THE PICTURESQUE AS POLITICAL TOOL

In its basic meaning, the word “picturesque” – resembling a picture or a painted scene, something charming in appearance, or something able to evoke a vivid image – may not readily align itself to the aesthetic design of a book on the effects of the oil industry. However, Petrochemical America’s ability to evoke a vivid image of a region whose pastoral qualities have been destroyed relies, amongst other things, on its picturesque qualities. To highlight the precarious state of the landscapes shown, Petrochemical America uses the picturesque as a marker for what has been lost as well as as an interrogation into how various forms of framing direct our gaze towards that loss. To understand this use of the picturesque, however, a word seldom used in connection with twentieth- and twenty-first-century photography of disaster areas, it is useful to return to the origins of the term, in particular William Gilpin's Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (1792).Footnote ³

Gilpin's ideas on the superiority of the picturesque within landscape gardening and pictorial composition rely, at their heart, on the belief in an equal measure of unadulterated, unchanged nature together with a more organized, horticulturally designed version. As Gilpin puts it in the introduction to his Observations on the River Wye,

In Gilpin's version of the picturesque here, nature's purpose is to enhance a particular perspective, one that enables “the imagination” to be excited rather than necessarily persuaded by the reality of what it views. As such, it makes sense that the presence of various picturesque tropes, or rather the impulse to “put nature right,” is often overseen in contemporary landscape photography. If the picturesque is partly about putting “nature right” it must also be antithetical to the recuperative, realist impulse of photographs of polluted and vulnerable areas, a form of photography dedicated to showing people the “real” effects of ecological disasters. In this sense, the concept of the sublime – with its focus on awe and fear – and on that which seems beyond our immediate control, presents itself as a much more attractive template than that of the picturesque.

An instance of this can be seen in Cecile Whiting's “The Sublime and the Banal in Postwar Photography of the American West.” Here she argues that although twentieth- and twenty-first-century American landscape photography appears to “present a straightforward opposition: pristine, spectacular wilderness in contrast to man-made development and destruction,” the move into the type of aesthetic that pervaded the New Topographics from the 1970s onwards was in reality a continuation of a longer art-historical tradition in which the sublime took precedence.Footnote ⁵ Citing how “[l]ate eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British and American landscape artists varied in their interpretation of the sublime,” Whiting nonetheless points to a crucial move within American visual art, one in which the picturesque aligns itself to that of the sublime. From a vision “which highlighted the theatrical aspects of romanticism” in transcendent landscape paintings of sunsets and grand vistas, the sublime gradually morphed into a vision “that increasingly cultivated an appreciation for a moral sublime,” one in which environmental concerns began to take precedence.Footnote ⁶ Misrach's visions of Cancer Alley constitute perfect versions of the Whiting's “moral” sublime because they – as Whiting puts it – open up “an aesthetic that sprouted out of, rather than eschewed, the imprint of humans on earth.”Footnote ⁷ As a study of the aftereffects of “the imprint of humans on earth,” Petrochemical America combines the moral sublime with what Gilpin saw as one of the main tropes of the picturesque, namely the desire to work them “into pictures.”

For David Punter, the different ways that we define the picturesque and the sublime tend to detract from the fact that they are born out of a similar impulse, the impulse to establish a set of rules for how we should ideally relate to our environment. As Punter argues, “The Picturesque is in fact tied into the same psychic constellation (as the sublime); nature is there to be improved upon, to be adapted.”Footnote ⁸ For Punter, then, the picturesque should not be read in opposition to the sublime but as a way to navigate a territory perilously posed between the two. According to Punter, “The Picturesque … represents the movement of enclosure, control, the road which moves securely and fittingly into the countryside, the comforting flanking, the side-screen … roughness subjected to symmetry.”Footnote ⁹

Using Gilpin's definition as a starting point, Punter reads the picturesque as a way to organize an otherwise insurmountable or disorienting view. However, within this the seeds of something unmanageable are allowed to persist, precisely because the need to enclose and to control the landscape is a constituent part of what creates the picturesque in the first place. This is crucial, for it allows the picturesque to be read as an investigation into what exactly constitutes territorial integrity as much as painterly enjoyment, two issues that this article will argue are present in Misrach's photographs in equal measure.

