The sparse landscapes of Wayne Gudmundson portray a world that, in the words of fellow photographer Robert Adams, “most people dismiss as uninteresting.”1 Adams recognizes that Gudmundson’s photographs do not easily or readily give up their content, for the content is like the land itself, quiet and brooding, offering subtle revelations that on close reading will unfold and expand to yield the rich character of not only the land, but also of those who live there. Despite their seemingly immutable emptiness, not a thing is missing from them. They are complete aesthetic statements.
When Gudmundson began exploring landscape photography in the early 1980s, he had been making pictures for over a decade. He understood the medium’s potential for expression and, significantly, its capacity to present subjects directly, yet without any sacrifice of their ambiguity. The open and arid wilderness of the upper Midwest became his muse. As his work developed, he began to direct his photographic passion toward an exploration of the land of his ancestors that simultaneously affirmed the present. In images he could see the land of the upper Midwest through the eyes of those who had come before him. His work has since evolved into a visual gift of memory, sense of place, and heritage for future generations.
Through his relationship with his grandfather in Mountain, North Dakota, as a child Gudmundson began to absorb the stories and traditions of his Icelandic heritage. Years later, as an adult, a husband, and a father, Gudmundson would deepen that knowledge. Since the Middle Ages, Icelanders have forged literary and philosophical traditions inspired by a strong and respectful bond with the land. As the fifth president of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, recently wrote: “To be was to worship the land in good times and bad. Our identity and the love of our country were forged from images of mountains and waterfalls, lava fields and walls of ice, moorland lakes and the ocean.”2 Wallace Stegner has observed that a child exposed to a particular environment at a “susceptible time will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.”3 When Icelanders left the island-nation for North America, referred to as “western Iceland,” they brought with them their tradition of respect for the land.
Stegner wrote about our deep-seated need to connect meaningfully with the places where we choose to live: “A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it—have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”4 With the slow passage of time, we begin to know, to formulate, our relationship and understanding of our homeland. Gudmundson himself has pondered, “If there can be a bonding of landscape to person, to what extent can that be carried on generation to generation, and is there an accompanying sensibility that takes place?”5
In Gudmundson’s visual response to the austere landscapes of the upper Midwest, he melds his personal experience with his forbears’ relationship with their adopted land, a part of America that was, in Stegner’s words, “the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”6 Gudmundson’s insight was to recognize that these simple terrains can be deeply influential on the people who have lived and continue to live there. He developed through his photography a sensibility that neither condemns nor exalts its surroundings; it records as faithfully as possible the tableaux of a world inhabited by man and controlled by nature.
In arriving at his own expressive language, Gudmundson first responded to the work of modern masters Edward Weston and Walker Evans. Of the two, it is perhaps Evans, in his guileless portrayal of everyday life, who has had the most profound and lasting effect on Gudmundson. Evans thought that style, or idiosyncratic form, interfered with or even hid the truth of a subject. He merged form and content so that neither could be separated from the other without being diminished.
Gudmundson’s austere and vast landscapes are perhaps even more usefully compared to those of an earlier photographer, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, known for photographing the western territories on early U.S. government expeditions in the late nineteenth century. O’Sullivan’s work was rediscovered by Ansel Adams, who found it “surrealistic and disturbing,”7 and has been seen variously as either a precursor of modernism or mere scientific documentation. But scholarly debate is not the issue in relation to Gudmundson. The point of comparison is that both photographers use the camera to frame a vast and unpopulated wilderness in order to convey the information and the visceral experience it offers. They share a process and a subject. O’Sullivan has been closely studied for how he interpreted, or re-presented, the land. By virtue of making a photograph, he scaled down the expansive terrains, imposing a sense of cultural order on the wilderness. The photograph tamed the land and made it manageable. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographer alike conduct “mapping and imaging of a land as at once a physical reality, a national symbol, and an order of political and cultural control.”8 Though Gudmundson has no overt agenda, his pictures, by documenting and conserving a region, inevitably exert a social and cultural control over it.
