Corson Androski | Before Parks
Corson Androski is a researcher, conservationist, software developer, and photographer/filmmaker from Hutchinson, Kansas. Their work uses the concept of care—as labor, affect, and ethic, given/received by humans and other-than-humans, individuals and systems—to consider subjects like institutional medicine alongside state ecological regulation, and beyond their respective margins, emergent communities of illness alongside informal conservation of the small, overlooked ecosystems of weeds and fungi that spring up in the seams of our patchwork flyover states. Corson was one of Amplify’s 2019 Artist Support Grant recipients and is a member of 2020’s Alternate Currents Working Group.
The following is a transcript of a talk Corson delivered on February 19, 2020 at Generator Space in Omaha.
Before Parks
I’m going to be talking about photography, conservation, and colonialism. We’re going to use William Henry Jackson and the National Park System as a starting point for thinking about how landscape photography shapes, and is shaped by, our culture’s ideas about people and nature, and what that means for us, using cameras and living through ecological catastrophe in the Midwest today.
This is kind of a niche topic, but for artists, I’m hoping this talk give some ideas about how considerations for medium specificity, historical research, and an ethical focus might fit into your own practices. But for everyone, I’m hoping that rethinking our assumptions about the land outside the Midwest could give us new ways to approach our own backyards which we tend to take for granted, the lawns and parks and nature preserves and industrial agriculture fields that make up our local landscape.
Just a quick introduction: I’m Corson Androski. I’m an archival researcher, software developer, aspiring ecologist, an enthusiast of our local city parks, and an artist who works mostly with cameras. I have lived in the Midwest pretty much all of my life, in Kansas and Iowa and Nebraska right in the middle of what is, from a satellite view, the biggest continuous crop field to ever exist in the universe, right in the middle of the three states that formally conserve less land than anywhere else in the country.
So growing up, my outlook on this region was pretty bleak. I didn’t just think that the Midwest was a lost cause, I didn’t know there had been anything of value to lose here in the first place. Which makes sense if all you see around you are industrial wheat fields and dying towns. It was actually just this year that, for the very first time, I got to see the ecosystem that was native to my home states, the tallgrass prairie, at a preserve out in Kansas. I had driven by my whole life and never stopped.
So of course I spent most of my life wanting to leave. I liked being outside, I liked doing outdoor things, and I cared a lot about some version of nature that I didn’t think existed in this region. I assumed that things were fundamentally different in other places, where there are National Parks, where the land is better cared for, where there’s wilderness without people.
And that was a longing expressed in my practice for a while. I was really fortunate and got to take those trips, I got to take lots of photos, and I can’t say that I didn’t love it. I spent a couple summers living out of my bicycle and traveling around the National Parks and Forests out west.
I have some pretty harsh criticisms of the park system that we’ll get into soon, but I don’t want to pretend that my experiences with them aren’t deeply important to me, and I know that’s the case of almost everyone who visits them, especially coming from places like here where the land is such a mess. But I’ve also found that after these periods of being a tourist, we tend to have this experience of coming home and realizing we found nothing in our travels that really means much in our day to day lives.
We don’t visit long enough to learn much, to build a deep connection with places, we can’t interact with them from behind guardrails, can’t reciprocate what we’re offered, all we can do is look, all we can leave are carbon emissions. Once home, things go back to normal. For a lot of us that means we’re often sad and lonely, and we feel the same or even worse about the land we’ve come home to.
A few years ago I moved to Omaha and something really surprising happened. I didn’t know anyone here and I worked from home, so this was a very lonely time, and I did a lot of wandering around outside. I happened to stumble into this corner of Elmwood Park, and I absolutely fell in love with it. It was abandoned, overgrown with invasive species, filled with litter and pollution. It wasn’t always a beautiful place, but it was full of life and close enough to visit every day, and that made it possible to build a relationship with it unlike anything else I’ve had in my life. Every day I learned more about what lived there and got to see and experience intuitively what our local ecosystems offers us, all the ways we depend on it, about the ways I was unknowingly harming it, but also about the ways I could mitigate that harm and even reciprocate care for it, to express gratitude for its incredible generosity and grace. It has made me obnoxiously sincere and corny.
So there was this really incredible unexpected difference between my experiences in the National Parks and in this trashed ravine next door. I wanted to understand why Elmwood Park meant so much more for me, was so much more transformative for my thinking on conservation and my artistic practice and my hope for the future generally. And figuring that out started with rethinking the assumptions I had about photography and conservation and travel.