If Cancer Alley has all the hallmarks of the sublime, it also uses what Punter calls the “comforting flanking” of various objects both natural and man-made to frame the view. Whatever roughness is presented in the form of discarded materials, debris, or ruined nature, it too is more often than not subjected to symmetry within the frame. In other words, rather than show us the toxicity of the landscape as something that overtly disturbs the eye, it is made palpable in other more subtle and often paradoxically picturesque ways.

In Figure 1 railcars rest quietly beneath a dense network of power lines, shrouded in what appears to be yellowish-grey fog. It is not incidental that the fog is a toxin-laden vapour and that in the background the outlines of industrial buildings and petroleum-processing infrastructure are barely discernible. In shots of actual highways, bridges and pipelines, humans themselves are seldom in evidence – the straight lines of human-made objects, on the contrary, seem to lead the eye away from the scene itself and towards something unseen, something intimated, menacing as well as potentially beautiful. In and of themselves the images, with their low contrast and soft focus, reinforce an idea of a landscape more comatose than anguished, more forgotten than ravished. In this context, the presence of the picturesque renders a vision of nature in which things are just visible enough to be vulnerable, but not visible enough to be overwhelming.

Figure 1.

Robert Misrach, “Night Releases,” Mississippi river corridor, Louisiana, 1998. © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

In Figure 2, Misrach's “New Housing Construction,” the photograph of a new build forms the visual foundation for an architecturally drawn version in Section II (Figure 3). Here a segmented close-up is surrounded by the material goods that will eventually come from occupancy of the house as either waste or recyclable commodities.

Figure 2.

Robert Misrach, “New Housing Construction,” Paulina, Louisiana, 2010. © Richard Misrach, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Figure 3.

Kate Orff, “Bigger, Farther, Filled with more Stuff,” 2012. © SCAPE/Landscape Architecture PLLC.

The two main sections of Petrochemical America operate in tandem in this way, allowing Misrach's photographs in Section I to form the backdrop for the various drawn material, superimposed information and text in Section II. The superimposition of data and drawings onto the photographs in Section II thus has several purposes: information that cannot readily be gleaned from the photographs renders the consequences of decades of industrial expansion in more graphic terms, and in turn the graphic nature of Misrach's perspective is given a more overt architectural and spatial dimension. Just as Misrach's photographs in Section I are designed to be more than simply backdrops for Orff's cartographic material in Section II, the superimposed material draws out the implications of the photographs in ways that are not readily perceivable in the photographs alone. The imposition of the cartographic material inevitably alters the illustrative nature of the photographs: it not only politicizes the images in different ways, but it also aestheticizes the process of doing so.

The use of Orff's cartographic material in Section II of the book does not, however, guarantee that Petrochemical America – with its attempted representation of a particularly ingrained and insidious pollution – moves away entirely from a potentially reductive idealization of the US South. One of the more noticeable facets of Petrochemical America is that it hovers between clearly referencing a particular type of southern iconography and staying clear of stereotypical versions of “southerness.” In Figure 4, it is only the actual naming of the Dow Chemical Plant that distinguishes the images from any number of industrial plants in America. In fact, one might argue that it is often the memory of a pastoral version of the South that facilitates the type of warning presented in Petrochemical America rather than any sense of its visible presence. The book's interest in the effects of industry and modernity on the American landscape returns to a pastoral vision of the South because it needs such a vision to demarcate a change that isn't always easy to gauge. As such, the photo-textual project is partly to navigate the politics of such a vision, and it is the use of the picturesque as a way to enframe earlier traditions both painterly and photographic that enables it.

Figure 4.

Kate Orff, “From Pipe to Plastic Bag,” 2012. © SCAPE/Landscape Architecture PLLC.

