Excerpt from Chapter Eight: Times Past, Times to Come

"What happened just before the universe was created?

Scientists, philosophers, artists and everyday people have pondered that question for ages and come up with scenarios but no consensus. Regarding the moment of creation, however, there is general agreement that a sudden emanation of light was involved, a big bang or the biblical God saying, “‘Let there be light;’ and there was light.”

And before the flash, perhaps, two words: say cheese.

The big bang as flash photo assumes the pre-creation existence of time,  photography, a photographer, a subject and dairy products, debatable assumptions all. But the presence at creation of art’s fundamental components--light, time and matter--is indisputable. There is also no quarrel about our miraculous ability to perceive these things in the external world through sight. As the Roman poet Lucretius wrote in 50 B.C. in his epic, 'On the Nature of Things.” “Know then: from surfaces forever flow/ these films of things, fine-textured, finely shaped./ Thus in a flash are many images formed,/ And we may rightly style them instant-born.'

Photographs, from those of Niepce and Talbot to the latest digital scans are indeed born of an instant when a finger pushes a button, selecting and preserving an image. Yet, given human life’s brevity and the vast, expanding universe surrounding us, any depiction of landscape can seem as ephemeral as a prairie sunset.

Still we do it. Human beings have been investigating the origin of this urge to depict since ancient times with little progress. To find the art impulse’s source means answering profound and still-open questions about human consciousness: what is it, why do we have it, what is its ecological function? What enables us to experience colors and forms? How is it that we came to exist in this ever-changing picture born in a flash, this singular Gesamtkunstwerk?

No human knows. In the end, making landscape pictures from creation’s raw materials and imagery may be as close as we come to answers. A photograph of a grain of sand can evoke a beach, an ocean, waves shimmering in the sun or dulled to pig iron by clouds moving inland, where their rain refuels the life cycle. No portrait or still life can do that. Landscape photographs distill and communicate these wonders of the world around us, informing our sense of time and place and what it is to be alive. They do so in manifold ways and for individual and collective purposes, some crass, some venal, some noble.

Crassness and venality are human characteristics to which art is not immune. The world is awash with billions of photos. Some are boring landscapes made by famous artists whose works are drooled over by critics and sold for large sums of money. Art’s upper echelon is small, cliquish, Manhattan-centric and inherently conservative. Latter-day Baudelaires shun new, experimental, photographic art as vigorously as their forebear did.

What saves landscape photography are the photos. At its best, the art transcends money and power and communicates on the primal, visual level that preceded language, stimulating our eyes, brains and souls. The mind, as Aristotle said, never thinks without an image.

How we make images keeps changing. Traditional film-based technology is being replaced by digital technology. At some point in the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to take a high-definition, full-color landscape picture with your hand-held media center, turn it into a Stieglitzian black-and-white and transmit it to a lab that will print it at the size you desire, frame and deliver it.

Who needs Ansel Adams’ zone printing system when there is Adobe® Photoshop®? Traditional photography won’t disappear. The magic of the emulsion is too enchanting and the combination of brilliant seeing and virtuoso printing by artists such as Sally Mann will always be compelling. But fewer people will do it. It will be to photography what opera is to music, a niche form playing to cognoscenti.

Traditionalists decry digital photography claiming it destroys what they see as the photographic image’s inherent objectivity, its verisimilitude. That view ignores the fact that photographs have always been manipulated. Digital technology is just another tool in the box.