Our New Jerusalems

“Recent Terrains,” a new collection of landscape photographs by Laurie Brown, opens with a dreamlike black and white panorama of a low hill above a dark, rutted plain. The sunstruck crown of the hill is crenelated with a curving wall of houses that seems both arrogant and defensive. Just below, the freshly landscaped slope descends like the fortification of a city ready for war. It would be a hard fight and hand-to-hand among the whirring sprinklers for an army to take this high ground. [See photograph below.]

“Sacred Ilium,” I think, another town where the price of an ordinary life was loyalty to an imperfect place. These houses on a man-made hill in Orange County are a suburb of doomed Troy. Like the other houses in Brown’s stoically ambiguous photographs from the suburban fringe, they recall how the story of Troy ends. Every city ultimately disappoints, Homer knew, and therefore is to be cherished while you can.

“Recent Terrains” is the collaborative work of a photographer, a poet and an essayist, and they have mixed reactions to what Homer knew. Martha Ronk, at the end of “Arroyo Seco” (the first of three poems that head the sections of Brown’s photographs), can’t decide:

. . . after a while, I couldn’t tell if

nostalgia was

for a place or a time or before learning

to think.

Until, in “Peripheral Views,” the middle poem, she considers that the ultimate state of grace might be one in which all of us are absent:

Before the streets laid out in grids,

before groves of oranges

and avocados, the horizon stared into

space as wind grew hotter

and light whiter and time slowed to

ripening vine.

There’s no place so timeless and no room to be nostalgic in the deeply textured photographs of freshly graded hillsides and cul-de-sacs under construction that are the substance of “Recent Terrains.” Presented as panoramas, Brown’s photographs aren’t vistas in the romantic tradition of American nature photography. She generally brings our attention to the confused middle ground in each photograph, where some abstract moment of place-making has just been arrested.

Over that disturbed ground, caught between man-made and unmade, hang two contentious views about the landscape of California. The first is that its unbuilt places invite your and my presence, but only to be acolytes of its unspoiled divinity. The second is that the empty land actually requires our presence, to build cities on it and a temporary home for civility. However opposite, these views contain something in common, namely the wholly American idea of improvement.

Improvement works both ways. The wild is almost as much improved by my regard, thought John Muir, as I am ennobled by its effects on me; and I am, thought Walt Whitman, as improved by my labor in building a house as the wasteland is on which I build it. This is our national contradiction, that American landscapes are better when they are left free and when they are built up. It is the irresolvable core of what it means to make one’s place in America.

The three sequences of Brown’s photographs of new subdivisions make this point emphatically. They also reveal all the uncertainties in photographing American scenes that Charles E. Little’s terminal essay collapses into unsurprising certainties.

*

Photography, as the first modern art form (that is, the first to give the accuracy of science greater weight than the indeterminacy of aesthetics), had promised hard evidence, but it delivered more conjecture. “This is the way things are,” a photograph insists, but we know by now that it’s only the way something was, and only for an instant and in one preferred direction, without reference to what was off to one side and without much connection to the instants before or any that followed.

Photography also is the most romantic of art forms, claiming an epiphany for both the photographer and the viewer with each mechanical click of the camera’s shutter but only revealing that instant’s true emotion later, after competing and unarresting images of the same scene are weeded out. Then, the pictures are shuffled in time (as Brown’s are), their edges cropped to fit and their colors abstracted to black and white until one is tempted to see a “just so” story in them.

Little’s concluding essay succumbs lyrically to the temptation. The poetry of Californian regret always evokes a time of libidinal adolescence acted out against a backdrop of Arcadian beauty (as if the glorious orange groves grew without migrant labor or rigid segregation). In his few hundred words, Little joy-rides among the orange trees with police pursuing, takes a clandestine plunge in a film star’s pool, pulls sweet fruit from the careless abundance of a neighbor’s yard and engineers a first tryst on the beach. How can ordinary suburban houses, “perched,” he writes, “on the terraformed landscapes of despair,” stand against so much militant nostalgia?

Brown’s answer is subtle. Her photographs do not appeal to elegiac memory and even less to unspoiled nature. She shows landscapes caught in a transitional moment of their improvement, so that graded house lots on one page are equivalent on the next to the trampled ground left by the herds of sheep that once processed these hills and by the Spanish and Mexican cattle that preceded the sheep and by the Native Americans, whose cultivation of the “wild” oak trees by fire and cutting came first.

That a landscape with houses and without them has some equivalent properties turns up in Ronk’s final poem, “Site of Staring,” by recalling the timeless, watchful horizon without us, except now

The houses whiten on the hillside

as suns written into years unborn. . . .

All cities are like Troy in their potential to mingle tragedy and the commonplace, Homer knew. Brown reaches toward that knowledge without flinching or sentiment. Though ambivalent as her photographs must be, she shows us towns being made that may claim someone’s allegiance, answer their longing and persist in memory. Homer knew such places were as sacred as they were vulnerable--New Jerusalems turning into Troys.