THE THROUGHLINES AS METHODOLOGY

In Kate Orff's own explanatory notes for the project, the cartographic material, the so-called “Ecological Atlas” in Section II, is created through the use of “a visual narrative called a ‘throughline’,” a device in which a layering of information combines visual superimposition – as seen in Figures 3 and 4 – with various forms of descriptive data. While these data provide a historical and geographical sense of the changes in the landscape, they also connects the visible effects of the pollution – more or less palpable in Misrach's photographs – with its more invisible ones, drawings of things that no longer occupy the region: wildlife, communal structures, the outline of previous churches and cemeteries, places now too polluted to be habitable. These “throughlines” enable a palimpsest of information, or – as Orff says – they enable the latent narratives in Misrach's photographs to emerge as a series of vivid mental images. Once again, it is the impulse towards improving nature that allows for the picturesque to emerge in what might otherwise have been “simply” a “documentary”-style photograph.

As such, while the “throughlines” contain a distinctly narrative element, they also contain a picturesque quality that references various aesthetic techniques already present in the photographs despite their realist subject matter. According to Steven Hoelscher, photography's embrace of the picturesque grew out of a general Victorian “search for order” during a period of economic unrest in the nineteenth century, but more crucially, it participated in the creation of a new, middle-class, post-frontier space as well. By turning nature into picturesque scenery, certain regional transformations (not to mention various colonial crimes) could be glossed, allowing photography to dictate what “the viewer should see, how it should be seen, and when it should be seen all in a matter of fact and seemingly unmediated way.”Footnote ¹⁰

Hoelscher's argument pertains specifically to the rise of touristic views and the ensuing commodification of landscape photography. Nonetheless, Misrach's depiction of a contaminated landscape – despite being critical of the effects of commodification – still carries the residue of this “Victorian” desire for a more ordered version of a landscape potentially “out of control.” Misrach's images may appear to be “unmediated” versions of the harsh realities of Cancer Alley, but the measured gaze and considered perspectives are clearly designed to allow – in line with Gilpin's definition of the picturesque – a comprehensive and in some ways ordered view of the surroundings.

Similarly, Orff's cartographic “throughlines” in Section II are as reminiscent of anatomical, horticultural and geographical cartographies of previous centuries as they are indicators of a contemporary sensibility in ecological terms. They too create a pathway for how we might order and mediate an essentially invisible form of pollution, at least in photographic terms. The attention to detail and the delicately veined outlines of the superimposed drawings in Section II share an affinity with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century 3D atlases just as they form a template for a particular form of digital info-graphics and contemporary mapping for the postindustrial age. In this sense, the decorative quality of the “throughlines” has more than simply an informative role. The delicate lines of Orff's drawings as seen in Figure 3 appear ingrained in the photographs themselves, facilitating narratives that, according to Orff, are already there. In addition, the picturesque qualities of the ornate drawings of material objects, animals, and spaces invoke a more emotive sense of the data supplied. It is not that the cartography merely turns Misrach's polluted spaces into something that on the face of it appears more decorative than the subject warrants; it enhances a picturesque quality already present in the photographs.

In this respect, both Misrach's and Orff's use of Cancer Allery indicates an awareness of the inevitably staged and “picturesque” quality that resides even in images designed to be “neutral.” Misrach's foregrounding of certain elements, the use of vertical structures, be they trees or chemical plants, to coincide with the photograph's margin, the provision of depth and movements – are all designed to give an overwhelming sense of how nature has been subsumed by industry. At the same time, they enable the viewer to understand the landscape more comprehensibly. Thus, while the use of the picturesque originally presented a version of America as predominantly restorative and/or pastoral, the semblance of something romanticized or pastoral can also, as Hoeschler points out, indicate that the image is about “the passage from one state into another.” Even though the stillness and apparent contemplative nature of Misrach's images seem appropriate to the polluted landscape, the underlying subject (namely deterioration and eventual destruction of habitats) is – as the throughlines illustrate – an ongoing narrative.