I want to shift a little bit to talking about what makes a medium a medium. When we think about artistic mediums like photography or sculpture or printmaking, we usually think about them in terms of materials used, or by tools or processes involved. But I would argue that the cultural history of mediums are just as, if not more important in defining and understanding them. I’m talking about the ways that a medium is originally developed, the ways it’s used through history, the different projects it’s involved in. All of that accumulates over time and informs how artists make work in that medium, and it also informs how viewers read work in that medium, whether we realize it or not.
In photography’s case, the medium is often understood as having a special relationship with truth and reality. When you see a footprint in the mud, you don’t just say, ah yes, now I know that feet exist in the world. It lets you know about one specific foot, at a specific place and time, interacting with the specific medium of this mud in front of you. Photographs points to reality in the same way, they’re mechanical reflections or imprints of very specific and situated real things. They can’t be produced from imagination alone. Photos are also easy to create, reproduce, and disseminate on a wide scale. These traits led to the use of photography as evidence in court cases and journalism, it became the medium of democratic objectivity. People place a lot of hope in photography’s power to shed light on the problems of the world and inspire empathetic reactions, to solve injustice.
Obviously, this isn’t quite how things work in practice. We make and share more photos than ever, we still generally believe them despite new ways to manipulate them, and they can be as deeply affecting as ever.
But a single photo is never a clear objective view, especially of big complicated problems, and photos are just as easily used to mislead, and to aggravate problems as to solve them. War photography hasn’t stopped war, and landscape photography hasn’t averted ecological catastrophe.
Sight and knowledge are so malleable. We need to rethink these assumptions if photography is to be rehabilitated as an agent of change, we need to consider more specifically how photographs are created and used, what meanings they make, what they do and don’t change in our broader culture.
Which brings us to the bit of history that I want to focus on as sort of the fulcrum of this talk. This story is really important to the history of the environmental movement in America, and to the history of photography as well. It’s usually told like this: Around 1870, William Henry Jackson, an Omaha based photographer, took an expedition west to a section of the Rocky Mountains and photographed the area for the first time. These photos were so beautiful that they were used to convince congress to found our country’s first National Park there, protecting the land to this day as Yellowstone.
This is an inspiring story, and suggests that photography, conservation, and travel are interconnected and lead to the betterment of the natural world and our relationship with it. Unfortunately, this story is deeply misleading, and obscures really horrific injustices. First and most importantly, Yellowstone wasn’t unoccupied. It was the territory of the Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, Nez Perce, and several other peoples who were forcibly removed when the parks were founded, in violation of various treaties. It wasn’t an untouched wilderness, either. It was an active cultural site. The land and wildlife were managed in varied and sophisticated ways that weren’t just good for the people occupying them, but good for the resilience and diversity of the ecosystems as wholes. The same is true for the other places which William Henry Jackson and other artists, poets, and naturalists would help convert into National Parks.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker just published a book called As Long as Grass Grows, a really thorough overview of indigenous environmental justice movements, and gives a detailed account of what this process looked like in Yosemite:
“When the first white settlers observed the magnificent “cathedral” of Yosemite Valley, they described vast open meadows covered in “luxuriant native grasses and flowering plants,” a place that “presented the appearance of a well-kept park,” “an appearance of a prairie planted with fruit trees.” These observers were there early enough to witness how the valley had been managed for centuries by Native peoples. With techniques like controlled burns and even hand removal of young willows and cottonwoods, the growth of a thick and highly combustible understory was averted, helping to prevent uncontrollable fires.”
She quotes M. Kat Anderson’s conclusion that “much of the landscape in California that so impressed early writers, photographers, and landscape painters was in fact a cultural landscape, not the wilderness they imagined. While they extolled the ‘natural’ qualities of the California landscape, they were really responding to its human influence.”
Of course, the removal of the peoples who knew and cared for these landscapes was devastating to both. Maybe the best known example of this sort of dislocation and ecological harm is the extermination of bison as an intentional effort to starve indigenous peoples in the plains, which was also a disaster for the prairie ecosystem. In the same way, displacing the National Park’s original occupants disrupted a relationship that sustained both people and the land. A recent study even showed that this disruption of indigenous care was so significant that its impact is visible in the carbon record stored in ice and stone to this day. After the National Parks were established, biodiversity fell, entire ecosystems collapsed, even the geology of parks was affected. The overhunting of wolves by park managers and tourists, for example, caused deer populations to grow and allowed them to overgraze areas they would otherwise avoid. This increased erosion, deforested large portions of the park, and drove away birds, beavers, and the species dependent on the ponds those beavers engineered.
William Henry Jackson did make portraits of indigenous subjects, but he mostly did so between expeditions, back in his Omaha studio, depicting them as placeless and without context in front of blank backdrops or artificial painted scenery, further naturalizing their displacement.
