiting for a roadkill.
The thing is, for those of us who grew up or at least lived awhile in a place we never wanted to leave, but left anyway for good reasons or bad, there is still a tangible pain from the loss. I strongly relate to that elemental condition.
I thought about touching on this in the initial comment except it was going a little a’field so passed: I think what’s bothering the fine people in the heartland is also the exposure via social media and the mainstream of life outside the dying small towns and cities — that there’s an alternative attracting people away. This, in turn, has created some resentment which makes where they are and their narrow, conservative lifestyles yet more repellant driving away yet more people. This of course adds a layer or something to the physical decline.
Could Biden's plan to expand rural internet access really be an EEEVIL scheme to lure the youths to the sinful cities? Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me, someone get Alex Jones on the phone!
I've been reading Tim Egan's book on the Dust Bowl, and people there sure did have a reason to hate the government, which promoted dry land wheat farming against the warnings of experts who saw the destruction it would cause. But the worst of it was due the the depredations of our Beloved Invisible Hand of the Free Market and farmers who saw the price of wheat drop by half and responded with, "Hell, I'll just plant twice as much!" You didn't have to be Adam Smith to see where that would lead.
Yeah, Jefferson’s yeomen getting screwed, and then resentful because they were, I dunno, under no obligation to know how the world works and otherwise protect themselves from predatory businessmen. One might be able to call their failing protocol-#Freedumb. So being able to acknowledge their own failing or related complicity, it’s everyone else’s fault.
Well, the free market explanation implicates the farmers themselves in their own destruction, "The Government Made Us Do it!" implicates only the hated government. Wonder which one people will go with?
I've always been skeptical when I hear people who live in flat, featureless places go on about the majesty of the sky, or the light, in their home-place as being something special. Hell, it's the same sky everybody else has, it's just in other places people have something to look at other than the damn sky.
When I started workin' the coastal bluffs of central California I discovered a hoody-based uniform adorning most of the farmers and their crews. Every afternoon they'd pull on the hood and tie it so tight the only thing you could see was eyes and sometimes a nose. The point was to cover the ears as completely as possible from the wind. Some of those farmers had been doing this every day for many decades, perhaps an anecdote related to the nostalgia thread above. Or perhaps not – what do I know...
When on a Norwegian fjord cruise I gleefully stayed out on the deck the entire time, feeling the wind on my face. I had the most glorious case of windburn afterward.
True, the prairie and plains can be monotonous, but there can also be sunsets that rival ocean sunsets in their panorama. And towering thunderheads and wall clouds that brew up suddenly on hot, humid, portentous days. And autumn wind rustling through endless cornfields like an echo of ocean waves.
As the saying goes, people who are bored are boring themselves.
As the ad campaign says, "Nebraska, it's not for everyone."
In the recent Republican primary for Governor, one candidate promised that one of his first official acts as Governor would be to "get rid of those damn ads."
When I spent 6 months in and around Omaha, I developed a respect for the weatherpeople there. It was close to impossible to know which way the wind would blow the next day. Had to look out the window every morning to see what way the big downtown flags were stretched out.
Cycling there was fun and challenging and yeah, not for everyone.
“while the ocean fog may have been meant to look ominous”
Realtor: “Sure, some people think the cloud waves breaking along Lake Hali are ominous, but between you and me it’s the most desirable real estate in Carcosa.”
I generally don't have much interest in landscape photography either. For me, it's mostly because a photograph cannot even begin to convey the feeling of being out in the open, which includes all the senses, not just the visual. But when looking at pictures, the crucial thing for me is what I call the difference between a picture of a thing and a photograph. A picture of a thing is just that. A photograph, on the other hand, has layers of meaning that go far beyond the thing that is photographed. It sounds like that's why you like Adams. You are looking at photographs, not pictures of things.
Most landscapes we see are just pictures of things, but there are notable exceptions. In photography, two of the masters are Edward Burtynsky and Sebastião Salgado, so you might want to keep a lookout for any exhibition by either of them. I think you would find Salgado particularly fascinating. Salgado was one of the foremost people photographers in history, capturing horrific conditions in Brazilian mines and Saharan famines among other horrors. Then he apparently had enough of misery and set out to capture the disappearing natural world, resulting in an incredible work called Genesis. I don't know if D.C. has anything like the New York Public Library but if possible, maybe someday go and see Salgado's books. They are world class works of the bookmaking art on top of the incredible photography.
