Conohar compares the photographs of Carleton Wakins, commissioned by the North Bloomfield Mining Co. as a promotional exercise ahead of an investment funding round, with those of J.A. Todd and “Clinch” which were used as evidence of tailing pollution against the company in two key trials that helped bring an end to the gold rush.
Watkins is described as “one of the very first corporate photographers” (Conohar, 2017:189) and his images cited as an early example of what Burtynsky has called the “industrial sublime” (Conohar, 2017:189). Conohar states that his images were also used in the courtroom in defence of hydraulic mining, but later seems to retract this. The mining had widespread environmental effects:
- Blasted the gold-bearing rock face with reinforced hoses
- Used huge amounts of water, often redirecting river systems
- Created vast sludge reservoirs of tailing
- Separated gold from the sludge with mercury
- Left mercury-contaminated tailings as an end product
Watkins used a dominant perspective of the mine, contrasting the light exposed rock with the dark vegetation and using the constructional elements as compositional devices. The overall effect is one of man in control of and ordering nature, the whole rendered relatively aesthetically by the albumen silver print. Conohar references Mary Warner Marien’s analysis of the images which “reconcile natural phenomena with human endeavour” (Conohar, 2017:193) signifying topographical congruence. It think the monochrome nature of the images greatly helps them in this. I also note the many images of Edward Curtis in his book The Native American Indian (https://documentary515050.wordpress.com/2021/03/08/edward-curtis/), and writings such as Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that present the story from the indigenous perspective, serve to present the other side of the story from the people who suffered most from the destruction of their environment. The text then mentions how the local people were used as labourers on these projects in very difficult conditions, further rubbing salt into the wounds.
Indeed it is interesting that the only reason a successful case appears to have been made against the company is because they came up against another investor who happened to own farmland polluted by the tailings – the gold rush then migrated to areas that could not fight back such as Canada. In fact the case therefore pitted large-scale commercial farming against large-scale commercial mining.
Conohar references the shift in corporation status in the US from public-good organisations to private gain organisations, and the move from commodity objects representing the value of social labour as a common wealth to the capitalist use of money as a measure of value of social labour, as issues leading to corruption in the Californian “Bank Crowd” that financed the gold rush. I don’t believe the Marxist economic arguments in the article would stand up to scrutiny, but the valuation of nature as a commodity, and potential errors in this valuation caused by the relatively short time frames upon which humanity operates relative to nature, are a valid and interesting area of investigation I believe. This can be seen as a way of bringing together the environmentalists and the deep ecologists in Garrard’s Ecocriticism.
Smaller agrarian concerns effectively achieved some representation via the case of Woodfuff vs North Bloomfield. As with the Native Indians, the local farmers were more invested in the longer term health of the land than the mining concerns mostly financed from afar. Again this speaks to the concept of value in economic/environmental determinations – Conohar later references this as the “virtual ecological transfer” of value (Conohar, 2017:206)
It’s interesting that we have come across Watkins before on an “art” based course but not Todd, who photographed the failing dams that could not contain the toxic waste, raising the level of SF Bay by 3 feet and the Sacramento River by 16 feet, killing wildlife and causing millions of dollars of damage to farms. Todd’s photographs are not aesthetic and serve a different purpose, as evidence of destruction – indeed it could be argued they need to be unaesthetic to achieve this aim. Along with news photographs, such imagery usually has a specific purpose at a point in time and often little shelf life beyond that.
Conohar refers to this as a counter-aesthetic strategy, although there is an attempt to analyse the composition of an image of a leaking dam. To me this seemed somewhat superfluous, as this is simply the only angle that gives the information required – the scale and progress of the dam in the landscape and the material seeping through it. Perhaps Todd’s main challenge was to document the scale of the destruction – 60 miles of orchards flooded and thirty thousand acres of farmland choked with mud. In his first series of images he seems to have wisely restricted himself to the root cause of the disaster – the poorly-constructed dams.
It is, therefore, interesting that in the second series attempting to capture the widespread destruction the images present more as landscapes with aesthetic devices such as lines that lead the eye through the image. The “evidence” is provided by context by the descriptions, such as the fact that what appears a scenic wetland used to be an orchard.
Conohar again quotes Marien on photography working with capital to transform “nature into property” although this approach could surely be shown to derive from landscape painting long before. However it is also interesting to consider whether techniques such as leading lines are culturally learnt or appeal to a more basic instinct. When trying to visually represent a certain scene there are some techniques that just work. However to counter this it could be argued that to represent total devastation a bleaker perspective could be utilised. Perhaps more interesting still might be if such as strategy would work better in colour, not available at the time – just as colour fills the empty centre of some of Eggleston’s works.
The counter-aesthetic the author mentions is more clearly seen in the photographs of “Clinch”, an unknown photographer who also contributed to court proceedings against the North Bloomfield Mining Co.. Nevertheless to me this is somewhat a matter of degree, particularly in monotone. I take the author’s point, but I wonder if there is not an alternative or ancillary argument that “Clinch” was simply a different type of photographer, perhaps one with less skill or time to devote to the aesthetic.
I’ve discussed regarding Burtynsky (https://wordpress.com/post/photo515050level3.wordpress.com/130) the need for a working “art” photographer to sell work. This will motivate an aesthetic as opposed to counter-aesthetic approach.
Salgado’s work is discussed here (https://documentary515050.wordpress.com/2020/11/20/2-sebastiao-salgado/) and I visited the Genesis exhibition, as well as owning the book and indeed one of his images of the Dinka with their cattle. So you could say that I am myself “invested” in Salgado. The sponsorship by Vale is an obvious issue which can be seen as the company trying to “greenwash” itself clean of its contaminated reputation. However, there is also a glimmer of hope here, albeit it a small one, that in recognising the public interest in the natural world attitudes begin to shift – since as per the environmentalist position it is the requirements of the consumer that will change the behaviour of the corporation.
Conohar more directly references position by considering the viewpoint of the photographer when creating the “industrial sublime” vs that of a counter-aesthetic image maker. The former necessitates a stepping back to convey the magnificence of the scene, whereas the latter involved the viewer in the dirty detail at the eye-level of the deep ecologist. The author links these to pro and anti capitalist stances, although it should be remembered that in each case the photographer was commissioned for monetary gain, just with a different brief.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Conohar, S. (2017) Photographing Mining Pollution in Gold Rush California. At: Scott Conohar, Photographing Mining Pollution in Gold Rush: California [abstract] (2017) in Photographies Volume 10: Issue 2. (Accessed 7.6.2022)
Level 3.1 Learning Log 