Kyle Powys Whyte argues that this displacement, this severing of the connection between people and land built up over eons, is the fundamental aspect of environmental injustice. He says that this “cuts at the fabric of systems of responsibilities that connect [humans and non-humans and ecosystems]. Environmental injustice can be seen as an affront to peoples’ capacities to experience themselves in the world as having responsibilities for the upkeep, or continuance, of their societies.”
Which really strongly resonates with my experience in the Midwest, where I grew up with no sense of what the land offered me, let alone what I could give in return. Dina Gilio-Whitaker points out that this severing of connections through colonial settlement and displacement isn’t just bad for indigenous people, but for everyone, even the settlers who gained and inherited land and resources and power from the process. She argues that colonization steers colonizers away from their own ancestral wisdom, preventing us from knowing how to respect ourselves and others.
So all of this leaves us with the question, what do we do with this information? Does this change how we live our lives? When we encounter histories of injustice, especially ones in which we’re implicated, or benefit from, it’s easy to feel like we are suddenly in debt, that limits are imposed on us. But I think that reconnecting with these responsibilities, in this case working towards environmental justice and decolonization, actually makes us more free, opens up new possibilities we otherwise could not see or reach. it can be joyful, generative, and energizing. It can give us a tremendous amount of hope just to be able to imagine alternatives to the way we live right now.
I don’t want people’s takeaway from this talk to be that they should never visit the National Parks, or travel at all, or take landscape photos. Instead, my hope is that this history, and demonstrating this approach, can help us better understand that there are other ways to know and interact with and make art about the land than those ways we’ve inherited from settler colonialist culture. I want people to understand that there is no such thing as untouched wilderness, that every landscape is a cultural landscape. That’s especially true in a colonized continent that is undergoing climate change and mass extinction. We can never escape that humans are entangled with every part of the natural world. But that doesn’t mean that everywhere is compromised or everywhere is ruined, or that we have license to act on and control the world however we see fit. It means that there is potential for responsible reconnection everywhere, that no region deserves to be left behind, that we need to be humble about what we do and don’t know, to step back and reduce our consumption and reduce our impulse to exert control over the natural world, and to listen to the land and to those who are closest to it, especially those most directly impacted by harms done to the land.
For myself and other beneficiaries of settler-colonialism I think that process must start with learning the histories of indigenous caretakers and connecting with and supporting contemporary indigenous peoples. Listening to and reading what they are so generously teaching today, accepting their invitations for connection, supporting them with time and resources and your voice, and applying those teachings.
Toward that end I wanted to point people towards two books, and also give credit to two resources that have been tremendously valuable for me. First is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatamie professor of botany who writes really fantastic short accessible essays on “indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants.” The other book is As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice From Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker, who I’ve been citing so much throughout. The book is a deep and comprehensive look at the history and philosophy of indigenous environmental activism in America. I also want to advocate that people get to know indigenous communities locally. There are so many local organizations that are doing fantastic programming that is designed to benefit everyone, and they do incredible outreach open to all. So keep an eye out for indigenous people doing creative work, for cultural events that are open to you, and take them up on that really generous invitation.
I deeply believe that all of these colonial assumptions embedded in the conventions of landscape photography still affect how we make and read images of nature, and how we travel and think about the places we live, and that we need to continually imagine alternatives, and not just make theories about them but try them out, evaluate how they affect the way we think about and see and act in the world. The work in this show is the result of just some early experiments with these alternatives. It focuses on one place instead of traveling to many, and it focuses on long term engagement over the course of years instead of visiting overnight. It treats the production of the work you see here not as the main goal, but as a byproduct of a larger process of learning about and rebuilding responsible connections with the land and sharing what I learn with other people. This practice focuses on human entanglement with these landscapes rather than seeking out pristine fictions of separation, which means focusing in on the places where our touch and our influence on the land is most evident, for better and for worse. I also try to always be transparent about the fact that there’s someone behind the camera, and kind of embrace the times that your hand ends up over the subject or your hair falls down into the frame, things that make that entanglement a little more tangible. The last thing I’m seeking to do is continually ask whether the costs and harms associated with my practice justify the good that they do. And of course that is an impossible question to answer, evaluating the harms of using resource intensive technology like a camera, of using energy, of using gallery space like this, with equally intangible benefits like having a chance to talk to you all about this history. But I think that it’s important we ask that question anyway, and continually work on answering it, that we continually struggle through that so long as the environment and our relationship with it is troubled.
These are just some initial experiments we can all build on. Find somewhere nearby that you can visit often, share what you learn there, and listen to others’ experiences of the places they know, and let’s start rebuilding our local ecological culture.