Landscape and the Environment

Introduction to Photography Collections at Cornell

This set of photographs focuses on the theme of landscape and the environment. It addresses a breadth of topics relevant across Cornell’s colleges: climate change and environmentalism; resource extraction, agriculture, and industrialization; commodification and tourism; land and identity; land and art. Western colonialist approaches to the environment and nature and the dispossession of Indigenous people inform and are responded to in many of these photographs.

As a major genre in photography from the medium’s early days to now, landscape photographs form a significant part of the Museum’s photography collection. They include an albumen print from a mammoth plate by Carleton E. Watkins, whose photographs influenced the establishment of National Parks by the federal government; representative works by Ansel Adams, through which Adams championed the importance of preserving the American wilderness; and more recent works by Richard Misrach, Frank Gohlke, and Edward Burtynsky that collapse landscape art and the documentation of environmental catastrophe. The series Stratographs, by the Nigerian-born photographer Simon Norfolk, visualizes the receding of the Mt. Kenya glacier, the second highest peak in Africa, where the Lewis Glacier has been receding over the past few decades. At night, carrying a makeshift torch, he walked numerous recorded former boundaries of the glacier, making long exposures that captured the flame’s path. Works by Marcia Resnick, Sherrie Levine, and Robbert Flick represent more conceptual approaches to landscape that emerged in the 1960s, and Meryl McMaster’s Calling Me Home dramatizes the loss of Indigenous monuments to the environmental actions of colonialist governments.

Scholars and scientists are turning to photographic documentation to gauge change over time as well as to appreciate the role geography plays in rural and urban development and design. For instance, the Library’s vast collections of photographs by Frederick Howell and Ralph Stockman Tarr — all of which have been digitized — of glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, and elsewhere at the turn of the last century constitute troves for studying land and environmental change. Hundreds of stunning cyanotypes by Liberty Hyde Bailey offer insight into his agricultural work and depict local farms, and snapshots from a collection of albums created by Black American families indicate the importance of place to personal and familial identities.

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Bound volumes included in this set can be previewed or viewed in their entirety. Please note that some of these digitized volumes belong to repositories other than Cornell, and that Cornell's own copies of the same volumes may vary slightly.

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Introduction to Photography Collections at Cornell

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Landscape and the Environment

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