Nostalgic environmentalities in the EPA’s Documerica and State of the Environment projects

Abstract

This article argues that environmental citizenship, understood as sustainable forms of consumption, is increasingly constructed through visual regimes of nostalgia for both pristine wilderness and an era of unfettered resource extraction. Drawing on the linkages between survey photography, popular constructions of nature, and nostalgia, it takes the Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica and State of the Environment projects as opportunities to understand how depictions of the environment reinforce contemporary notions of sustainability. As the predominant discourse guiding environmentality, or the governance of our relationships with the non-human world, sustainability relies on scientific knowledges in order to harmonize economic growth, population health, and ecologies. To do so, sustainability draws on the power of media to encourage forms of consumption that might indefinitely perpetuate capitalist economies at the expense of the non-human world. Analysis of the images of small-town life, extraction industries, and pollution, as well as seemingly pristine wilderness in Documerica and State of the Environment demonstrates how these projects draw on widespread nostalgias in order to reinforce notions about sustainable modes of consumption and perpetual industrial growth. This article subsequently shows how the circulation of survey photographs harnesses the camera’s nostalgic lens in the service of contemporary environmentalities.

Keywords

Documerica environmental citizenship nostalgia survey photography sustainability state of the environment

Introduction

In 1971, less than a year after its founding, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) commissioned 70 photographers to ‘colorfully and explicitly illustrate the breadth of the nation’s problems and struggles with noise, water and air pollution, health problems, and social decay’ (Simmons, 2009) as a part of what would become the Documerica photojournalism project. Meant to publicize the EPA’s work and elicit support for environmental regulation, the resulting photographs form a useful archive for understanding American environmental citizenship in the late 20th century. Photography has long been a tool of environmental management and publicity, and Documerica followed its forbearers in attempting to situate nature as an object of intervention and regulation, but often focused on economic and social activity alongside picturesque scenes. The project receded from public view as funding dwindled, but garnered renewed visibility in 2013 when the EPA launched the ‘State of the Environment Project’, digitizing many of the original photos and publicizing them with a social media campaign. The National Archives posted 15,000 Documerica photographs on its website and the image-sharing platform Flickr, funded a touring exhibition of the images entitled ‘Searching for the Seventies’, and invited social media users to document America’s contemporary environment with their own digital snapshots.

As attempts to build support for the EPA’s regulation of economic and social activity, Documerica and State of the Enivronment rely on the well-worn assumption that the visibility of environmental problems shapes both public responses to ecological destruction and popular understandings of nature. Unsurprisingly, the most visible forms of ecological damage are most likely to draw public concern and subsequent government interventions (DeLuca, 2005a; Szasz, 1994), while pollution that fails to garner widespread attention tends to continue unabated (Nixon, 2011; Pezzullo, 2007). Visual media help shape popular conceptions of nature and good citizenship, where relationships to the environment are shaped by understandings of nature rooted in photographic and mediated representations (DeLuca and Demo, 2000).

We are interested in understanding how the original Documerica photographs, as well as their recirculation via the State of the Environment project, shape definitions of nature, conceptions of environmental citizenship, and the possibilities for government intervention in the current context. We argue these projects harness seemingly contradictory environmental nostalgias for both pristine wilderness and unregulated manufacturing in order to reinforce understandings of nature proffered by contemporary discourses of sustainability. Though these nostalgias are rooted in specific historical conditions, we claim that sustainability discourses in the current moment establish the optimal limits of environmental destruction to ensure harmonious interactions between capitalist expansion, governmental action, and human health. Before expanding on how sustainability constitutes a particular logic of governance, as well as how circulating nostalgias shape dispositions towards the environment, we begin by situating Documerica within the long history of governmental survey projects. After showing how Documerica and the State of the Environment reinforce discourses of sustainability, with particular reference to the modes of viewing enabled by their recirculation on digital media, we conclude by meditating on contemporary possibilities for environmental citizenship.

Documerica and the History of Survey Photography

Documerica and the State of the Environment’s aesthetization of environmental degradation continue a long history of photography’s use as a technology of governance connecting landscapes and the political imaginary, construing the environment as an object of policy. Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the US government deployed photography as an empirical and aesthetic tool for managing natural spaces, often imposing a literal economic vision (Parak, 2015). As the US Geologic Survey’s photography abetted Westward expansion, land management, and resource extraction, it also produced the American landscape as an object of management and exploitation, a logic that would shift to accommodate changes in the relationship between the environment and American culture over time (Wycoffe, 1999).