Orff's “throughlines,” although designed to function as a distinctly twenty-first-century form of eco-atlas, thus inevitably carry the weight of previous cartographic practice. And yet, by filtering it through the picturesque, it aligns itself with a particular history and lineage of American landscape photography as well. If nineteenth-century American cartography and photography were fixated on the United States an as emerging nation-state, then Petrochemical America charts – paradoxically – many of the same concerns by looking at the effects of environmental expansionism through a twentieth- and twenty-first-century lens.

The fact that much of Misrach's landscape iconography owes a debt to the cartographic practice of earlier decades and centuries is, of course, not surprising. From the nineteenth-century surveys of the American West by Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, to the postwar portfolios of Robert Adams, Edward Burtynsky, Mitch Epstein, David Meisel, and, of course, Misrach – to name just a few – the constraints and strengths of landscape photography have inevitably been linked to the challenges of capturing temporal processes (whether it be changes in tourism, infrastructure and habitation, or change and decay). Earlier attempts to chart and map the “wilderness” of America, in order to incorporate it into an emerging capitalist infrastructure, are also present as a response to the effects of “civilizing” that wilderness and what it has done in industrial terms. In other words, the two are part of the same continuum even if their aims are vastly different.

Nor is it strange that American versions of landscape photography tend to cast a broadly colonizing eye on its surrounding environment regardless of century or decade. Originally employed to map the colonizing efforts of American settlers and the most expeditious ways to occupy territory, mapping in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was always operating in a dual capacity, a capacity that paradoxically mirrors those tensions brought up by and in contemporary landscape photography. As a practical tool for an expansionist ideology and as an aestheticizing tool designed to sanctify and glorify the labour and results of that ideology, mapping's focus on how to best render agricultural and industrial progress is also – although in different ways – at the heart of Petrochemical America. Misrach may not be shoring up the same colonial anxieties as his nineteenth- and twentieth-century antecedents, but he is still unashamedly involved in how landscape photography functions as an agent of progress, for better or for worse.

In this respect, Petrochemical America’s aesthetic quality – its very look – hinges on more than the photographs to indicate what has happened and might happen in terms of ecological disasters. It also hinges on the fact that its imagery invariably references a period in which the picturesque quality of the landscape was seen as proof, rather than critique, of America's divine right to access its natural resources. In other words, if Petrochemical America is about the misuse of natural resources, it is also an at times incongruous continuation of a form of mapping that originates in the expansionist ethos of an earlier era. This does not automatically make the look of the book contradictory to the ethical concerns of the material itself, nor does the presence of the picturesque disqualify its political efficacy. It simply means that both Misrach and Orff are engaged in in a longer and more complex history of the sanctification of the American landscape.

On multiple levels, then, Petrochemical America is charged with a task not dissimilar to that of the picturesque, namely dealing with the aestheticizing effect that photographic framing has on how we view landscapes politically. For Catrin Gersdorf in “History, Technology, Ecology: Conceptualizing the Cultural Function in Landscape,” Misrach's photography is in fact a particularly good example of how to straddle the line between art photography and advocacy. Thematically and aesthetically, Gersdorf argues, Misrach does not uncritically perpetuate a picturesque tradition of landscape painting and photography even if he gravitates towards “an enchanted, spectacular, and yet extremely injured maltreated terrain.”Footnote ¹¹ For Gersdorf, it is precisely Misrach's interest in “the power play of biology, economy, topography, and ideology” that ensures his ability to align the politics of pollution with the “spectacular” aspects of the terrain. In this respect, Misrach utilizes the picturesque qualities in the landscape to illuminate the intersections between economics and a topography both critical and indicative of previous aesthetic and political traditions.

