Storming the Gates of Paradise (21 page)

Burtynsky is starting to approach something that photography could have pursued all along, and maybe did once or twice in the era of the
Life
photo essay: an inspection of systems rather than places. His oil fields, oil refineries, tire dumps, oil pipelines, and dismantled tankers begin to get at the cycle of oil, nasty at every turn even without politics and wars. They aren’t presented that way in the book, but they accrue that way in the imagination. A truly ecological photography might pursue something along those lines, tracing the life of a commodity from extraction to disposal (Burtynsky’s pale uranium mine site with its dead trees invites this line of investigation, raising as it does the specter of bombs and power
plants and nuclear waste disposal). Or it might address what photography has mostly been unwilling to acknowledge: so toxic is the medium itself that Kodak in Rochester—not far from Burtynsky’s Ontario home—is New York State’s number one polluter, cranking out in a typical year 2.5 million pounds of airborne methylene chloride as well as enough dioxin to cause more than half a billion cancer deaths. This could be why a really thoughtful photographer, in Pauli’s words, “believes that it would be hypocritical . . . to use his photographs as a diatribe against industry.”

“Don’t show the sky unless the sky has something to say.”
Eliot Porter, quoted by David Brower

Here the sky is changing, all the time, every day, demanding attention lest one get caught in a lightning storm but rewarding that attention with the unpredictable magnificence of what light, space, and water vapor can do. This summer, the rains periodically reach a tropical intensity, and lately tall feathery cirrus clouds have been coming in among the cumulus like eagles among sheep. The cirrus reach upward, making palpable the heights of the sky, while the cumulus scatter across its breadth as though floating on an invisible plateau more level and far wider than the New Mexico prairie from which I watch. At the end of the day, some of the clouds become dark against a luminous sky, others pale against the night; and as darkness deepens, they become obscured regions,
caelum incognita
, in the map of the stars.

A few days ago, when strangely beautiful, individual gray clouds floated beneath the soft gray sky after a deluge, I began to think that the sky is the consciousness of landscape. Landscape is generally thought of as being about land, and the earth is solid matter that changes only slowly, imperceptibly. But light and weather hourly give it new aspects, new moods: the tentative, fleeting radiances of dawn and dusk; the flat, objective glare of shadowless midday; the ambiguity of days when scattered clouds drag shadows across the terrain, storms not brewing but brooding. The light and weather of the sky give landscape its temperament even more compellingly than facial expression and posture convey a person’s disposition.
And the sky isn’t just a reflection of mood but a creator of one, as anyone exalted by a storm’s ferocity or made joyous by sunshine after rain knows. Beaumont Newhall writes of walking out in the desert while waiting to be sent to war in 1944: “Somehow the sky seems important in moments like that. And it did seem an optimistic sky—not because of its blanket of clouds, but because of the quality of them.”

Photographers know that a place is utterly transformed by its light, that everything earthly depends on the sky for what, after all, is called atmosphere; desert dwellers know that not just aesthetics but life itself depends on the sky, on its light, on its cooling darkness, and on its rain. In the arid West, the sky determines everything. The desert bares itself, submits to a sky so turbulent and glorious that it is a place of revelation and awe. If the earth is the record of what has happened, the sky is the realm of portents and prophesies, from the practical stuff of incoming weather to the apparitions of deities and omens. Yahweh, the wrathful God of the Old Testament’s desert-dwelling Hebrews, was originally a Semitic storm god—“a traveling deity who was everyplace and therefore not bound by location”—according to Paul Shepard. This origin is evident in his association with light, with high places, and with celestial phenomena, from the rainbow as postdiluvian promise to the psalm that says, “He shall come down like rain.” In the dichotomies that structure much Western thinking, the sky is aligned with the mind and the masculine, while the earth is associated with the body and the feminine.

The horizon, the boundary between earth and heaven, gives most Western landscapes orientation and limits, a balance between above and below, consciousness and incarnation. When Frederick Sommer photographed landscape entirely below the horizon, making the southwestern terrain into a repeating pattern of stone, saguaro, and shrubbery, the image was disorientingly radical. Since then, it has become more common to make such subhorizon scapes and easier to read them. However common in photographic history, pictures of sky without earth are likewise still disorienting—they have no apparent location, and location is one of the things we’re used to getting from landscape photography. Clouds without land have often been seen as pure subjectivity, as in Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 1920s
photographs of them, which he and his interpreters have usually regarded as abstract art. “These series are not meteorological records of the movements of the clouds, nor are they documents of the sky on a particular day; they are instead totally artificial constructions which mirror, not the passage of real time, but the change and flux of Stieglitz’s subjective state,” write Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton in the text for a Stieglitz retrospective, as though the clouds had surrendered their biospheric functions for aesthetic toil, as though photographs must be either documents or expressions.

Richard Misrach’s photographs of the cloudless, horizonless sky insist on being both, and their place-name titles unfurl history across a sky that is usually the home of the immortal and the ephemeral. They could be considered photographs of that most elusive and elementary photographic subject, time itself. One could ask questions about the distance light travels to reach the film and information travels before it fades into unrecognizability or flares up into revelation. There are other questions about the time it takes the imagination to travel from rapture to analysis, beauty to politics. Clouds drift, stars rotate, and sometimes the shortest distance between two places leaves out the most important sites.