As a governmental project, the Farm Service Administration’s Depression-era photography project is Documerica’s most famous forebear. The FSA photographs helped produce notions of citizenship and governmentality that linger in American political culture (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007). Led by Roy Stryker, the project operated within a visual mode of citizenship that necessitated government action as a response to depictions of economic and environmental catastrophes (Sontag, 1977; Stryker and Wood, 1975). Various scholars have noted that the FSA project marked the emergence of a style of documentary photojournalism focused on social inequalities (Gray, 2006; Severin, 1964). The FSA photographs situated desolate individuals within vast, destroyed landscapes to show how average citizens could be beset by forces beyond their control, thus necessitating New Deal policies (Finnegan, 2003). As Schwartz (1999) argues, photojournalism and documentary photography projects like the FSA photographs and Documerica gain discursive power through an overt relationship to journalistic objectivity, creating a factual, visual record from which broader understandings of reality extend. This claim to stark, visual truth grants images their social power by addressing audiences with a reality that cannot be ignored (Wagner, 2004).

Unlike Stryker, the EPA’s first deputy director of public affairs Gil Hampshire exerted much less editorial control over Documerica (Bustard, 2013). Confusion over the EPA’s mission and legislative opposition led to annual budget reductions and the eventual shuttering of Documerica in 1977, five years before its intended end date (Quarles, 1976; Shubinksi, 2009). Photographers were hired as freelancers and given minimal editorial guidance, resulting in a collection without the FSA photographs’ aesthetic or thematic coherence. Though Documerica would never receive the same public acclaim, its 22,000 photographs, now housed in National Archives, have recently received scholarly and popular attention. As one commentator put it: ‘the images also capture specific touchstones of the period … events that helped define the period’s growing ecological awareness’ (Blauvelt, 2015: 314).

Photography helps reproduce connections between American landscape and culture, often through appeals to what Dunaway (2005: 196) calls the ‘ecological sublime’, or popular awe at the environment as exceeding humans’ managerial capacity. The ecological sublime underscored many early 20th-century environmental reform efforts, where depictions of grand landscapes characterized the work of photographers such as Eliot Porter, Charles Pratt, and William Garnett. As DeLuca (2005b) notes, photography politicizes nature through acts of reverence and offers a range of visual rhetorics for challenging strictly economic logics. Representations of the environment continually remake the American landscape as a site for governmental intervention, Wilson (1991) argues, by politicizing it according to shifting appeals to human subjectivity. For instance, David Brower’s editorial work for the Sierra Club used documentary photography and literary nonfiction to ground environmental conservation in appeals to human morality, conscience, and consciousness by establishing clear divides between human society and images of nature as unspoiled beauty (Turner, 2015).

Commentary around Documerica reveals a clear impulse to use photography to create visual record for evaluating environmental degradation and recovery over time. Hampshire stated that he hoped Documerica would establish a ‘visual baseline’ for evaluating future improvements in the US ecology (quoted in Light, 2000: 167). Unlike the propagandistic clarity of the FSA photographs, the Documerica archive is conceptually loose and complicated, and thus open to competing interpretations about American citizens’ relationship to the environment (Shubinski, 2009; Stryker and Wood, 1975). As Bustard (2013: 7) notes, ‘the 1970s were not the 1930s. American society had become increasingly complex, fragmented, and diverse … And while many environmental problems might be blamed on corporate practices or governmental inaction, others originated in American affluence and consumerism.’ While Shubinski (2009: 6) finds in Documerica a collective nostalgia for a time when government responses to social problems seemed obvious, the photographs reveal how the problem of environmental destruction was ‘more perniciously embedded in Americans’ interior lives and individual habits, and thus more difficult to solve’.

Perhaps this is intentional. For William Ruckelshaus (2013: ix), the first head of the EPA, ‘[Documerica’s] focus on people and the environments in which they lived and worked anticipated, in an almost uncanny way, what is today the primary focus of the EPA: the protection of public health.’ Public health connotes a broader regime of biopolitical discourses (Foucault, 2008) and sets limits for legitimate environmental regulation by foregrounding sustaining human activity as a policy goal. As Rose (1999: 74) argues, ‘public objectives for the good health and good order of the social body’ idealize individual flourishing while obscuring complex structural concerns, such as environmental health.

Theoretically Situating the Project: Visuality and Environmentality

Documerica embodies a visual apparatus of governmental power that reinforces competing logics of sustainability that guide contemporary environmental citizenship. They do so as part of the broader discourses of environmentality, or the collection of rhetorical, representational, and disciplinary technologies that render the environment amenable to political and economic dynamics. Drawing on Foucault’s (2008) conception of biopower as the practices that cultivate social life according to particular logics of governmentality, Luke (1995, 1997) posits that environmentality is inextricably linked to knowledges about the environment that abet human activity. A polysemous signifier, representations of the environment are always shifting to establish different fields of interpretation. Thus, as public discourses modulate our relationships with the non-human world, they are subject to broader relations of politics, economy, culture, and history (Luke, 1995).