Regarding the Hudson Valley School, we differ on that. I think the best of those paintings are far beyond mere pictures of things and they are a huge influence on my outlook on light. But that's fine. There's so much out there to appreciate, none of us can get it all.
Oh, I don't fault the painters -- it's really all on me. In fact I assume their grasps exceed my reach. I take your other points and am very grateful for the recommendations.
I used to have an outlook on dark, but I lost it somewhere last night, and no matter how hard I look under this streetlight, I cannot seem to find it.
I'm a Bierstadt fan for a couple reasons, but mostly because one of his Pacific coast paintings highlights bizarrely colorful surf, that drove my wife crazy because there's no surf that color. Except yes there is, and when I showed her she had an awakening moment. Not woke, mind you – heaven forfend – but she came around...
A former colleague had a Burtynsky mining photo in very large format covering one wall of her condo. Was a kind of mesmerizing object.
And I spent years poking around Google Earth looking for the most interesting salt pond imagery to capture simply because I loved the colors and shapes, only to find his versions from drones in ultra hi-def. Worth a look.
In those first few weeks of covid lockdown, when enough people were taking it seriously, I took some comfort in how quickly and noticeably the air became cleaner, and in how so many birds quickly grew comfortable enough to appear outside my city window. I had not realized the former buzz of the world had been making them uncomfortable, furtive. We need to stop fucking up, and I'm ready.
(Then, of course, I interact with a friend who will drive his SUV to grab a bag of chips and some guac, which he does not need. All the things we do not need... I've been walking to the store, I say. "This store is half a MILE," he says. Aka nine minutes of mild exercise. I remember how in first grade we were taught it was amazing, it was a startling insight into his unique, impossible, alien character, that Abe Lincoln once walked five miles to give a lady her money. I was six, and already being taught that walking is incomprehensible. The gods alone do it.)
Circling back just to gloat that my friend the retired NatGal cultural historian just gave me the curation text and gallery map and lending institution details and a copy of the NatGal coffee table catalog/doorstop/book.
Tasty. Gotta see this. I'm a believer that the witness of beauty is one of humankind's best endeavors, and here's somebody witnessing where he finds it, in all its contradictions.
Wow - agog at this (& Magog too...)
That clear-cutting photo reminds me of the scenes in David Lowery's recent The Green Knight adaptation: Gawain cuts across a blasted field of felled trees, uprooted stumps, & the rotting corpses of soldiers — and here you realize King Arthur's words to his knights are indeed true: (highly paraphrased) "You have fought my wars & changed the land itself for us."
(Sorta off topic but it's like King Arthur knew what World Wars I and II would bring.)
A gog or two never hurt...
Your Gog is as good as mine...
Sherman's march through Georgia, IIRC trashing the farmland. Wonder whether there were any permanent effects there. I mean, environmentally; hearts and minds-wise, of course there were.
There's some scholarship out there (which I have not yet viewed). I presume the vast majority of change was immediate and localised to agriculture (environmentally degradative in its own right, tho not then as it is now)...
https://ugapress.org/book/9780820342498/war-upon-the-land/
and
Environmental Impact of Sherman's March (Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, 1864)
http://www.uga.edu/srel/sherman.htm
Press release entitled "Historical march of Civil War general [Sherman] had no large-scale environmental impact," from the University of Georgia Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, May 29, 1996; based on a research project by ecologist John Pinder using satellite images, field study data, and GIS technology to identify any residual effects of the march. Pinder concludes his findings with this note: "This is not to say there weren't any lasting environmental effects of Sherman's March. . . . Towns were destroyed and people relocated. But the effects were local, not regional, in impact."
My problem underlying the question is a feeble memory of Team Sherman salting fields. All I know about salting farmland is that it’s bad. Whether it’s permanent or at least long lasting or what, I not only have to idea but I suffice to interest (or a professional reporter level of disinterest) in doing a quick online research. But even at its most benign, Sherman surely pissed off the white natives plenty, ruining farmland or not.
Thanks, for the info, B!
In days of yore, assisting a prof with research, Civil War military exploits became my area of expertise. It was decades ago, so I have lost nearly all knowledge, but I feel confident I can say Sherman did not salt the fields. Strictly from a logistics standpoint, he would not have been traveling with or laid his hands upon a salt supply commensurate with the task, and he was moving too quickly to deploy troops to plow the salt in. He just burned shit down. A lot of it. In a swath 60 miles wide, 250 miles long.
