Abstract<\/strong> |\u00a0In the accompanying essay, I examine attachment to places, particularly to the prairie. My attachment to the Saskatchewan prairie is partly a fondness for the abstract and minimal. More deeply, it is what philosophers have called an aesthetic engagement, that is, an active participation and immersion in a place. Psychologically, my attachment to the prairies is a result of the significant personal memories I carry with me, my emotional investments in my (adopted) home, and the social ties and sense of community I felt living there. Being out on the prairie also evokes a certain contemplative, self-reflective melancholy in me, an emotional experience, while not always pleasant, I also cherish and court.<\/p>\n
A number of artists have reflected on how growing up on the prairies has had a profound influence on their work. Georgia O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s paintings reflect the \u201cbarren beauty\u201d of the plains. Wright Morris said that the prairie \u201cconditioned what I see, what I look for, and what I find in the world to write about. The plain is a metaphysical landscape…Where there is almost nothing to see, there man sees the most.\u201d<\/div><\/p>\n
R\u00e9sum\u00e9\u00a0<\/strong>|\u00a0Dans cet essai, j\u2019examine l\u2019attachement personnel au lieu, tout particuli\u00e8rement les Prairies. Mon attachement aux prairies de la Saskatchewan tient en partie \u00e0 une affection pour l\u2019abstrait et le minimal. Plus pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, c\u2019est ce que les philosophes appellent un engagement esth\u00e9tique c\u2019est-\u00e0-dire une participation et immersion active dans un espace. Psychologiquement, mon attachement aux Prairies est le r\u00e9sultat de souvenirs personnels significatifs que je porte en moi, de mon investissement \u00e9motionnel pour ma maison (d\u2019adoption) et des liens sociaux et du sens de la communaut\u00e9 que j\u2019y ai d\u00e9velopp\u00e9s. \u00catre en plein air dans les Prairies \u00e9voque aussi chez moi une certaine m\u00e9lancolie r\u00e9flexive et contemplative ; une exp\u00e9rience \u00e9motionnelle qui bien que parfois d\u00e9plaisante, je recherche et appr\u00e9cie toujours.<\/p>\n
Un nombre d\u2019artistes ont r\u00e9fl\u00e9chi sur l\u2019influence profonde que grandir dans les prairies a eu sur leur \u0153uvre. Les peintures de Georgia O\u2019Keeffe sont une r\u00e9flexion sur la beaut\u00e9 infertile des plaines. Wright Morris a dit que les prairies \u00ab\u00a0ont conditionn\u00e9 ce que je vois, ce que je recherche et ce que je d\u00e9couvre et dont je parle dans le monde. Les plaines sont un paysage m\u00e9taphysique\u2026ou il n\u2019y a presque rien \u00e0 voir, ou l\u2019\u00eatre humain observe le plus.\u00a0\u00bb<\/div>
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John Conway | Photographer<\/p>\n
SEEING SASKATCHEWAN<\/h4>\n
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The camera eye is the one in the middle of our forehead,
\ncombining how we see with what there is to be seen. <\/em>(Morris 11).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I have photographed the Saskatchewan prairie for close to 40 years. Though I came to the prairies \u201cfrom away,\u201d as they say in Atlantic Canada, I developed a strong attachment to the landscape. Why, I have wondered, have I grown so fond of driving, walking, and photographing the prairie? What about being on this land attracts me? Or, perhaps, this attraction is more about me than the land, that is, something about my psychological make-up has led me to become attached to the prairie rather than to mountains or forests.<\/p>\n
I began to realize how profoundly the prairie landscape influenced my seeing when, early on, I spent a year in California and could only photograph the sea, its strong horizontal divide near the middle of my viewfinder. I could not photograph landscapes there as they were so unlike my beloved prairies. Traveling over the years, I have often photographed landscapes reminiscent of the prairie. In these 10 diptychs, I place Saskatchewan prairie landscapes alongside photographs from other landscapes that are reminiscent of the prairie\u2014Tuscany, Costa Rica, Mexico, the United States, and other Canadian provinces.<\/p>\n
Forty years ago, I began to photograph the prairie landscape as an outsider, as a tourist or newcomer, in a distant and detached way. Over the years, my view gradually evolved into that of an insider\u2014a participant engaged in the place. As a tourist in these other places where I have travelled, my view is as an outsider, an outsider looking inward to a remembered landscape of his (adopted) home place.<\/p>\n
I left Saskatchewan nine years ago, returning regularly to photograph my prairie homeland. Photographing the prairie is a great passion of mine, but also a limitation, as I seem to have lost interest in photographing much else.<\/p>\n
In this essay, I examine attachment to places, particularly the prairie, and the influence of attachment to the prairie landscape on my art work.<\/p>\n
The Prairie: Love It or Leave It<\/strong><\/h5>\n
The prairie landscape certainly does not appeal to everyone. How many do you know who have driven across southern Saskatchewan on the Trans-Canada for the first time and raved about the beautiful landscape?<\/p>\n
Lured by cheap land and extravagant promises of fertile soil, early settlers typically found the prairies a harsh place.[1]<\/a> For example, a Welshman on his way to his homestead in Saskatchewan wrote home in 1910:<\/p>\n