Contemporary definitions of nature emerge within what Srinivasan (2017) calls the ‘sustainability episteme’, a field of knowledges, such as the discourse of restoration ecology, that posit the potential harmony of ecological preservation and unceasing industrial production. In contradistinction to moral, spiritual, or even strictly biological orientations towards nature, sustainability discourses privilege the development of ‘win–win’ solutions to conflicts between ecology and economics, whereby some levels of ecological destruction are defined as necessary for economic growth. Luke (1995: 67) argues that dwindling resource deposits in the face of globalization necessitate ‘capital intensive development strategies’ whereby ‘the simulation of spaces, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls, and the provocation of resistances can all be linked to one another.’ Corporations are implored to observe limits and properly manage pollution in order to continue indefinitely the extraction of economic value from the Earth (Luke, 2013). Sustainability works to harmonize economies, human populations, and nature through a series of managerial solutions (Luke, 2005), such as restoring damaged ecosystems.

Sustainability’s limitations on ecological damage require modulations of citizens’ consumption habits, a move that synergizes with both discourses of neoliberalism and what Parak (2015) calls Documerica’s demarcation of a rupture whereby landscape photography shifted to accommodate the limits of industrial capitalism. Indeed, Luke (1997: 121) shows how concerns about ‘ecological crises’ invite struggles over ‘tastes in the everyday lifeworld of material consumption’. Media systems circulate messages about ‘consuming green’ and encourage the purchase of particular products in order to produce value within acceptable limits of ecological destruction. As such, sustainability participates in what Foucault (2008: 223) identifies as a neoliberal emphasis on ‘an active economic subject’ in order to ameliorate failings of the free market. With this context in mind, we assert that, while Documerica’s photographs emphasize potential damage to ecological and human health, they nevertheless reinforce consumerist understandings of environmental citizenship.

While discourses that emphasize the limits of individual consumption remain operative in contemporary contexts, sustainability’s constitution of subjects interested in the preservation and restoration of ecosystems lends credence to emerging discourses of ecological resilience. The increasing popularity of the field of restoration ecology has redirected this environmentality towards the re-development in order to maintain ecological balance and healthy populations (Choi, 2007). Ubiquitous resilience discourses emphasize sustainable management techniques to ensure that ecosystems maintain their central functions, and thus remain sites of economic activity in the face of changing climate conditions and potential disaster (McGreavy, 2016). To do so, they visualize ecosystems as reserves of capital to be preserved and improved upon (Walker and Cooper, 2011) by subjects ‘trained to ride the unpredictable waves of neo-liberal life’ through disaster response, remediation, and preparedness (Pugh, 2014: 316).

As one technology used to reinforce ecological consumerism, photography constitutes particular ways of seeing, and thus defining, both nature and acceptable limits on pollution. In this case, we argue that Documerica and the State of the Environment draw on synergies between photography and circulating environmental nostalgias in order to frame environmental degradation as a consequence of industrial activity that can be avoided through the expansion of sustainable modes of governance that accommodate capitalist expansion. In so doing, they work to constitute the natural world as a site and sight of consumption in ways that preserve both dominant relations of economy and politics.

Environmental Nostalgia

As an important, yet contested, visual mode operating in the Documerica archive, nostalgia reinforces idealizations of the environment and economy, making them amenable to the workings of sustainability, where the status of photographs as slices of time abets the production of environmental nostalgia. For Sontag (1977: 54), photography’s ‘irrefutable pathos as a message from a time past’ derives from an ability to render present and dignify even the most mundane subjects. Photographs provide an illusive recreation of fleeting moments from the past: ‘However, the photographic camera as we know it, when pressed to the eye, appears to capture time, taming it or making it subordinate to our subjectivity’, inviting nostalgia for disappearing environments from which humans are increasingly separated (Sutton, 2009: 38).

The fleeting parcels of wilderness envisioned by the camera’s nostalgic lens situate industrial destruction of the non-human world outside the audience’s field of vision. In doing so, photography encourages both nostalgia for pristine wilderness and yearnings for the heights of Fordist production and the small-town life it enabled. We argue that these two types of environmental nostalgia – one that seeks to protect wilderness and another that longs for widespread employment in manufacturing and resource extraction – operate dialectically in a manner that synergizes with discourses of sustainability. In short, prospects of unsullied nature and a vibrant economy operate as flexible ideological resources within the discourses of sustainability, shifting as historical and political conditions change.

Nostalgia for wilderness

American environmentalism has long fixated on the restoration of idealized wilderness. These wilderness visions, embodied by photographic imaginings of a romanticized past, have encouraged preservation efforts that position the non-human world as a site of potential resource extraction. Buell (1995) locates this nostalgia in pastoral rhetorics, such as Thoreau’s elegies for disappearing wilderness, that emerged in response to America’s increasing urbanization while Cronin (1996: 13) points to Fredrick Jackson Turner’s 1894 text, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, as a crucial nostalgic text propagating the ‘myth of the vanishing frontier’. Turner portrayed the opening of the American West via the railroads, which aided the expansion of nature photography, as the moment when the frontier’s and America’s rugged individualism began to disappear. Nostalgic alignments of pristine nature and national identity influenced both wilderness preservation movements and the development of the national park system at the turn of the 20th century (Nash, 2014), while popular writers such as Rachael Carson and Aldo Leopold called for reorientations of American economic, ethical, and political systems, often alongside sublime visual representations of majestic landscapes (Ladino, 2012). Idealized connections between picturesque wilderness and America’s national identity continue to propel nostalgic attempts to preserve parcels of landscape which may appear grand within the frame, but are easily reducible to post-card images.

