Change and Preservation

“You’ve got to ac-cent-u-ate the positive,” goes the old song, one of many from the middle part of the century that accompany the Autry Museum of Western Heritage exhibit, “California Deserts: Today and Yesterday.” And it’s certainly easy to walk away from the 82 striking photographs (or dance away, given the swing-era tunes) positive that the desert lands around Los Angeles have survived the ravages of time--and man--surprisingly well. But like any good exhibit, the images at the Autry invite a more complicated response.

Organized by the Palm Springs Desert Museum and the Automobile Club of Southern California, the exhibit pairs black-and-white photographs taken for the Auto Club’s travel magazine between 1911 and 1955 with color photographs of the same sites taken in 1997. The object was to see what had changed, and in many instances the answer appears to be: very little.

That desert landscapes appear much the same after 40 to 80 years is not in itself so surprising. Arid lands lack the rainfall needed to speed the growth of vegetation, wash away landmarks or wear down rocks and ridges. Even sand dunes, constantly shaped and reshaped by the wind, settle back into formations that look familiar decades later.

What surprises most viewers, and what surprised James W. Cornett, the Palm Springs curator who took the 1997 photographs, is how relatively little we humans have changed these landscapes. Footprints and tire tracks, after all, are preserved in a dry climate for decades too. The photographs were expected to be as unforgiving as the desert.

Development has changed the desert dramatically, as photographs from Palm Desert to Palmdale attest. A viewer might recognize, from the earlier of a pair of photographs, a mountain’s profile in the background but nothing in a foreground of shopping centers and green lawns. Still, the overall impression one takes from the exhibit is that man’s more drastic impacts are relatively isolated.

Viewers less inclined to accentuate the positive might wonder what changes a camera lens could miss, like ground water contamination or declining species, both problems in a landscape some consider most suited for waste dumps and test sites. They also might credit the timelessness of the vistas less to the resilience of the desert, which is as fragile as it is harsh, than to the vigilance of those who have worked to preserve its often unappreciated beauty in state and national parks.

For this, some credit must go to the early Auto Club explorers, whose publication helped promote the desert as a place worth preserving. The exhibit, on display through Sept. 26 at the Griffith Park museum, does the same.