And power to him for it. I love Sherman.
Of course, afterward, in alignment with today's post and Robert Adams quote about your hate growing in the world you have destroyed, some Georgians afterward assuredly did say, and maybe even believed, that Sherman salted the field. It would be a way of looking at the decision they themselves had made -- to spend four years carrying out violent overthrow of the United States -- and then blaming someone else for the destruction it visited upon their home. Heck, why not imagine the destruction was even worse -- there was salt! -- so as to be an even bigger and more blameless victim for the rest of your life?
Thanks for this. The salted fields claim always sounded like rubbish to me but even more so in recent years if only because it fits the disinfo pattern we've all come to know and love.
As I noted somewhere here, I was going by aged memory which is to say I wouldn’t swear I recollected it correctly and may well have been conflating things.
Yeah this. Sherman brought "the hard hand of war"--his words--to people who had up to that point been insulated from the choices they had made. They thought they could be in rebellion, declare war on their government, and sit back comfortably without suffering.
It was also strategic. Atlanta had cannon foundries and was where multiple Southern railroads met. (The city's original name is "Terminus".) Same with Macon on a smaller scale. Augusta was the South's gunpowder works. Savannah was a port still seeing blockade runners. And of course there was King Cotton. Break Georgia's ability to fight, and you break their will to fight. Three years into the war and no one had touched these places. Yet.
Sherman's destruction was limited in scale and scope. It also--although he himself despised Black people--forever ended slavery wherever he went. No salt required.
What *did* do in post-bellum Georgia was going right back to planting cotton, this time on the sharecropping system. Jim Crow was invented to, among other things, ensure a cotton crop. But cotton strips the soil of nutrients. Soil started eroding. They had to start planting kudzu in the 1880s.
Then, at the end of the 19th century, up from Texas via Mexico, came the boll weevil.
A couple days ago I started dreaming up a poem about Lincoln and Grant bantering over a snifter or two. Now I wanna add indecision about the late-1864 campaign and how they eventually decide Sherman is the dude to snuff Georgia.
"They had to start planting kudzu in the 1880s."
Now there's a proto-Faulkner storyline...
Others have mentioned the logistical issues with salting the earth. My memory was similarly tickled, but I assume it came from their beloved Bible as a metaphor for the gloom, despair, and agony visited on them.
"Salt? Nah, that's just the blood of your slaves."
"a carnival ride at night gleaming like a fluorescent jellyfish"
This new month is barely 7 hours old and I got my 7 Bucks worth!
On one hand there is the honest insightful criticism /comment on art, film, music, literature. On the other, brutal takedowns of Republican assholes.
This is truly a full service substack.
Nicely done. I didn’t know anything about Robert Adams’ work. Apropos the stump photo, my younger self’s unwarranted assumption that beauty and ugliness were objective realities was upended on a hike in the Marble Mountains of Northern California. Where the trail topped out there was a Visitors Log. I meant to make a comment about the wonder I felt in that old growth forest but was brought up short by the most recent entry. Someone in a family group noted they had come the day before and wrote, “The clear cut on the west side of the valley is beautiful.” You could indeed pick out the brown scar on a distant mountain. Given the many families in the area that sent loggers into the woods, I guess “beauty” includes “cash in hand” for that commentator.
I love the smell of clearcut in the morning!
That fresh pine scent you only find in clear cuts, car deodorizers and retsina.
“After people live awhile in a place to which they've laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things.”
Jesus, that's heavy. Not sure"place" has to geographical to work but could be metaphysical, emotional, whatever, everywhere.
Yup.
2 marks, easily.
"You should have stopped us. Why didn't you stop us?"
Proto-#Freedumb, of course. Maybe could’ve stopped them but, to paraphrase Tricky Dick Nixon in a different context, it would have been wrong.
I can't decide between two Tom Stoppard quotes,which is most appropriate.