Although nostalgias for disappearing wilderness continue their political usefulness for the environmental movement, and thus cannot be necessarily discarded, photographs fail to grapple with nature’s ‘materially and representationally mobile’ qualities (Ladino, 2012: 229). Aesthetic displays of disappearing places invite engagements in which ‘Wilderness can only exist as a reserve of unexploited capital’ (Morton, 2007: 115). Reductions of nature to picturesque destinations obscure industrialism’s constitution of the non-human world as a site of capital production and resonate with discourses of sustainability by maintaining these places as resources reserved for future consumption. Photographs may evoke nostalgias for picturesque wilderness that, despite their potential to motivate limited forms of environmental politics, ultimately obscure industrialism’s creeping destruction.

Nostalgia for Fordism

Nostalgia for a time of widespread employment and economic prosperity provided by resource extraction constitutes another important force in contemporary environmental politics. These Fordist nostalgias are grounded in what Boym (2007: 10) calls utopic imaginations of ‘a pure and clean homeland’ which depict widespread industrialism as providing for small-town prosperity, human health, and environmental preservation. Through an analysis of images of automobile factory ruins, Steinmetz (2008: 218) identifies a widespread ‘nostalgia for Fordism’ as a time of prosperity. The ongoing proliferation of images of abandoned houses and factories during the economic downturns of the early 21st century, according to Steinmetz, points to a popular tendency to ‘see postwar Fordism through rose-coloured glasses, but at the same time their memories are rooted in actual historical realities’ (p. 220). While the manufacturing economy produced widespread employment for the white middle class during the long post-war boom, nostalgia for post-War America lends itself to policy agendas ‘that aim to restore a more hierarchical polity’ (Kohn, 2010: 365) by obscuring the era’s rampant racial exclusions and environmental destruction.

Depictions of small-town life or utopic imaginings of post-War society function similarly to images associated with industry. Cross (2015: 15–16) points to a widespread material culture centered around vintage ‘snapshots, songs, dolls, and cars’ as evidence of popular longings for an imagined past of national wholeness prior to the acceleration of life produced by global capitalism. The ongoing spread of retro architecture and outside shopping malls designed to evoke a sense of loss for postwar America are part of a design trend that remakes built environments in line with this persistent nostalgia (Kohn, 2010: 365). The loss of widespread manufacturing employment and small-town prosperity, a process already at work when Documerica was commissioned and manifest most clearly with the crises following the 2008 housing market crash, produced widespread nostalgias that have an increasing force in American culture and politics.

This Fordist nostalgia, while seeming disconnected from the environment, is evident in conservative populisms that imagine linkages between economic prosperity and the restoration of unfettered resource extraction as a response to the 2008 economic crises. Indeed, numerous commentators (see Bailey, 2017; Irwin, 2016; Kirsner, 2016; Schreckinger, 2016) argue that Donald Trump’s election was ‘premised on the idea of restoring the country to a lost greatness closely associated with a mid-20th century industrial economy that supported a large middle class’ (Schreckinger, 2016). Explicit calls for the intensification of resource extraction, such as Trump’s promises to ‘ease environmental restrictions on coal’ (Hyman and Tyllis, 2016), followed these fantasies of national restoration and point to the inextricable link between nostalgic images of post-War America and environmental exploitation. Competing nostalgias for pristine wilderness and post-War Fordism subsequently shape both contemporary environmental politics and Documerica’s power to motivate audiences by providing two idealized poles between which the discourses of sustainability navigate.

Analysis

Despite the absence of a singular vision in the Documerica project, certain strains of visuality become apparent across the archive. In particular, we argue that the photographs’ nostalgic mode makes sensible an idealized relationship between the environment in the economy, thus setting the limits for what constitutes sustainable consumption. Meanings within this archive are not fixed, but are open to various change and reuse overtime. Travelling exhibitions of the Documerica photographs throughout the 1970s overtly encouraged popular support for the remediation and regulation of pollution (Simmons, 2009). The recirculation of these images as part of 2013’s State of the Environment project – on the sharing platform Flickr as well as the National Archive’s website – render Documerica amenable to discourses of resilience and restoration, inflected with the dynamics of neoliberalism. These photographs, we argue, resonate with nostalgia for America’s Fordist economy while simultaneously demonstrating the co-existence of industrial growth and natural conservation.