Gersdorf's argument, however, is not based on a reading of Petrochemical America but on Misrach's Desert Cantos, an ongoing photographic project begun in 1979 mostly of vast arid landscapes of the American West. Inscribed by technological and commercial usage, Desert Cantos often shows what appear to be uninhabited sites ranging from waste dumps to military zones in which the intersection between nature and various forms of human encroachment are particularly palpable. Acknowledging the inevitable conceptual challenge posed by “critical landscape photography,” Desert Cantos, according to Gersdorf, “imaginatively re-design[s] landscape” not as an idealization of the natural or the technological sublime “but as a product emerging from the power play of biology, economy, topography, ideology, geology and religion.”Footnote ¹²

In this respect, Desert Cantos proves a particularly useful example of how critics tend to read Misrach photographs, namely as a refashioning of stand-alone landscape photographs that confirm their applicability to contemporary issues such as migration and ecology. Nonetheless, the Cantos are fundamentally different from Petrochemical America, a project designed as a photo-textual exercise above all. While both projects strive to embody the tension between an aestheticized landscape and its usefulness in political and ideological terms, the fact that the terrain charted in the Cantos could be from any number of regions is crucial. By charting the “sameness” of many territories across a vast area, the Desert Cantos is partly about the homogeneity of capitalist exploitation, whereas in Petrochemical America the cartographic material reiterates the specificity of singular figures and communities, all the way down to local species and animals indigenous to Cancer Alley. Another difference is that while the havoc wreaked on the landscapes of Desert Cantos is signposted very clearly in the photographs, it is not necessarily so in Petrochemical America.

Rather than define Petrochemical America as picturesque per se, the decorative aspects of the cartographic material could be read as a form of reenactment of the picturesque, or as something that enables already existing picturesque elements in the photographs to emerge more clearly. Many of the landscapes in Section I are arresting, photographically and emotionally, not because they show pollution as frightful or ugly or even as a scar on the landscape, but because the pollution overwhelms the scene as something both intangible and yet compelling visually. This sense that something elusive is being marked out, or rather framed through Misrach's measured gaze, is – as previously mentioned – linked to a history of mapping the United States as a nation more broadly, but it is also crucially linked to an ontology of disaster photography as a genre in itself. As John Roberts points out in “Photography and the Photograph: Event, Archive and the Non-symbolic,” the very concept of disaster photography relates to the medium's ontological status because it points to something intrinsic within the photographic process – the fact that as a document of a particular time and place, the photograph is always at its heart an image of the event after the fact. According to Roberts,

For Roberts, the role of the photographer as reporter, artist, and narrator allows “the event as aftermath” to take centre stage within a genre marked equally by nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century histories of photography. Orff's throughlines in this context operate as part of what Roberts might define as a “reconstruction of evidence,” a way to flesh out the “remains” of the pollution that constitutes the event – however intangible. By comparing such photographs to Mathew Brady's Civil War images, littered with another form of very palpable human waste in the form of corpses, Roberts's reading of the documentary impetus is hardly optimistic. Photography not only has to “make a case for its necessary lateness”; it also necessarily operates with the knowledge that this is impossible. In several ways, then, Petrochemical America is symptomatic of the impossible premise of such a desire, a book whose narrative point and aesthetic charge can only rely on the aftermath as essential to the photographic process. More importantly, within the use of the picturesque lies another constituent trait of Misrach's work, namely that “photography of the event-as-aftermath … tends to stress,” just as its nineteenth-century forerunners did, “the melancholic allure of photographic stillness” in very picturesque terms.

The fact that Petrochemical America shares what Roberts defines as “the melancholic allure of photographic stillness” does not mean, however, that it is fundamentally stuck in time. One of the aims of Section II's “Ecological Atlas” is precisely to indicate that the situation documented has a history of economic misuse, racism and social displacement and that changes in law and practice can, if not radically alter, then at least disrupt the process of continuous pollution. However, while Orff's writing and drawings in Section II indicate a long sociological history of human, regional and geographical abuse, what Roberts deems particularly elegiac and mournful in Misrach's photographic visions is as much artistic as it is sociological. This sense of melancholia – rendered through the stillness that Roberts defines – has to find, as it were, a resting place together with the wider political point of the book. If Petrochemical America is a warning about the future damage of unhindered pollution, a project designed to warn future generations of what will happen to other places and regions, Misrach's environments are somewhat distanced from this sense of urgency. In other words, the stillness of the photographs may be another reason why they risk being subsumed by their own picturesque, if mournful, qualities.