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Ur onto something there, MM — the sense of nostalgic grievance that undergirds most fascist & authoritarian ideologies is quite often based in a baseless claim of lost home, that which existed before they've laid their own place waste (and are now blaming the other for that loss ore destruction). It's right in the word "nostalgia" -- "pain for homecoming" (νόστος (nóstos), + ἄλγος (álgos)), but the term itself is just a calque for the German Heimwoh, coined by Johannes Hofer, who first diagnosed it as a medical condition in 1688. This is also why the odela-rune is a prominent feature of European fascist iconography.
It's also where we get eco-fascism. Adams, however, is a world away from there.
Any article in the WaPo on climate change draws a pack of the Zero Population Growth guys. I imagine them perched by their computers, like vultures waiting for a roadkill.
Sure.
The thing is, for those of us who grew up or at least lived awhile in a place we never wanted to leave, but left anyway for good reasons or bad, there is still a tangible pain from the loss. I strongly relate to that elemental condition.
I thought about touching on this in the initial comment except it was going a little a’field so passed: I think what’s bothering the fine people in the heartland is also the exposure via social media and the mainstream of life outside the dying small towns and cities — that there’s an alternative attracting people away. This, in turn, has created some resentment which makes where they are and their narrow, conservative lifestyles yet more repellant driving away yet more people. This of course adds a layer or something to the physical decline.
Yeah, and the thing attracting the emigrants? That sweet, sweet gummint cash that's just layin' around in the feces-smeared streets, so's I hear...
Could Biden's plan to expand rural internet access really be an EEEVIL scheme to lure the youths to the sinful cities? Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me, someone get Alex Jones on the phone!
"The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service".
As always, fuck their feelings.
I've been reading Tim Egan's book on the Dust Bowl, and people there sure did have a reason to hate the government, which promoted dry land wheat farming against the warnings of experts who saw the destruction it would cause. But the worst of it was due the the depredations of our Beloved Invisible Hand of the Free Market and farmers who saw the price of wheat drop by half and responded with, "Hell, I'll just plant twice as much!" You didn't have to be Adam Smith to see where that would lead.
Yeah, Jefferson’s yeomen getting screwed, and then resentful because they were, I dunno, under no obligation to know how the world works and otherwise protect themselves from predatory businessmen. One might be able to call their failing protocol-#Freedumb. So being able to acknowledge their own failing or related complicity, it’s everyone else’s fault.
Well, the free market explanation implicates the farmers themselves in their own destruction, "The Government Made Us Do it!" implicates only the hated government. Wonder which one people will go with?
A subset of the marks prone to succumb to the GAG*.
*Great American Grift
"Look, this land must be good or we wouldn't have bothered to steal it from the Indians!"
In the collision of the yeoman's horse-drawn wagon and the businessman's freight train, I know where I'm putting my money.
Yeah.
Always a treat when you write on the arts. Your final sentence is worth a year's subscription!
I've always been skeptical when I hear people who live in flat, featureless places go on about the majesty of the sky, or the light, in their home-place as being something special. Hell, it's the same sky everybody else has, it's just in other places people have something to look at other than the damn sky.
It was once accepted that the signal feature of the Big Sky was that over time it drove settlers insane. Then came the malls!
Wasn’t it Giants in the Earth where a Norwegian settler couldn’t take all the open sky, and crawled into a trunk?
But honestly, the open sky isn’t the most nerve-wracking: it’s days of howling, unremitting wind. It really does make a person edgy.
When I started workin' the coastal bluffs of central California I discovered a hoody-based uniform adorning most of the farmers and their crews. Every afternoon they'd pull on the hood and tie it so tight the only thing you could see was eyes and sometimes a nose. The point was to cover the ears as completely as possible from the wind. Some of those farmers had been doing this every day for many decades, perhaps an anecdote related to the nostalgia thread above. Or perhaps not – what do I know...
When on a Norwegian fjord cruise I gleefully stayed out on the deck the entire time, feeling the wind on my face. I had the most glorious case of windburn afterward.
Wisconsin Death Trip
…and their sanity, once lost, never fully returned…
True, the prairie and plains can be monotonous, but there can also be sunsets that rival ocean sunsets in their panorama. And towering thunderheads and wall clouds that brew up suddenly on hot, humid, portentous days. And autumn wind rustling through endless cornfields like an echo of ocean waves.
As the saying goes, people who are bored are boring themselves.
As the ad campaign says, "Nebraska, it's not for everyone."
In the recent Republican primary for Governor, one candidate promised that one of his first official acts as Governor would be to "get rid of those damn ads."