Although our attention to environmentality might lend itself to a discourse analysis of photographs’ meanings, we attend to Documerica and State of the Environment as particular visibilities (Deleuze, 1988[1986]) that, by virtue of their circulation, constitute nostalgia-tinged proof of sustainability’s truth-value. Put differently, we are not interested in these photographs as metaphors or other symbols, nor how they operate as products of a particular photographer’s intentionality. Instead, we attend to how they function within the field of power/knowledge to render self-evident the limits of consumption and pollution, as well as the potentialities for restoration and resilience. In the following sections, then, we show how nostalgia works as a mode of visuality and how it renders intelligible contemporary sustainability.

Nostalgia’s visual work

Perhaps the most prevalent signifier of Fordist nostalgia in the Documerica Archive is the car. Automobiles are everywhere in these images, with one commentator writing about the 2013 Documerica exhibition at the National Archives at the inauguration of the State of the Environment project: ‘With so many pictures to choose from, covering a range of ecological and social concerns, America’s torrid love affair with the car is one of the show’s few constants’ (The Economist, 2013). The photographs show long lines for gasoline during the 1973 Oil Embargo, cars on city streets and highways, in picturesque national parks, abandoned on roadsides and amongst overgrowth.

The ubiquity of car culture during the Documerica period was abetted by the absence of fuel-efficiency standards, and many of the automobiles in these photographs consumed gasoline at twice to three times the rate of today’s average family cars. The car subsequently served as a particular symbol of American expansion across the landscape (Wood, 2010), while constituting a major cause of the acid rain that destroyed ecologies throughout the United States (Paterson, 2000), a fact that propelled concerns about fuel-efficiency and sulfur emission regulations during the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, in the Documerica archive, any notion of ecological crisis implicating the automobile is supplanted by images of fuel scarcity and heightened social tensions provoked by gasoline shortages (see Figure 1). Scarcity, when represented in such a way, applies an overtly economic logic to fuel consumption and limits the car to a signifier of a time when resources were more plentiful. Large smoke stacks, billowing white clouds, brown haze, and other signifiers of industrial pollution literally overshadow the cars (see Figure 2), leaving viewers with images that cast a nostalgic glance at the productive activity abetted by automobiles and once plentiful fossil fuels (see Figure 3). Within the contemporary context then, such images may serve as proof for ongoing calls to expand domestic oil extraction.

Figure 1.

Original caption: Country’s fuel shortage led to problems for motorists in finding gas as well as paying much more for it, and resulted in theft from cars left unprotected. This father and son made a sign warning thieves of possible consequences, April, 1974. Credit: David Falconer/US National Archives (photo no. 412-DA-13063).

Figure 2.

Original caption: Clark Avenue and Clark Avenue Bridge, looking east from West 13^th Street, are obscured by smoke from industry. July, 1973. Credit: David Falconer/US National Archives (photo no. 412-DA-7686).

Figure 3.

Original caption: Looking down southwest Broadway in Portland, during the energy crisis shows limited lighting on misty evening. December, 1973. Credit: David Falconer/National Archives (photo no. 412-DA-12994).

As with nostalgia for car culture itself, this imagined industrial past is connected to the consumption of natural resources, and thus a broader longing for extraction industries that pervades the Documerica Archives (Sperb, 2016). The depictions of cars, factories, industrial workers, and other aspects of material culture likely resonate with Fordist nostalgias, yet the photographs are at their most complex when dealing with the communities economically dependent on resource extraction.

Photojournalist Jack Corn treated his Documerica assignment in rural Appalachia as a long-term documentary project, focusing on life and work in mining towns in Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia. In these photos, he captures a vision of mining as polluting and imperiling towns while sustaining them economically, sometimes capturing bucolic nostalgia and industrial ruin in the same frame (Figure 4). Centered on these towns’ inhabitants (mostly the male mineworkers, but sometimes children playing and women in both domestic and professional scenes), Corn’s photographs contrast labor and leisure in a way that stitches coal mining, and by extension, resource extraction and manufacturing, into the social life of a community (Figures 5 and 6). Captions are generally ambivalent towards mining companies, but visually, the photographs connote social structures rooted in small-town nostalgia, a theme most readily apparent in a photograph of veteran miner Harold Stanley talking to a novice as he heads into his first day of training, his headlamp illuminating the younger man’s face (Figure 7). The photograph is almost allegorical in its composition, symbolizing the transfer of knowledge and vitality from one generation to the next.

Figure 4.

Wilder, TN, in the Cumberland Mountains near Cookeville in the eastern part of the state. It is an almost abandoned town in a once great mining area. It reached a population of more than 20,000 in the 1920s and had a slight comeback during World War II. Now the population of 400 live on welfare and pensions. April, 1974. Credit: Jack Corn/US National Archives (photo no. 412-DA-13861).

Figure 5.

