In times like these, one yearns for the solace of a tranquil, special place.
The Nature Conservancy, a worldwide conservation organization that has helped place some 100 million acres under ecological protection, knows of many such places — singular in their beauty, wildness and valued contribution to the diversity of life.
The far reaches
Most are at a far remove. Cobscook Bay, Maine, hard by the Canadian border; the Pribilof Islands of Alaska; the wild barrier islands of Virginia’s eastern shore; Brazil’s Grande Sertao Veredas National Park — these are hardly easy getaways.
But the Conservancy has made it possible for us to enjoy them anyway, commissioning 12 of the world’s leading photographers to capture both the whole and the essence of these places.
The result is an exhibition of some of the most mesmerizing images you’ll ever see. “In Response to Place: Photographs from The Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places” has just opened at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, its first stop on a national tour. The full, 150-work show will visit eight American cities, including Chicago, over the next three years. A slightly smaller selection from the collection will tour another 18 cities.
“These aren’t just landscape photographs,” said Phillip Brookman, Corcoran curator of photographs. “They went out and got the soul of these places.”
Celebrity shooters
Some of the pictures are highly improbable, but only because of the identity of the photographer.
Annie Liebovitz is famous around the world for her glamorous, imaginative and highly focused portraits of the celebrated. Here, she turns her lens and talent to unpopulated wilds in upstate New York’s Shawangunk Mountains. She produces ethereal images, catching the last of sunlight over the mist-kissed Clove Valley, and the Peregrine falcon aeries along the cliff face of Millbrook Mountain.
“The Gunks, as they are called, are an extraordinary outcropping of rock,” she says. “I wanted to show the raw bones of it. In some of the pictures it looks like the rocks just fell, when they actually fell thousands of years ago. It’s a difficult environment, but nature is so determined that trees grow right through the rock.”
William Wegman is known for his whimsical and sometimes bizarre photos of his comically placid Weimeraners. He employs the dogs in these pictures, but not simply as props. He sets them loose on the tranquility of Maine’s Cobscook Bay, and they find a home, at one with the seaweed mounds and pebble-strewn beaches.
Beauty of Southwest
Noted, among many other things, for his black-and-white nudes (including some of a pre-rock star Madonna), New York’s Lee Friedlander treks to the San Pedro River along Arizona’s border with Mexico, and finds whole universes of design in the gnarly tangle of trees branches.
“I don’t go looking for twisty and sprawling images,” he says, “but I find them. I guess it suits my personality. When there’s not much water available, plants will fight to grow, and all hell breaks loose.”
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There are people in these pictures, people who belong there. Mary Ellen Clark shows us the proud black faces of Virginia’s Eastern Shore and the weather-hard peculiar ones of Alaska’s Pribilof Islands. A lonely, bearded fellow is caught in an odd embrace in “Man and His Beloved Toy Monkey.”
The Brazilians in Fazal Sheikh’s images of Grande Sertao Veredas National Park not only belong there but seem to have grown from the soil.
William Christenberry finds extraordinary places in his native Alabama, in such unlikely locales as Bibb County. His views of the Cahaba River produced a yearning in me to visit that Deep South state that I hitherto could not have imagined.
All the photographs have magic; Sally Mann’s pictures of Mexico have religion. She allows a brilliant light to suffuse her subjects as though from a divine source. This is especially apparent in her pictures of Mayan pyramids.
After viewing these extraordinary photographs and contemplating all the places I might like to be, I would choose the far reach of the Nevada desert explored by Richard Misrach in his pictures of Pyramid Lake and the Lahontan Valley Wetlands. There is one photo of a long sand dune at Battleground Point that seems an island washed by both lake and sky. The water is without a ripple, and all is profoundly quiet. Here, then, is eternity.
A no go
I was supposed to attend the opening of this show, but it was abruptly canceled when terrorists chose that hour to strike the World Trade Center. I returned two days later, only to be turned back just as I was entering the show because the museum, located across the street from the White House, was being evacuated because of a bomb scare.
The exhibition is to open at Chicago’s Field Museum in January 2003. It is worth the wait. Worth any wait.