This was so unlike what we had imagined back in Wales. We had visualized a green country with hills around. There was something so impersonal about this prairie, something that shattered any hope of feeling attached to it or even building a home on it. (qtd. in Rees 157-158 )<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To enrich their understanding of the problems of adjustment to an alien environment, American astronauts at one time were required to read Walter Prescott Webb\u2019s classic study, The Great Plains<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Many newcomers find the prairies to be barren, desolate, and alienating, a \u201cvast nothingness\u201d; they feel exposed, vulnerable, frightened in the emptiness of the prairie, as if they were \u201con the edge of the earth\u201d (de Witt 36).<\/p>\n
Others are immediately taken by the prairie landscape. Albert Pyke, traveling in Texas in 1831-1832, wrote:<\/p>\n
The sea, the woods, the mountains, all suffer in comparison with the prairie….The prairie has a stronger hold upon the senses. Its sublimity arises from its unbounded extent, its barren monotony and desolation, its still, unmoved, calm, stern, almost self-confident grandeur, its strange power of deception, its want of echo, and, in fine, its power of throwing a man back upon himself. (qtd in Haley)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Walt Whitman referred to the prairie as \u201cthat vast Something, stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined … combining the real and ideal, and beautiful as dreams\u201d. He spoke of the \u201cgrandeur and superb monotony of the skies,\u201d and \u201chow freeing, soothing, nourishing they are to the soul\u201d (qtd. in Milton 59).<\/p>\n
Aesthetic Attachment to the Prairie Landscape<\/strong><\/p>\n
Geographers have studied what they call a sense of place\u2014the affective bond between people and place or setting. Such ties may vary in intensity, subtlety, and mode of expression. Responses to the environment may be aesthetic, tactile, or emotional (Tuan; Relph).<\/p>\n
My attachment to the Saskatchewan prairie is partly aesthetic. Connoisseurs of the \u201cpicturesque\u201d in the 18^{th<\/sup> century used a special device through which they viewed natural landscapes: the \u201cClaude Glass,\u201d a tinted convex mirror that framed and reflected the view, transforming it into something like a miniature painting (Brady 316).<\/p>\n}
Looking through my camera viewfinder is not unlike this kind of \u201cpicturesque\u201d or \u201cscenic\u201d aesthetic appreciation. I appreciate, aesthetically, many visual art works of the prairie landscape, including my own photographs. My aesthetic appreciation of a landscape has to do with the abstract minimalism of the expansive prairie land and sky.<\/p>\n
However, standing out in the middle of a prairie landscape evokes something more than a two-dimensional, visual appreciation of a scenic place. There is a strong sense of the tremendous vastness and the power of the open prairie. The experience can be both exhilarating and, with a storm approaching, overwhelming and frightening. The experience, for me, has been what Brady describes as the \u201csublime\u201d in nature (318).<\/p>\n
My experience of the prairie is what Berleant has described as an aesthetic \u201cengagement.\u201d Such engagement in a landscape involves active participation and immersion in a place. Many times I have stood in the middle of a vast prairie landscape immersed in the vista, the smell of wheat, the song of a meadowlark, the feel of the wind on my face.<\/p>\n
Being in the natural environment, unlike looking at works of visual art, allows one an aesthetic experience that draws on a broader range of senses.<\/p>\n
My attachment to the prairie comes, then, from both a visual appreciation of the minimal scenic viewpoint and a 40-year personal engagement with the landscape.<\/p>\n
Psychological Attachment to the Prairie Landscape<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Though not born or raised in Saskatchewan, it is my home, as I have lived there for over 40 years. Environmental psychologists (see Scannell & Gifford) understand my attachment to the place as a result of the many significant memories I carry with me, my emotional investments in my home place, my social ties there, and the sense of community I feel being there. Saskatchewan was a good fit for me as many of the traditional values there (such as community and social justice) matched my own values.<\/p>\n
My psychological attachment to the prairie is also associated with emotional experiences. Being out on the prairie brings feelings of solitude and calm, and also a certain contemplative, self-reflective melancholy. My photographs of the prairie today are more melancholy than before. After photographing only in colour, I prefer a black-and-white aesthetic today.<\/p>\n
A few of my friends have told me that they sense a feeling of longing or yearning in many of my prairie photographs, even in my older, colour work. While this was a surprise to me at first, I now recognize what I understand as melancholy in my pictures.<\/p>\n
I think that the longing or melancholy I experience while photographing the prairie, connoted in my pictures, has as much to do with me as it does with qualities inherent in the prairie landscape.<\/p>\n
The prairie landscape itself does evoke negative emotions in some, including isolation, loneliness, vulnerability, fear.<\/p>\n