For Misrach this comes through precisely in the “allure of photographic stillness” – a restrained sense of the beauty of the landscape as modified and enabled by the intrusion of the effects of the industrial. The photographs aesthetically recall the past even if they invoke something unmistakably contemporary. If Misrach's photographs facilitate a sense of mourning and loss it is because of the presence of the picturesque rather than its absence. To facilitate this, the landscapes tend to distance the observer in ways that are similar to that of the traditional picturesque viewpoint. We are thus drawn in as witnesses to something that is near enough to be understood and yet far enough away not to be directly threatening. Likewise, the constant presence of smoke and pollution in Petrochemical America often functions literally as a smoke screen that sets the landscape further away from the viewer, as seen very visibly in Figure 1. One could argue that underlying Misrach's use of the picturesque lies an attempt to establish some limits to our experience of nature, limits not entirely unlike those advocated by Gilpin's eighteenth-century version. Here, however, those limits are also in place to show how the damage done to nature constitutes a form of alienation, one rendered in visual, political and aesthetic terms simultaneously.

THE PICTURESQUE AS HISTORICAL MARKER

Because the picturesque in photographic terms is often read as exclusively visual and so ultimately indifferent to the political, social and moral aspects of what it renders, Misrach's subject matter appears unrelated to the more conventional picturesque principles of framing. However, as seen, it is acutely aware of such tropes. The use of side-screens, distant perspectives and the architectural intrusion of ruinous material – abandoned sites and structures – while central to the landscape tradition, may seem incidental, but of course shares crucial qualities with the picturesque. Often the photographs defeat recession to a distant point; planes extend horizontally, and the image presents itself as a segment of a continuum, casually cut off by the borders on the top and to the left and right. While the presence of decay and roughness could be read as an aspect of the sublime rather than the picturesque, for Misrach the immersion of pollution into the surrounding air, shown through lighting and perspective, provides a landscape in which industrial ruins, rather than idealized sites of past triumphs and accomplishments, are solid reminders of a longer history of natural exploitation. According to Misrach,

The narrative of toxicity outlined here goes beyond one of corporate misappropriation and pollution. In fact, the proximity between human habitation and “industrial behemoths” signals a violent intrusion of the industrial into the private, an intrusion inscribed into the landscape itself. This is partly what is tempered by the enforced distance between Misrach's camera and the scene photographed even when it is designed to draw us back into the realm of human comprehension and compassion. Again, one of the ways in which the photographs do so is by being recast as a distinct scene; in other words, a picturesque view. If Section II works discernibly towards something more immersive by giving the reader/viewer material to digest and apply, Section I provides a different vantage point by stressing that what we see as outsiders in the photograph may not be the whole picture.

Misrach's oil pipes and endless highways are thus often presented as objects that, like a series of views or pictures in a gallery, can be faced squarely and with a certain sense of uniformity. In Petrochemical America, Misrach does not suddenly shift his perspectival framing from the ground to the air or from middle distance to a close-up of some mass-produced architectural feature; he chooses instead to hover somewhere between a bird's-eye view and one made possible by a bystander or observer at some distance in the landscape. The effect of this is that, as observers, we are situated vis-à-vis the images in ways that are similar to an exhibition in an art gallery. Not only does this add to a rarified sense of the photographs as art objects, but it also allows the picturesque qualities of the landscapes to indicate the intrusion of something polluting into an otherwise aesthetically pleasing scene.

