The power of collective vision: landscape, visual media, and the production of American mountains

ABSTRACT

The way we view the landscape is socially constructed and influenced by media. Images from paintings to digital photographs influence how Americans see mountains and reproduce a collective vision. I describe the process by which this collective vision of nature and mountains in the United States has been constructed through the dissemination of visual media and the rise of domestic tourism. The progression of landscape representation modes over the past two centuries has continuously distanced the image from reality. Since the American collective vision of the mountain is a simulacrum, I use Jean Baudrillard's orders of simulation as a heuristic for understanding the diachronic relationship between the landscape and its visual representations. I argue that this collective vision possesses the powers to colonize, to nationalize, to exclude, and to constrain ways of seeing mountains. These powers inform one another to the present day and are all entangled with the collective vision of mountains. I trace the history of mountain representation in America and the process of American orogenesis to show how image production and distribution is linked to the orders of simulation and the power trajectory from colonization to nationalization to exclusion and ultimately to a myopic view of mountains.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual culture
• landscape
• mountains
• media
• colonization
• collective vision

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their helpful feedback, David Glassberg for his invaluable guidance and support, and Zachary Del Nero for for constantly challenging me to elaborate and deepen my ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Danielle R. Raad is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research lies at the intersections of cultural anthropology, archaeology, and public history.

Notes

1 See the work of economist, psychologist, and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, including: Shankar Vedantam, “Daniel Kahneman On Misery, Memory, And Our Understanding Of The Mind,” Hidden Brain. Podcast audio, Mar 12, 2018. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/592986190.

2 Recent research in psychology has shown how immediately viewing a video of an event after it takes place alters one's memory of the experience. For example, see this recent article: Julia Cho, “Is the Immediate Playback of Events Changing Children's Memories?,” The New York Times, April 25, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/well/family/video-altering-memory.html.

3 Anglo-Americans initially ignored the remains of ancient Native American and Spanish settlements. It was not until the early 1900s that Anglo-Americans would celebrate Spanish Missions and the ruins of ancestral Puebloan settlements in the Southwest as picturesque and potential tourist attractions.