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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2020
This article looks at the landscape photographer Richard Misrach's collaboration with the architect Kate Orff in Petrochemical America (2012), a prizewinning examination of the effects of the oil industry in the Mississippi delta. Whilst situating its critique of the oil industry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Petrochemical America nonetheless uses a variety of aesthetic devices from previous centuries and traditions, in particular the use of the picturesque in landscapes of the nineteenth century. Through this and other mechanisms, the images in Petrochemical America become potential allegories for the paradoxical coexistence of a picturesque nature visibly affected by industrial transformation.
1 Cole, Thomas, “On the Destruction of Beautiful Landscapes,” Essay on American Scenery, American Monthly Magazine, 1 (Jan. 1836), 1–12Google Scholar, 12.
2 Misrach, Robert and Orff, Kate, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture, 2012)Google Scholar. Described in the introduction as a “unique collaboration between a photographer and a landscape architect,” Petrochemical America consists of 47 photographs by Misrach followed by Orff's “Ecological Atlas” of written and drawn material, some added, superimposed or drawn on top of the preceding photographic material. Subsectioned into chapters, the “Ecological Atlas” moves from topics such as “Oil,” “Infrastructure,” and “Waste” to “Ecology/Economy” and lastly “Landscape,” ending with an added explanatory index of organizations and terms. In Misrach's other ongoing projects, The Desert Cantos (begun 1997) – a series of images of the American West – and the later Border Cantos (begun 2004) set on the border between the US and Mexico, the effects of ecological damage, colonization, and industrial exploitation are also made visible.
3 Alongside Richard Payne Knight's The Landscape (1794) and Sir Uvedale Price's Essays on the Picturesque as Compared with The Sublime and The Beautiful (1810), Gilpin's work still forms the foundation for a conventional reading of the eighteenth-century attempt to establish a category alongside and in response to Edmund Burke's more spectacular and better-known definition of the sublime in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
4 Gilpin, William, Observations on the River Wye (London: Pallas Athene Publishers, 2005; first published 1782)Google Scholar, Introduction, 17.
5 Whiting, Cecile, “The Sublime and the Banal in Post War Photography of the American West,” American Art, 27, 2 (Summer 2013), 44–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 47.
6 Ibid., 7.
7 Ibid., 12.
8 Punter, David, The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape, and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Copley, Stephen and Garside, Peter (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1994), 122Google Scholar.
9 Ibid., 224.
10 Hoelscher, Steven, “The Photographic Construction of Tourist Space in Victorian America,” American Geographical Society: Geographical Review, 88, 4 (Oct. 1998), 548–570Google Scholar, 549.
11 Gersdorf, Catrin, “History, Technology, Ecology: Conceptualizing the Cultural Function of Landscape,” Icon, 10 (2004), 34–52Google Scholar, 45.
12 Ibid., 49.
13 Roberts, John, “Photography and the Photograph: Event, Archive and the Non-symbolic,” Oxford Art Journal, 32, 2 (2009), 281–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 289.
15 Mark Feldman, quoted at https://placesjournal.org/article/illuminating-the-petrochemical-landscape.
16 Misrach and Orff, Petrochemical America, 161.
19 LeMenager, Stephanie, “Oil! The Aesthetics of Petroleum after Oil!”, in American Literary History, 24, 1 (Spring 2012), 59–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Misrach and Orff, 21.