Stars are made of flaming gases, but constellations are made of stories. Stars are the things themselves, constellations the way we connect those things to each other and ourselves through words, names, stories. Every culture has read constellations into the night sky, perhaps because we remember things and beings by their names; and calling people, places, things by name is how we establish a relationship to them at best, claim them as property at worst. Constellations connect the stars to each other, but in a way that no longer speaks of stars but of animals, goddesses, and heroes. Constellations are an essential metaphorical construct—or one might say that metaphor is an art of making constellations, of constellating. A constellation is made by drawing imaginary lines between stars to make a picture of something other than stars; a metaphor draws analogies between disparate
things, finding a common ground for them that makes each look different. As Aristotle explains it in the
Poetics
, “A metaphor is a word with some other meaning which is transferred either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from one species to another, or used by analogy. . . . For example, to cast seed is to sow, but there is no special word for the casting of rays by the sun; yet this is to the sunlight as sowing is to seed, and therefore it has been said of the sun that it is ‘sowing its divine rays.’ ” The acts of the sower and the sun are linked in this metaphor, which suggests the life-generating force of sunlight and perhaps the way the celestial calendar dictates the agriculturalist’s routine. Writing of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt notes, “Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.”

In a wonderful extended metaphor from the thriller
Smilla’s Sense of Snow
, the protagonist sees a chest x-ray as a photograph of the cosmos: “The rib bones are the closed ellipses of the planets, with their focus in the sternum, the breastbone, the white center of the photograph. The lungs are the gray shadows of the Milky Way against the black leaden shield of space. The heart’s dark contour is the cloud of ashes from the burned-out sun. The intestines’ hazy hyperboles are the disconnected asteroids, the vagabonds of space, the scattered cosmic dust.” Metaphor means the body can look like the heavens, and constellations fill the heavens with bodies (for the ancients, these metaphors became so entrenched that a comet moving through the pudenda of a constellation foretold an increase in moral laxity). Seven stars slightly west of due north conjoined make something wholly different than stars, a dipper, and the dipper makes the sky navigable—but it also makes the sky offer up a metaphysical drink and a recognizable earthly object. Runaway slaves called the constellation “the drinking gourd” and followed it north. Farther west, the Zuni also saw it as a drinking gourd, but the Hopi saw it as a “star thrower,” the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone as a rabbit net, the Chumash as seven boys who became wild geese, the Isleta Pueblo as a cradle, and the Tohono O’odham as a cactus-gathering hook. The same stars can make up entirely different maps.

The night sky is a clock, a compass, and a calendar for those who know how to read it. Wristwatches and calendars measure a cyclical time abstracted from the
movements of the heavenly bodies that still describe its intervals: the earth’s daily rotation and its yearly orbit of the sun. Once, though, the heavens themselves were the timepieces people needed to read. Three thousand years ago, Hesiod advised his farmer brother, “When Orion and Sirius are come to the middle of the sky, and the rosy-fingered Dawn confronts Arcturus, then Perses, cut off all your grapes and bring them home with you.” Orion was huntsman for Artemis, the moon goddess; he was seen as forever chasing the seven Pleiades across the sky, in a sky that was an anthology, an inventory of myth. Agriculturalists had particular need of annual calendars or calendrical knowledge such as Hesiod describes, and in some places the landscape itself marked the seasons. Pueblo Indians in the Southwest sometimes used the formations of their local horizon to mark the agricultural year. As the sun moved from south to north through spring, each notch or peak from which it rose marked a time at or near part of the preparing and planting. Time and space were correlated; the movement of celestial bodies marked the passage of time, and the largely cyclical nature of time was borne out by the reliable repetition of these movements. That is to say, the sky was once a repository of important information as well as cultural lore; looking at it was a necessary pleasure. Standing stones, pyramids, medicine wheels, and other structures around the world bear witness to the ceremonial importance of tracking the movements in the sky, and a few artists—notably Nancy Holt and James Turrell—have built new observational structures in our time. Celestial observation requires a kind of triangulation of three pieces of information: time, observer’s earthly location, and observed heavenly body. You could say that the three form a constellation of knowledge.

That earthly places—rainforests, wetlands, prairies—are disappearing is commonly bemoaned, but the sky is disappearing too. Ecologically speaking, the ozone layer is thinning, and so we are losing our atmospheric protection from the cosmos; but aesthetically speaking, thicker and thicker layers of humanly produced stuff intervene between us and that cosmos. We spend more and more time under roofs and surrounded by walls, whether in cars or buildings, and less and less time in night’s true darkness, unmitigated by artificial light. The light pollution generated by cities makes it hard to see more than a few of the brightest stars
in many places, and smog taints the colors of the sky by day (and gives Los Angeles its blood-red sunsets). In a national park last summer, I heard an astronomer who was pointing out the constellations assert that the sky is the most important place to save, because it is available to everyone, visible to prisoners and urbanites as well as outdoorspeople. Who looks at it nowadays? A century and a half ago, John Ruskin wrote, “It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky”—strange because the sky is ubiquitous.

The noblest scenes of this earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them, he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them; but the sky is for all: bright as it is, it is not “too bright, nor good, for human nature’s daily food”; it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity.