The Lions in Autumn, 1984

“… in the context of the post-Enlightenment and the early Industrial Revolution a whole series of Romantic ideas concerning ‘culture’ and ‘cultural identity’ began to take root in relation to the treatment of landscapes. Culture unlike the principles shared by a ‘civilisation’ is invariably based on categorisations of difference. In consequence of the Enlightenment project of taxonomy and classification … the differential aspects of cultural identity increasingly emerged.” ~ Mark Gisbourne

The way we view landscape, whether we realize it or not, is filtered through the lens of culture. As we saw in my last post, via John Locke’s 17th century meditations, that view has been imbued with our ideas of value and property. 

Dust to Dust, Craig Bay, Nanoose, BC, 1994

Twenty-five years-ago, I was contracted by the Snaw-Na-Was First Nation to document an ancient burial site, disturbed by the development of waterfront condominiums on Craig Bay, on the east coast of Vancouver Island. The chief brushed us from head to toe with cedar boughs, asking permission from the grandfathers and grandmothers to enter their place of rest.

It was a hot August day. The molten sun burned in a deep cerulean sky, shimmering on the Salish Sea. A blue haze hung over the Coast Mountains. Earth, disturbed by bulldozers and backhoes, rose in ochre puffs around our feet. We were walking through the dust of the chief’s ancestors.

Much, if not all, of my landscape work, both natural and “modified,” reflects my struggle as an immigrant to discover a sense of place.

The English Romantics, motivated in no small part by the industrial despoliation of nature, sought to idealize the landscape in poetry and paint. In 1757 Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The essay itself influenced the ideas of artists around the world.

Yosemite Valley, California, 1865 by Carleton Watkins

In America, the landscape photographs of pioneer photographers Carlton Watkins, William Henry Jackson and Timothy H. O’Sullivan were undertaken as survey work, contracted by the U.S Geological Survey (1867-1869 and 1872).

The results ushered in a new photographic age, yet we see in their compositions echoes of the British Romantic landscape tradition of Constable, Turner and Gainsborough.

Landscape photography today, outside of work documenting the “altered landscape,” must invoke nostalgia to focus on views not yet despoiled by our industrial-scale interventions.

The photographs of Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams, whose work influenced my landscape photographs as much as Watkins, O’Sullivan and Ansel Adams, are a purposeful acknowledgement that most of us do not inhabit these sublime gardens of Eden, but rather the mundane urban environments where we make our lives, for better or worse.

“In the cup of His hands, He lifted the chief’s two daughters and set them forever in a high place, for they had born two offspring—Peace and Brotherhood—each of which is now a great Tyee ruling this land.” ~E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionawake) The Two Sisters, Legends of Vancouver (1913)

Don McTaggart, Summit, West Lion, 1984

In the fall of 1984, my roommate Don McTaggart and I set off on a spectacular morning (much like the one that dawned today) to climb the West Lion (left above).

Vancouver’s “Twin Peaks,” (West Lion – 1,646 m (5,400 ft); East Lion – 1,606 m (5,269 ft) dominate the city’s spectacular skyline — I mean the horizon formed by the North Shore Mountains, not the puny “skyscrapers” dedicated to human affairs.

Don, a veteran tree planter by trade, set the pace through the fragrant forest. I was hauling my heavy medium format Mamiyaflex camera, stopping along the alpine ridges to photograph the glorious views, etched by the clear fall light.

To the area’s aboriginal people, the Squamish, these summits were Ch’ich’iyúy Elxwíkn, the Twin Sisters, peacemakers elevated to this eternal place by the Creator.

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” ~Edmund Burke

When I photographed Snaw-Na-Was remains and artifacts among the warm earth of Craig Bay, I had just returned from a two month solo bicycle trek through the northern forests and mountains of Yukon, Alaska and British Columbia, traversing back roads that took me far from what we call civilization. Along the way, I occasionally found myself facing that awesome beauty and terror that raw nature inspires. The unfiltered immediacy that raised the hair on the back of my neck had visited me on other adventures, from the Rocky Mountains to the Coast Range. Perhaps I had brought something of the Brothers Grimm to Yukon forest and the ice-encrusted walls of the Stawamus Chief.

Nature, if we apprehend it deeply, without romance or cultural bias, impresses upon our consciousness the impermanence of our stay among its beauties.

Limited edition Lions in Autumn prints available at the shop.