Surveying Sites Unseen: Trees, Representation, and Power

• In Event: Environmental Images and Calculations

Abstract

This paper examines how trees and terrain were represented by surveyors, artists, photographers in the years immediately before, during, and after the American Civil War, and the powerful role that these representations played in the development of state and national movements for preservation and conservation. Carleton Watkins’ photographs of Yosemite are well-known in this regard. Presented in Congress in 1864 to support the establishment of the first federally-protected parkland, these photographs created an American wilderness vision that has shaped environmental politics ever since. Yet the sublime landscape depicted in Watkins’ photographs, which were presented in Congress as unmediated facts, depended on the forced removal and forgetting of indigenous life. Taking Watkins’ Yosemite photographs as a starting point, this paper argues that the landscape representations prepared for subsequent surveys of the Adirondacks and the American West continued to construct scopic regimes that relied on “faction” – or the blending of fact and fiction for a political purpose. While these landscape representations were prepared to allow the public to “witness” the scientific process, they also often depicted “marked trees” as “witnesses” to property claims. By focusing on such “double-witnessing,” this paper begins to unpack the ways in which nature’s authority was called upon to both stabilize and subvert human norms in the years following the Civil War. Before the War trees were generally seen as obstructions to the progress of civilization, while after the War trees became powerful national emblems of nostalgia. The loss of trees to industry and of population to war, I argue, contributed to a sylvan melancholia that coincided with a search for the nation’s origins in the forest. By examining how and why this happened through graphic and historiographic investigation, this paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing “wilderness debate” and to strengthen discourse between landscape and environmental history.

Author

• Charlotte Leib, Harvard University Graduate School of Design