Original caption: Miners waiting to start their 4 p.m. to midnight shift at the Virginia-Pocahontas coal company #4 near Richlands, VA. There are two working shifts with miners digging and taking coal out of the mine. The third, called the ‘hoot-owl’ shift (midnight to morning) is involved in cleanup operations. Many of the miners carry their own water into the mines rather than use that provided by the company. April, 1974. Credit: Jack Corn/US National Archives (photo no. 412-DA-13922).

Figure 6.

Original caption: Four young men gather in a beer joint in Clothier, WV, near Madison. They are left to right–Michael Doss, 18; Lanny Green, 21; Junior Jeffory, 20; and Robert Johnson, 18. All their parents work or have worked in the mine. Jeffory is a mining foreman after two years, but does not like it and wants to join the Navy. Green can’t find a job, but would like to work for the railroad. Doss isn’t working, but is waiting for a job in the mine. April, 1974. Credit: Jack Corn/US National Archives (photo no. 412-DA-13988).

Figure 7.

Original caption: Veteran miner Harold Stanley, right, talks to a young miner who has come into the mine for the first time after 40 hours of classroom training. Stanley placed his hand on the new man, shined his lamp in the miner’s face and said ‘Be alert, be safe, and uns (you) will be a good miner and get along just fine. This is Virginia-Pocahontas Coal Company Mine #3 near Richlands, VA. Credit: Jack Corn/US National Archives (photo no. 412-DA-13910).

Though industrial spoil, pollution, and de-industrial abandonment feature prominently in many of Corn’s photographs, their overt focus on human connection and community makes his pictures ripe for nostalgic repurposing. For instance, the digital publication Timeline uses Corn’s photographs to push against the overt politicization of ‘coal country’ that emerged in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign (Dundon, 2017). Framing Corn’s subjects as ‘proud workers, not political pawns’, and arguing the images depict communities persisting despite mining’s slow economic decline, Timeline shows how a nostalgia for the dignity attached to economic activity pervades representations of industrial life, occluding environmental harm (para. 1).

In contrast to images of personal sentimentality, other photographs aestheticize industrial production at a grander scale, almost mythologizing its destructive potential. Take, for example, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner William Strode’s photograph of a large excavator wrapped in shadows. Here, the excavator contrasts sharply to a light sky, just beyond smoke, clouds, and dust stirred up by the machine’s activity (Figure 8). The dust and smoke exemplify Strode’s use of ‘visual pollution’ in his photographs as he sought to make visible the wages of industrialism throughout his Documerica project (Shubinski, 2009). The caption indicates that the excavator is helping to strip mine a Native American burial ground, but the shadows and darkness in the image render its boxy form almost mythological with malevolence. While this visual pollution might have emphasized the problems with ecological destruction to Documerica’s initial viewers, for more nostalgic audiences who have benefited from decades of environmental regulations, it shrouds industrial activity in aesthetic beauty.

Figure 8.

Original caption: Strip mining on indian [sic] burial grounds by Peabody Coal Co. May, 1972. Credit: William Strode/US National Archives (photo no. 412-DA-1616).

The aestheticization of both nature and industry through the absence of human subjects is an important aspect of the Documerica and State of the Environment archives. Following the trend of standardization within the digital age, the State of the Environment contains heavily-saturated depictions of singular natural objects, such as birds, animals, trees, or landscape features (Figure 9). These pictures often invoke nostalgic understandings of nature as a sublime and non-human space (Dunaway, 2005). Industrial structures occupy a similar scale, helping to create a visual regime that further obscures individual consumption’s role in ecological degradation and preserves a precarious balance between economic activity and the environment.

Figure 9.

State of the Environment (2010-2013), Global Snapshot 1. Credit: US EPA. Available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/usepagov/8446213770/

Establishing sustainable limits

The Documerica archive and its recirculation also visualize the limits of ecological harm necessary for sustaining industrial activity while making overtures to the logics of redevelopment and resilience that validate governmental management. Within the contemporary context, where nostalgias for Fordism often supersede memories of the ecological disasters of the 1960s and 1970s, the photographs of pollution demonstrate the sustainability of industrialism’s ecological destruction. Images of smoke, wastewater draining into rivers, as well as rubbish on beaches and in landfills, code pollution as necessary for sustaining Fordist production by connecting them to symbols of industry such as smoke stacks, water treatment centers, active mines, and what appear to be chemical plants. Other photographs that depict trash in the ocean, on beaches, near housing developments, or in areas with signs against dumping or littering may expose the limits of sustainable pollution. Not only do numerous studies demonstrate that audiences react negatively to trash and pollution in their environments (e.g. Tudor and Williams, 2003; Wyles et al., 2015), but Szasz (1994) shows how images of polluted everyday environments spurred the EPA’s response to the Love Canal disaster. These Documerica photographs may similarly define polluted human environments as objects of State remediation by highlighting threats to public health. In this manner, Documerica helps visualize optimal levels of pollution for sustaining the smooth functioning of economies and populations.

