Exercise 4.4: ‘Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men’

We are asked to read the within the link below. This text provides a contextual insight (particularly in relation to American photography) and an interesting sense of the climate from which much critical practice has emerged. 

http://www.deborahbright.net/PDF/Bright-Marlboro.pdf

Bright herself summarized her own essay saying: "Probably my most widely known essay, “Of Mother Nature” was an attempt to answer the question: “Why are there no great women landscape photographers?” With twenty years of hindsight, I can appreciate the polemical tone of the essay as an artifact of its time in the mid-1980s (raging gender wars within the Society for Photographic Education where I was active in the Women’s Caucus, an exciting energy as artists and scholars were speaking truth to power in the academy and art world and inventing new critical tools to dismantle entrenched minority privilege.) Those heady days seem distant, now, as conservative backlash has taken its toll. However, the fact that this essay still strikes a chord with so many young people indicates to me that it’s still doing its good work"

The essay per the copy right appears to have been written around 1985 and from this her summary suggests this itself was written 2005.

Key Comments / Points I noted:

1. The term Marlboro man rang a bell with me regarding advertising (I think TV and/or posters) for the cigarette and a manly cowboy puffing on one. A quick Wiki search and I find the following from this Wiki link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlboro_Man
"The Marlboro advertising campaign, created by Leo Burnett Worldwide, is said to be one of the most brilliant advertisement campaigns of all time.^[2] It transformed a feminine campaign, with the slogan "Mild as May", into one that was masculine, in a matter of months. There were many Marlboro Men. The first models were a Navy Lieutenant and Andy Armstrong, the ad agency’s art supervisor.^[3][4][5] Other early models were sales promotion director of Philip Morris, Robert Larking, and others from the Leo Burnett ad agency, Lee Stanley and Owen Smith.^[6] A number of models who have portrayed the Marlboro Man have died of smoking-related diseases.^[7]


2. Bright starts off reviewing I think early pictorialism as the beginnings of landscape as an art form

3. I was particularly taken by the phrase "..whatever its aesthetic merits, every representation of landscape is also a record of human values and actions imposed on the land over time".  I wonder if the human values and actions imposed on the land are those physically or those portrayed in art and photography.

4. "The red blooded pioneer life" she refers to has been the subject of many films of the 50's and 60's and many of which I think I likely grew up watching with my parents. The strong male pioneer fighting of the Indians I think must be the Malboro men that Bright refers to. Actors portraying the masculine cowboy types were seen by the film goers as strong and red blooded and their woman often portrayed as the emotional homemakers in the big dresses. I note a few real life strong women of this era existed such as Cattle Kate and Calamity Jane.

5. Much of the scenery depicted in the stereotypical films I refer to above had been captured on canvas or as photographic prints. The real life pioneers brought in the rail-roads and to a degree facilitated travel and views of these locations and "lured tourists into making the journey to find the Real Thing."

6. Bright mentions "Returning to landscape, what can photographs of landscapes tell us about how we construct our sense of the world and its relations?" . Does this mean our views of landscape images are shaped by how the photographers interpret them since people both current and past may have no personal access or access to an unbias view of that particular landscape. There have personal views of the landscape and fitment within entirely shaped by the photograph. I expect the black and white cowboy type films did exactly the same when describing the red-blooded male and home making women of that era.

7. Following on from 6 above this most certainly would have been the view of male and female photographers in early landscape imagery with just a few Cattle Kate's / Calamity Jane's being accepted among the red blooded pioneering male landscape photographers