For the critic Mark Feldman, this is an inherent part of images of polluted sites. As he argues in his review of Petrochemical America,

In Petrochemical America, however, Section II, with its explanatory data and superimposed images, appears precisely to counter such an accusation by providing more than “partial information.” Even though the photographs rarely show any of the actual labour involved in the “extraction, transport, processing, consumption” of resources, the unseen presence and consequences of toxic materials are reiterated in the “proof” offered in Section II's throughlines. An example can be found in chapter 4, “Displacement” a case study of “Regional Displacement Over Time.” In Figure 5 the Mississippi is shown from above as a sinewy artery winding itself through various communities, whose inhabitants have all been displaced through harassment, legal action, buyouts and payoffs by major chemical plants. The drawn symbols superimposed onto Misrach's photograph show – amongst other things – the cemeteries, churches and freedman's towns of the Reconstruction era that are no longer present. The throughline in this instance adds the human data and the historical markers of previous lives and communities to the photographs in order to provide a more palpable sense of loss. Even in this part, though, the sites and places documented are notably void of human figures, as though they are visions of a state of nature put on hold (not dissimilar to nineteenth-century photographs of American vistas) rather than a region contaminated by too much human activity. Again, a link can be made to the mapping of America during previous centuries in which indigenous settlements were rarely marked as present in order to accentuate the “virgin” nature of the land. In this context, the involuntary migratory patterns of local inhabitants in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries mimic that of native populations originally displaced through genocide and colonial aggression, putting the large oil corporations on a par with earlier ruthless forms of expansionism. For Orff these historical similarities are unmistakable. As she puts it, “On a regional scale, the African and Cajun diasporas are simply repeated.”Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 5.

Kate Orff, “Toxic Release Mapping,” 2012. © SCAPE/Landscape Architecture PLLC.

Within Petrochemical America, the repeated nature of American colonization as internal, domestic and primarily economically motivated allows the throughlines to operate as geographical proof of an expansionist ideology set in place centuries ago and now continued by the energy industry. Pollution itself becomes a substratum that may be invisible to the eye of the photographer, but nonetheless visible to the reader once it has been unpacked. In other words, a particular subterranean narrative unfolds or is made visible through the throughlines:

For Orff, the throughline functions as a process of photo-textual narration rather than a fixed concept, a process capable of tracing change across time as well as a way to reuse existing aesthetic models in cartographic terms. Referring again to the chapter entitled “Displacements,” the throughline is described as something that disrupts the static nature of the photograph, mimicking instead the fluidity of time passing and of the Mississippi itself:

By combining archival data with a visual guide to the flow of the river, the course of regional history is aligned with that of the Mississippi itself. The line of the river carries the historical baggage of the region itself as a source of power and mechanization, as well as a transportation route for slaves and produce.

The combination of archival data and the visual rendition of the river's flow becomes a continuous stream of information both literally and figuratively, a stream that connects a wider historical perspective with the actual “material relationships” outlined by Orff. At the same time, an interesting counterpoint is established between Misrach's more static vistas in Section I and the flow of information in Section II. In seeking, as Orff puts it, to render unseen “histories” of displacement intrinsic to the region, Section II is charged with the not inconsiderable task of creating a “portrait of a certain scale and type of community fabric.” The inhabitants of those communities may no longer be visible in the photographs but the throughlines signal their absence nonetheless.

If the methodical and more systematic use of information, grids, statistics and other forms of data allows Misrach's photographs to function as backdrops for the environmental agenda, the throughlines facilitate the presence of the picturesque despite their apparent role as predominantly factual and informative. What they do is enable Petrochemical America’s more neutral gaze to accommodate the picturesque as something both inherent in the framing of the landscapes, and as something indicative of a longer history of American photography's relationship with its own environment. For instance, Misrach's interest in industrial architecture and the fact that so many of the images in the book appear to be fairly unspoiled by that architecture and yet deeply marked by its effects is fundamental to the book's aesthetic and political charge. In this respect, the images of industrial sights both beautiful and horrific mark an inherent contradiction, a contradiction at its most palpable when it is most under risk of extinction. Misrach in fact uses various structures themselves as staging areas for these contradictions, sites where an idea of national character based on consumption persists despite the visual proof of its harmful effects on the environment.