In contrast to images of industry and polluted human environments, some photographs depict picturesque scenes or humans participating in outdoor activities. Many of the pictures of national parks and Native American reservations foreground wildlife or bucolic openings in front of mountains or other topographic features. Akin to some of the earliest photographs of the American West, which defined nature as sites where humans’ touch is completely absent or limited (DeLuca and Demo, 2000), these images show that idealized pristine spaces were preserved through government intervention at the height of industrialism. These types of photographs offer visual proof that nature and endless economic growth, at least within the nostalgic imagination, can exist in harmony.

The visualizing of limits is especially apparent in digital recirculations of the Documerica archive (EPA, 1970; US National Archives, 2011). In response to contemporary anti-environmental challenges, Documerica photographs detailing obviously unacceptable pollution often accompany justifications for ‘why we need the EPA’ (Palmer, 2017; Potenza, 2017). Documerica photographs reappearing on social media, in traveling gallery shows, and in environmental journalism, substantiate the existence of a tacit limit that contemporary environmental politics should not cross. This limit is exemplified by a widely-circulated photograph of a suburban scene where playing children move towards an industrial smelter stack. In this image’s upper portion, a white cloud that ostensibly contains toxins emerges from the tower (Figure 10). Connoting a time when industrial pollution was a common feature of American life, the sight of children moving toward the smokestack indicates that without action, this will be their future. While the parents stand idly in the foreground, unaware of the risks unregulated pollution poses, those of us addressed by the photograph in the current moment should know better, as evidenced by the striking visual irony of the children running toward the smoke stack. In this instance, nostalgia situates the polluted past at a safe remove, yet aestheticizes environmental degradation in a way that keeps it potent as a visual signifier of possible futures. Amid the discourses of sustainability, this photo evidences a boundary beyond which the delicate relationship between the economy and environment becomes unsustainable.

Figure 10.

Children playing in the yard of a Ruston, Washington, home while a Tacoma smelter stack showers the area with arsenic and lead residue, August 1972, Gene Daniels/US National Archives. Credit: Gene Daniels/National Archives (photo no. 412-DA-2753)

The State of the Environment crowd-sourcing project provides perhaps the richest examples of how the archive reinforces contemporary discourses of resilience and restoration. To advertise the newly digitized Documerica archive, the EPA encouraged participants to deploy Documerica’s techniques of visuality within the contemporary environment by snapping and submitting ‘Images of the environment you see around you, good or bad, it’s YOUR view’ (EPA, 2011: para. 3). Collected in Flickr groups comprising 3,000 photographs submitted by 950 verified users, the State of the Environment project contains fewer images from fewer photographers than the original Documerica archive (State of the Environment Photography Project, 2013). Representing a much smaller financial, editorial, and infrastructural investment than the original Documerica project, the State of the Environment maintains Documerica’s focus on sustainable industrialism while emphasizing resilience and remediation through images that are amenable to the atomized, neoliberal sensibility proliferating across digital media networks. As Fenton (2011: 69–70) has argued, such projects conflate digital user-generated content with democratic engagement and embody the ‘contradiction between the democratic potential of new media technologies and the stifling constraints of the market’. Social media platforms tend to flatten modes of representation so that activity across these platforms can be easily captured, quantified, and monetized (Fuchs, 2017). The result is often a much more polished image of reality, ready for sharing, as the agency of the image producer stands in subtle tension with the aesthetics privileged by the dynamics of the platform.

Pollution and industrialization, hallmarks of the original Documerica images, disappear from many of these photos, hearkening to what Jameson (1991: 19) would call a pastoral and preindustrial ‘past beyond all but aesthetic retrieval’. These photographs, in other words, embody a pre-capitalist nostalgia where the phenomena of pollution and environmental degradation merit less concern. By locating such pastoral images in the present, the State of the Environment turns the discourses of sustainability toward re-development and resilience. They stand as evidence of ecological recovery and overt natural beauty found in the wake of the widespread environmental destruction recorded in the original Documerica photographs. However, these seemingly benign representations belie the absence of an overt and politically-charged editorial mission present in the original project, raising the question of whether contemporary photography could even be used toward the same ends (O’Neil, 2013).

Rather than positioning the environment as no longer worthy of policy concern, these State of the Environment photos maintain the prospect of pristine wilderness as a flexible resource for justifying governmental intervention while making overt logics of renewal and resilience. Shot both by professional photographers and amateurs recruited from social media, these comparisons revisit key sites from the Documerica archive in order to show change over time (see Figures 11 and 12). Color is an important point of contrast in these photographs, as richer blues, greens, and whites connote cleaner air and water. In many cases, abundant plant life where trash used to be clearly stands as evidence of ecological cleanup and recovery (National Public Radio, 2013; NBC News, 2012).

Figure 11.

Are we better off? NY Skyline 40 Years Later Credit: Chester Higgins/National Archives; Ken McCown/US State of the Environment.

Figure 12.