We have had a good time mocking our Cornhusker neighbors for that one.
"Nebraska, it's not for everyone. In fact, it may not be for anyone."
I like the cut of your jib.
I had it custom made for my prairie schooner.
Related: Grand Island is neither grand, nor an island. Discuss.
Not a bad jumping-off place for chasing the wild cranes – one of the grandest wildlife shows in North America...
Good Rocky Mountain oysters though, for obvious reasons
When I spent 6 months in and around Omaha, I developed a respect for the weatherpeople there. It was close to impossible to know which way the wind would blow the next day. Had to look out the window every morning to see what way the big downtown flags were stretched out.
Cycling there was fun and challenging and yeah, not for everyone.
I'd heard you don't need to be a weatherperson to know which way the wind blows.
Sounds like all you need is a window and some flags.
“while the ocean fog may have been meant to look ominous”
Realtor: “Sure, some people think the cloud waves breaking along Lake Hali are ominous, but between you and me it’s the most desirable real estate in Carcosa.”
Ugh... it's byakhee migration season again
I generally don't have much interest in landscape photography either. For me, it's mostly because a photograph cannot even begin to convey the feeling of being out in the open, which includes all the senses, not just the visual. But when looking at pictures, the crucial thing for me is what I call the difference between a picture of a thing and a photograph. A picture of a thing is just that. A photograph, on the other hand, has layers of meaning that go far beyond the thing that is photographed. It sounds like that's why you like Adams. You are looking at photographs, not pictures of things.
Most landscapes we see are just pictures of things, but there are notable exceptions. In photography, two of the masters are Edward Burtynsky and Sebastião Salgado, so you might want to keep a lookout for any exhibition by either of them. I think you would find Salgado particularly fascinating. Salgado was one of the foremost people photographers in history, capturing horrific conditions in Brazilian mines and Saharan famines among other horrors. Then he apparently had enough of misery and set out to capture the disappearing natural world, resulting in an incredible work called Genesis. I don't know if D.C. has anything like the New York Public Library but if possible, maybe someday go and see Salgado's books. They are world class works of the bookmaking art on top of the incredible photography.
Regarding the Hudson Valley School, we differ on that. I think the best of those paintings are far beyond mere pictures of things and they are a huge influence on my outlook on light. But that's fine. There's so much out there to appreciate, none of us can get it all.
Oh, I don't fault the painters -- it's really all on me. In fact I assume their grasps exceed my reach. I take your other points and am very grateful for the recommendations.
Yo missed a spot...
I used to have an outlook on dark, but I lost it somewhere last night, and no matter how hard I look under this streetlight, I cannot seem to find it.
I'm a Bierstadt fan for a couple reasons, but mostly because one of his Pacific coast paintings highlights bizarrely colorful surf, that drove my wife crazy because there's no surf that color. Except yes there is, and when I showed her she had an awakening moment. Not woke, mind you – heaven forfend – but she came around...
A former colleague had a Burtynsky mining photo in very large format covering one wall of her condo. Was a kind of mesmerizing object.
And I spent years poking around Google Earth looking for the most interesting salt pond imagery to capture simply because I loved the colors and shapes, only to find his versions from drones in ultra hi-def. Worth a look.
In those first few weeks of covid lockdown, when enough people were taking it seriously, I took some comfort in how quickly and noticeably the air became cleaner, and in how so many birds quickly grew comfortable enough to appear outside my city window. I had not realized the former buzz of the world had been making them uncomfortable, furtive. We need to stop fucking up, and I'm ready.
(Then, of course, I interact with a friend who will drive his SUV to grab a bag of chips and some guac, which he does not need. All the things we do not need... I've been walking to the store, I say. "This store is half a MILE," he says. Aka nine minutes of mild exercise. I remember how in first grade we were taught it was amazing, it was a startling insight into his unique, impossible, alien character, that Abe Lincoln once walked five miles to give a lady her money. I was six, and already being taught that walking is incomprehensible. The gods alone do it.)
I've taken to inviting folx to coffee shops and saying I'll meet them at their place and we'll ride to the cafe. Sometimes works.
That's a complicated final sentence but it sure pays off.
Circling back just to gloat that my friend the retired NatGal cultural historian just gave me the curation text and gallery map and lending institution details and a copy of the NatGal coffee table catalog/doorstop/book.
She's a pal!