I’ve been a fan of Rebecca Solnit since reading Wanderlust (2014) a few years back and find her an uncompromising but compassionate and balanced voice on social media. It’s been great discovering that same voice applied to visual arts – the roots of her critical engagement – and photography; I’ve discussed elsewhere her excellent collaboration with Klett and Wolfe, Drowned River (2018). As Eve Said to the Serpent (2003) is a collection of essays and three have proven especially useful in developing – and challenging – my thinking. 

At its core, Elements of a New Landscape is a critique of Plato’s cave which proposes alternatives. This foundational metaphor has never sat right with me, and Solnit problematises it as a highly gendered metaphor: a move from womblike irrationalism, upward to male empiricism and separation from the earth. She argues that much recent landscape art, and landscape photography, reverses this movement, and that a return into the cave is turning back from toxic progress, demonstrated in the mounting ecological crisis. It is also an unsentimental return to connecting with the earth, a restatement of unavoidable human entanglement with natural systems – and thus also the damage meted out on them. This entanglement rejects abstraction, favouring a subjective, sensory, tangible collaboration with landscape and a close observation from within. With specific reference to photography, Solnit notes its historic emphasis on the frame’s caesura and demonstrates how through installation work and self-insertion, the viewer can become involved while keeping intact photography’s evidentiary force which, she argues, plays a crucial role in reporting on the crisis. While I’ve long viewed my practice as an embodied entanglement inside landscape, and while I’m increasingly adopting a more subjective stance in my practice, it remains conventional. I’m not – yet- ready to make the leap to self-insertion, or installation, but will let those ideas float at the back of my mind. 

Unsettling the West: Contemporary Landscape Photography challenges an inherent binary in more conventional work, which distinguishes between landscape and social documentary photography, forcing a choice between aesthetics and tradition on the one hand, and political awareness and commentary on the other. Solnit does not see this is a recent turn, referring to Frank and Eggleston as documentarians of landscape, but is nevertheless one which has becoming more prominent. Speaking of Klett’s work, she points to his accommodation of both majestic “wilderness” and man’s banal but savage impact on it, without recourse to simplistic “elegies for a raped landscape” (94). This clean break between ‘virgin’ and ‘raped’ landscapes is one she returns to, arguing that the foundational work of Ansel Adams on the one hand, which deliberately strips Yosemite of human traces, is one side of the same coin as the New Topgraphic photographers’ trash-filled prairies in which human activity is dominant. This certainly resonates with my own work, as I never wish to settle on either the pristine or the ruined, but somehow incorporate both; certainly, to address conservation and the human enjoyment of non-urban areas is to weigh up precisely this.

Scapeland is an essay written to accompany Misrach’s Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (1996), which I will explore in some depth at a later date. She develops the themes of Unsettling The West with specific reference to the work of Misrach, arguing that in landscapes such as the desert is to be found precisely the complex, violently confrontation landscape that eludes the pastoral or sublime modes. Solnit specifically evaluates the role of beauty in these images, attacking a leftist rejection of beauty as unequal and elitist, no less than a right-wing belief in it as wholesome, conservative. She argues that beauty can be and is found everywhere, citing Constable’s belief that nothing is truly ugly, and that beauty is profoundly complex, suggesting fragility, transience, as well as seduction and violence. The desert, she points out, is the ideal landscape for exploring such contradictions. I am similarly troubled by but unwilling to reject, ideas of beauty, especially where beauty might permit a decontextualisation – and thus depoliticisation – of landscape. The commons are not so violent as the desert, and yet with their military traces and the evidence of often brutal landscape management, such as soil scrapes, to portray the experience of them in pastoral terms is to turn them into something they are not; finding the beautiful in a soil scrape is, however, something I have yet to achieve, though not through lack of trying. I look for an uneasy tension between beauty and political complexity in much of my work. Solnit illustrates here how it might be done by a master of his art. 

Klett, M., Solnit, R., & Wolfe, B. (2018). Drowned River: the death and rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado. Santa Fe: Radius Books. 

Misrach, R. (1996). Crimes and Splendors: the desert cantos of Richard Misrach. Boston: Bullfinch Press. 

Solnit, R. (2003). As Eve Said to the Serpent: on landscape, gender, and art. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. 

Solnit, R. (2014). Wanderlust: a history of walking. London: Granta.