Palo Seco Electric Power Plant, San Juan, PR in 1973 and 2012. John Vachon/US National Archives; Flickr user Maldonado/State of the Environment. Credit: John Vachon/US National Archives; Flickr user Maldonado/State of the Environment.

In the discourse of resilience, such images of recovery, or ‘bouncing back’, emphasize the potential harmony of environmental health and capitalist modes of production as evidence (Mcgreavy, 2016). As Fletcher (2010) notes, neoliberal conservation projects place the onus on individual citizens and communities to navigate tensions between nature and industry, a quality that works well with resilience’s emphasis on ecologically aware individuals (Pugh, 2014). This logic is evident in many EPA (2013: para. 5) calls to contribute to the ‘Then and Now’ digital photo albums: ‘Our environmental problems may be less obvious today, than decades ago. Some we have even overcome. Yet, new challenges await our action. What can your camera – or smartphone – show for the State of our Environment now?’ This appeal implicates all citizens in seeing the environment and making visible the work of remediation and ecological resilience.

Caught between the gaze of professionals and amateurs, a position that is uniquely authorized by digital media platforms, the State of the Environment renders the environment an elusive referent. National Archives senior curator Bruce Bustard distills this distinction plainly:

State of the Environment is incredibly democratic … However, for me, it is a little diffuse. I think using professional photographers under the direction of a photo editor made DOCUMERICA a somewhat more focused project, even with 22,000 photographs. (quoted in Rosenberg, 2013: para. 9)

Greater editorial control of Documerica may have provided a visual lexicon for understanding industrialism’s threat to the environment in the 1970s, but in the contemporary moment, the individualized modes of visuality in professional and amateur photographs alike work to constitute subjects. Critic Ingrid Hafitel (2012: paras 11–12) writes:

Nature in these images is right where it has always been, at the edge of our own existence, waiting to be fixed by our perception like a photograph … However, for me, it’s precisely this rupture that makes the photos so powerful: it symbolizes a breach between inside and outside, us and it, we humans and our environment.

Though commenting primarily on Documerica’s reemergence, Hafitel describes how, by positioning the environment as subject to individual perspective, State of the Environment persists in Documercia’s tendency to make sustainability sensible as not just a policy program, but as a way of seeing and, ideally, being.

Conclusions

As we wrote this conclusion, scientists and supporters of science-based policymaking were organizing for ‘The March for Science’, a world-wide demonstration against government inaction in the face of ecological destruction on Earth Day 2017. While we applaud widespread concern about ecological destruction, and certainly do not oppose science’s sounding of the alarm about humanity’s planetary impact, this exercise of environmental citizenship demonstrates the ascendance of scientific definitions of nature undergirding sustainability discourses. Indeed, ongoing concerns about the impact of ecological destruction on human economies and health are often couched in measurements of the sustainable limits of pollution. As our analysis shows, photography gives these discourses force by making visible the pollution that sustains industrialism as well as intolerable forms of environmental destruction that threaten human health.

Documerica and State of the Environment constitute powerful examples of photography’s power to align environmental citizenship and sustainability discourses, in part, because they draw upon increasingly popular environmental nostalgias. Nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial picturesque justifies ecological preservation, but often conflicts with growing longings for Fordist industrialism’s exploitation of natural resources that work to remove hard-won environmental protections. These photography projects appeal to both nostalgias by showing that industrial pollution and bucolic wilderness exist in harmony. Furthermore, Documerica and State of the Environment provide limited justification for governmental remediation of pollution while simultaneously individualizing responsibility for restricting consumption. These projects navigate neoliberalism’s ecological destruction through discourses of resilience that justify sustainable consumption and pollution, rather than providing the impetus for the realization of new modes of relationality with the Earth.

Given malleable definitions of nature as well as growing concern for ecological destruction, possibilities for new modes of environmental citizenship remain. Just as survey photography helped inaugurate an environmentality grounded in conceptions of sublime wilderness, and sustainability constitutes nature as an object to be managed for endless economic growth and human health, we might similarly constitute another way of depicting the non-human world that does not reduce it to either a space absent human intervention nor the object of biopolitics. Indeed, if we are to survive the coming ecological catastrophes – and we must – then we must define nature as something other than a space of moral goodness or an object to be consumed and polluted in the name of economic growth.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors and there is no conflict of interest.

Biographical Notes

DUSTIN A GREENWALT is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Arts & Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. He earned his PhD from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia in 2015. His work has previously been published in the Southern Journal of Communication and Explorations in Media Ecology, as well as in other edited volumes.

Address: Department of Arts & Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802-1800, USA. [email: Dgreenwalt@gmail.com]

BRIAN CREECH is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism at Temple University. He earned his PhD in mass communication from the University of Georgia in 2015. He has published in a wide variety of journals, including Convergence, Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, Communication, Culture and Critique, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Journalism History, and The Communication Review.

Address: Department of Journalism, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. [email: brcreech@gmail.com]

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