There may be people out there who think the air quality along the Front Range is fine, who think we've managed the land wisely, who don't feel it's overdeveloped, who think stripmalls and suburban sprawl beautify the landscape, who don't value open space, vistas, native flora and fauna, or silence, who don't think the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant has led to any major problems. And there may be people who think these are merely the concerns of the privileged. But these people don't live in the same reality that I live in.
That's a straw man. There are plenty of people who care deeply about these things, but who come to different understandings about why they are and what to do about them than does Robert Adams.
Many who moved to the mountains in search of beauty and clean air, a better life connected to the pleasures of the land, are now paying the price of the lack of planning and stewardship that went into the areas they live.
You have just defined a self-selected few and (unintentionally, I'm sure) framed the issue as one of preservation of a private consumption benefit. As did Adams himself, in the very passage you quoted from Beauty in Photography:
"Our discouragement in the presence of beauty results, surely, from the way we have damaged the country, from what appears to be our inability now to stop, and from the fact that few of us can any longer hope to own a piece of undisturbed land".(emphasis added)
I don't think the love of unspoiled land is the province of rich people and alienated academics. If it is, then Ansel must be an elitist too.
In a global context, this most certainly is a concern of the privileged. You ducked the issue of Adams' anti-poor-immigrant prejudice - better to keep the Mexicans down below the border where they belong, than to allow for any tradeoff of the things he personally values against the possibility of a more prosperous future overall both for them and for us. His response has a nasty nativist edge - shut the door and keep out the grimy masses, lest they foul the lawn and spoil the view.
Are you criticising him for not breaking into the same calender and coffee table book ubiquity as Ansel?
No. If the problems he perceives are so central to his very being that he lives a life of pain, so critical to our society that we face looming catastrophe, there are plenty of life paths someone of his intelligence could have taken that would have placed him at the heart of environmental policy, whether as a professional or as an interested amateur. He chose not to pursue such a life; instead he makes photographs and writes stylish little essays, once in a while emitting an ill-tempered screed that parrots silly agitprop. I don't blame him for not going into the business, as it were; he followed his muse, and more power to him. But to make him out as some sort of environmentalist hero strikes me as fatuous.
Remember that this whole thread started with a question about the impact of photographers on environmental conservation. In that context, Robert Adams' (unintended) role has been to sustain the conceit that intense feeling and impassioned esthetic expression are a reasonable substitute for getting your hands dirty, really understanding the issues, and participating in the hard tradeoffs needed to find solutions that we can all live with.
Do you really think there's anything high-falutin' about his books or his pictures?
You bet I do. Not that I don't like some of his work; but in overall context, yes, I do.
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