For me, being out on the prairie has often brought some melancholy. I think this is simply because melancholy is a part of my inner life that is stirred while alone on the empty prairie. Today, returning to Saskatchewan after leaving brings back many memories of my life there, along with nostalgia and some regret.<\/p>\n
My melancholy is not usually enjoyable or otherwise a positive feeling. Yet melancholy is a very familiar emotional experience of mine. It is a familiar habit of mind. Melancholy is a part of me. In a sense, I am \u201cattached\u201d to my melancholic nature.<\/p>\n
At the same time, I am aesthetically engaged and psychologically attached to the prairie landscape in the positive ways I\u2019ve described.<\/p>\n
Attachment to the Prairie as an Influence on One\u2019s Art Work<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Visual art in the tradition of abstract expressionism and minimalism can reflect the minimal and abstract landscapes of the prairie. Artists who grow up on the prairie often feel that the landscape leaves an indelible print on their imagination.<\/p>\n
Jackson Pollock, who grew up in Wyoming, never got over what he called the West\u2019s expansiveness and \u201cvast horizontality,\u201d qualities that influenced his abstract paintings. The lines that he put into his paintings express an expansiveness that has been associated with the Western landscape. Because the landscape is relatively empty and uncluttered, it lends itself both to abstraction and to the filling of the open spaces. In Pollock the two approaches come together. (Milton 61)<\/p>\n
Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, who grew up on the Midwest plains and lived most of her later years on the high plateaus of New Mexico, thought that where a painter grew up and lived was reflected in their art. Her own paintings reflect the \u201cbarren beauty\u201d of the plains (Milton 61).<\/p>\n
Wright Morris, the novelist and photographer who spent his adolescent years in Nebraska, said that the prairie \u201cconditioned what I see, what I look for, and what I find in the world to write about. The plain is a metaphysical landscape…Where there is almost nothing to see, there man sees the most\u201d (qtd. in Marty).<\/p>\n
Robert Adams, who for years photographed the plains in Eastern Colorado in black and white, was greatly influenced by his deep attachment to his home land. He described his engagement with the plains:<\/p>\n
Were you and I to drive the plains together, and the day turned out to be a good one, we might not say much. We might get out of the truck at a crossroads, stretch, walk a little ways, and then walk back. Maybe the lark would sing. Maybe we would stand for a while, all views to the horizon, all roads interesting. We might find there a balance of form and openness, even of community and freedom. It would be the world as we had hoped, and we would recognize it together (Adams 182).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Works Cited<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Adams, Robert. Why People Photograph<\/em>. New York:\u00a0 Aperture, 1994.<\/p>\n
Berleant, A. \u201cWhat is Aesthetic Engagement?\u201d Contemporary Aesthetics<\/em> (December 30, 2013). Online publication. Accessed July 14, 2016. http:\/\/www.contempaesthetics.org\/newvolume\/pages\/article.php?articleID=684<\/p>\n
Brady, Emily. \u201cEnvironmental Aesthetics.\u201d Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy<\/em>. Vol. 1. Ed. J. Callicott and Robert Frodeman. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2009. 313-321.<\/p>\n
de Wit, Cary W. “Women’s Sense of Place on the American High Plains.” Great Plains Quarterly<\/em> 21 (2001): 29\u201344.<\/p>\n
Haley, J.E. \u201cAlbert Pike’s Journeys in the Prairie 1831-1832.\u201d Panhandle Plains Historical Review<\/em> 41.4 (1969): 1-89.<\/p>\n
Marty, M.E.\u00a0 \u201cThe Description of Place: The Plains, the Prairies, and the Humanities.\u201d Nebraska Governor\u2019s Lecture. 1997.<\/p>\n
Milton, John. \u201cPlains Landscapes And Changing Visions.\u201d Great Plains Quarterly<\/em> 1.1 (1982): 55-62.<\/p>\n
Morris, Wright. Time Pieces, Photographs, Writing and Memory<\/em>. New York: Aperture, 1999<\/p>\n
Rees, Ronald. \u201cNostalgic Reaction and the Canadian Prairie.\u201d Great Plains Quarterly<\/em> 2.3 (1982): 157-67.<\/p>\n
Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness<\/em>. London: Pion, 1976<\/p>\n
Relph, Edward. \u201cSense of Place: an Overview.\u201d Placeness, Place, Placelessness<\/em>. March 1, 2015. A website by Edward (Ted) Relph. Accessed July 14, 2016. http:\/\/www.placeness.com\/sense-of-place-an-overview\/<\/p>\n
Scannell, L. and Robert Gifford. \u201cDefining place attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework.\u201d Journal of Environmental Psychology<\/em> 30.1 (2010): 1-10.<\/p>\n
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values. <\/em>Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974.<\/p>\n
Webb, W.P. The Great Plains: A Study in Institutions and Environment.<\/em> Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1931.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Notes<\/h5>\n
[1]<\/a> The Canadian government greatly exaggerated the promise of farming on the prairie, especially the Palliser triangle in Sask., to entice European settlers. In the first decade of the 20th Century most who had settled left due to severe drought. And then, during the depression, many more left after years of drought and no crops.<\/p>\n
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SEEING SASKATCHEWAN<\/h4>\nThis slideshow requires JavaScript.<\/p>