PETROCHEMICAL AMERICA AS ACTIVIST PHOTO-TEXT

For Stephanie LeMenager, our society's continued psychological and economic reliance on oil offers a shorthand for grasping a network of power and control that plays out on a multitude of platforms – photography included. However, as LeMenager argues, the risk in such readings is often that our reliance on oil becomes something so overwhelming and insurmountable that it prevents any potential for change.Footnote ¹⁹ Granted, in many of Misrach's more oblique photographs of polluted environments, it can similarly be difficult to glean what the actual effects of various forms of toxic waste are. To counter this potential obliqueness, many of these images rely in unexpected ways on both preexisting historical knowledge and the reader's ability to literally read between the lines of the image. In Figure 6, for instance, Misrach shows the irony of the juxtaposition between a particular type of southern heritage in the form of an antebellum mansion, which upon closer inspection is now too polluted to enter. The image of an abandoned southern mansion, previously a tourist site but now closed, is a double reminder of both past and present crimes – the home financed by slave labor now destroyed by the effects of another form of ruthless capitalism.

Figure 6.

Richard Misrach, Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation, acquired by Shell Chemical, Geismar, Louisiana, 1998. © Richard Misrach, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

The issue of how a continuum of experience can imply both a history and a sense of immanence is crucial, partly because it touches on an idea of timeliness that incorporates both historical and social dimensions similar to Roberts's definition of documentary photography. As Orff puts it, “Richard's photographs capture a specific moment in time and space, but if you think about time as a continuum – of past–present–future-relative to the photographs … one photograph can touch so many different issues and situations.’Footnote ²⁰

The sense of immanence in Misrach's photographs become a way to impart information on multiple levels and it allows Orff to describe the political efficacy of the image in transcendent rather than purely documentary terms. In Orff's throughline, “time as a continuum” is not antithetical to the photograph as a form of art that captures static, still moments; it is simply another way to synthesize that particular vision into a wider political process. Orff describes this process as a way to conceptualize “the local environment … understanding the mutual and systemic connections between people and the earth, between landscapes and communities … synthesizing these disparate factors into a cohesive set of systems.”Footnote ²¹

The throughline's process of layering also bears crucial similarities to a more tangible layering, namely that of various geographical strata. Orff's “synthesizing of these disparate factors into a cohesive set of systems” is accentuated in the very last section of Petrochemical America where another “layer,” a “Glossary of Terms & Solutions for a Post-petrochemical Culture,” is added: a listing of concepts; organizations; and scientific, sociological and ethnographic terms (originally a twenty-four-page pamphlet nestled into a pocket inside the back cover). On the one hand, the glossary reinforces Orff's belief in the importance of grassroots ventures. On the other hand, it also somewhat at odds with Misrach's more melancholy photographs. One of the reasons for this disjunction between the first two sections and the glossary as a form of postscript lies within the nature of the cartographic practice itself. While the varied set of discourses within Petrochemical America reflects the selective and partial process of cartographic practice, it also signals the ongoing pollution and the impossibility of dealing with it comprehensibly. Ultimately, what is not mapped, what remains uncharted, underground, and unexplained, is as crucial as that seen and measured in the book.

This sense of both the limitations and the advantages of mapping, and the issue of what constitutes knowledge, containment and control within that process, are one of Petrochemical America’s strengths. The cartography of Petrochemical America inevitably has to participate in a rather synoptic view of American power, even if it is designed to illuminate the nature of the relationship between local life and global economics. It seems telling in this context that Misrach's photographs often shy away from taking an overt bird's-eye perspective on the landscape even as it uses a slightly heightened vantage point to provide a sense of the vastness of the territory. Rather than facilitate a form of “objective” knowledge production, the distancing effect of the photographs becomes an oblique reminder that the pollution charted is both underground and above ground, not always visible or even containable in terms of its actual visualization.