During the last quarter of the 20th century, artists sought to re-vision landscape photography and to break from idealized depictions of the West as a pristine wilderness. Indeed, as Alinder notes, “Ansel never intentionally included a human or an animal in his creative landscapes. For him, nature was Teflon-coated: man did not stick” (1996 239).Contemporary photographers have implicitly or explicitly acknowledged Ansel Adams as the “unwitting embodiment of the false dichotomy between humanity and nature at the root of our continuing legacy of environmental destruction” (Spaulding xiv).

Significantly, many contemporary photographers, much to Adams’s dismay, insist on highlighting the beauty that remains in the “man-altered” landscape. Some corresponded with Adams, seeking his oedipal blessing as well as justifying or explaining their own conceptual aesthetic to the great master. Richard Misrach—whose own work was made iconic as the featured screen image for Apple’s iPad when it was introduced by the lateSteve Jobs in 2010 (Newman 2010)—was one such photographer who corresponded with Adams. Misrach’s work from the 1970s onward used the aesthetic to remark some of humanity’s uglier interactions with landscape. Adams responded by reproaching the intrusion of the discursive into the form and content of Misrach’s photographs. Adams was no fan of the conceptual turn in photography, strongly believing that the aestheticized photograph should speak for itself.

For many scholars and critics, the genre of landscape photography, like the 18th-century painted landscapes after which the genre is so often modeled, became firmly established in the aesthetics of mastery associated with territorial exploration, expansion, and imperialist conquest.

As Rephotographic Survey Project director MarkKlett has observed, “when [survey photographer W. H.] Jackson placed human figures inhis photographs [in the 19th century], they appear on a level with or above the landscape.They often stand with their hands on their hips,” their body language further reinforcingthe camera’s and viewer’s dominion over the land and its resources (Fox 43)

This bodily and experiential perspective of battle and terrain is reinforced by the accompanying historical details of text to the photograph, thus associating the “view”with the soldiers’ and Indians’ mortality, rather than with the timeless aesthetics of American Manifest Destiny. Battlefield Panoramas was completed after the end of theAmerican War in Vietnam, and during the early years of American Reagan-era imperial foreign policy. In accompanying texts, Bright emphasizes casualty numbers to reinforce“the horrible, inhumane calculus of any war: piles of human bodies and body parts to feed an imperial war machine with dubious objectives” (Bright 2011).

What principally distinguishes Adams’s recreation of O’Sullivan’s White House Ruins fromthe Rephotographic Survey Project’s rephotography of other O’Sullivan images? While the RSP seeks to capture the impact of intervening time and human intervention on the landscape, Adams sought to establish the image as timeless. Thus, in keeping with popular perspectives of the period, Adams reinforced the idea of the ruins as themselves timeless; as ancient, and as mysteriously transcending the historical upheavals of the 70 years intervening between his and O’Sullivan’s photographs. His recreation implicitly honors and preserves the expeditionary and expansionist historical conditions of O’Sullivan’s own era both as natural and, ultimately, as irrelevant to his own aestheticized aims. Rephotography, by contrast, acknowledges the mediated status of photography itself as representation and as subject to the biases and historical conditions of its making and its maker.

Embedded in landscape photographs of the West, then as now, are the ideologies of surveillance and conquest. Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen included a reproduction of the famous White House Ruins in a 2010 diptych entitled Artifacts (Anasazi CliffDwellings, Canyon de Chelly; Spacecraft in Perpetual Geosynchronous Orbit, 35,786 kmAbove Equator).

Paglen’s diptych juxtaposes the military’s historical and contemporary presence in theconquest of the American West by visual communications technologies: First, by thearmy’s 19th-century photographic surveys, then by its omnipresence in thegeosynchronous orbit of military satellites overhead. Artifacts is thus related to another aphotographic series by Paglen titled The Other Night Sky, in which he tracks andphotographs classified spacecraft—namely satellites—from his own calculations and fromthose made by the amateur community of astronomers who, as Paglen acknowledges,“have taken it upon themselves to maintain a catalog of classified spacecraft in Earth’sorbit by producing accurate orbital elements...for classified objects (Paglen Blank Spots,85).” Paglen’s long-exposure photographs trace the satellites’ star-like paths above suchWestern landscapes as those aestheticized by Adams. Photographs in this series close thepresumed distance between orbital evidence of “the other night sky” and those skies weassociate with picturesque Western landscapes, including Yavapai Point (DMSP B5D2-8from Yavapai Point (Military Meteorological Satellite; 1995-015A), 2009) overlooking theSouth Rim of the Grand Canyon, and Glacier Point (KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL fromGlacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 1860, 2008)overlooking YosemiteValley, both points from which Ansel Adams photographed the West as an uninhabitedwilderness. The landscapes photographed by Adams and referenced by Paglen constitutegeological evidence of a prehistory that predates human existence; coupled with Paglen’sdocumentation of “covert operations and classified landscapes,” they become veritablemomento mori—Heideggerian allegories of what will have been.