During the late nineteenth century, through the efforts of O’Sullivan and others who followed—including William Henry Jackson and Hudson River painters Thomas Cole and Frederick Church—the western wilderness and its wide-open spaces would become an important symbol of the American experience. The Midwest and the western territories beyond became a visual icon for America’s sense of freedom and desire. O’Sullivan represented a land that was as yet “unmarked, unmeasured, and wild, a place in which man is not yet—and not without an immense future effort—the measure of all things.”9 In a different historical moment, Gudmundson focuses on the issues of humankind’s marking and measuring the land:
Photographically, I enjoy the layering of marks on the landscape made by the forces of man and nature. I’m fascinated by the presence of the Jeffersonian grid, by the location and variations of the railroad company’s platted towns, by the physical response of people to the considerable forces of the region’s harsh weather. I have always been interested in this occupied, although thinly, vernacular landscape. Human artifacts are still evident and act as testaments to previous optimism and epitaphs of failed efforts.10
The photographs by O’Sullivan have been described as portraying “tropes of the sublime.”11 The nineteenth-century experience of the sublime that informed O’Sullivan’s work and that of his contemporaries was seen as all-consuming, threatening to overwhelm humans with the vast and terrifying forces of nature, yet transmuted into awe through the distancing effect of aesthetics. Gudmundson’s landscapes often evoke a hint of a melancholy sublime. The marks of man are evident, but seemingly insignificant compared with the dominion of nature. The unpeopled snow-blanketed fields, abandoned buildings, disappearing roads, and endless and unbroken horizons suggest a land abandoned, left to the violent vicissitudes of natural forces.
Gudmundson challenges the traditional pictorial conventions of landscape imagery and represents the land not as beautiful spectacle or pleasurable Eden, but as the still-to-be-tamed wilderness that O’Sullivan first photographed some 140 years earlier. It is the same wilderness that Stegner hoped would not disappear under humankind’s relentless encroachment: “Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment.”12
Though Gudmundson’s art reflects a deep understanding of Stegner and other thinkers, and the picture-making principles of Walker Evans, these do not form its intellectual underpinnings. The deeper impetus is the land itself and the families who steward it. During the long process of examining the land of his birth, Gudmundson has represented the moments and spaces that are, for him, defining. His sense of the region is defined by obscure, out-of-the-way, seemingly empty vistas, with perhaps one building still left standing, one solitary road marker. Few others, if any, have photographed the upper Midwest as honestly as Gudmundson. His work evokes what Stegner focused his career on—the knowing of a place. Paraphrasing his friend Wendell Berry, Stegner remarked: “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are,” and went on to clarify what Berry was striving for:
He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of a place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is talking about the knowing that poets specialize in. . . . No place is a place until it has had a poet.13
Gudmundson is the visual poet of the upper Midwest. His familiarity with its many aspects is hard-won, deep, and intimate. The landscapes of Gudmundson’s melancholy sublime do not pretend to be the last word, or even to offer conclusions. The land still beckons.
1 Robert Adams to Wayne Gudmundson, Sept. 1984.
2 Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, “A Message from the President,” in Gu›mundur Ingólfsson and Wayne Gudmundson, Heimahagar–Homeplaces (Minneapolis, 1997), 3.
3 Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962; New York, 2000), 21.
4 Wallace Stegner, “The Sense of Place” (1986), Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (New York, 1992), 201.
5 In Dan Gunderson, “Icelandic Heritage Frames Photographer’s Work,” Minnesota Public Radio interview with Wayne Gudmundson, Dec. 30, 1997, http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/ 199712/30_gundersond_iceland/
6 Wallace Stegner, “The Wilderness Letter,” in Peter Forbes, ed., Our Land, Ourselves: Readings on People and Place (1967; San Francisco, 1999), 77.
7 Quoted in Joel Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 2002), 192.
8 Graham Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford, 1997), 60.
9 Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” 196.
10 Wayne Gudmundson to author, spring 2004.
11 Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” 197.
12 Stegner, “Wilderness Letter,” 77.
13 Stegner, “Sense of Place,” 205.
Rusty Freeman: The Work
The sparse landscapes of Wayne Gudmundson portray a world that, in the words of fellow photographer Robert Adams, “most people dismiss as uninteresting.”1 Adams recognizes that Gudmundson’s photographs do not easily or readily give up their content, for the content is like the land itself, quiet and brooding, offering subtle revelations that on close reading will unfold and expand to yield the rich character of not only the land, but also of those who live there. Despite their seemingly immutable emptiness, not a thing is missing from them. They are complete aesthetic statements.
When Gudmundson began exploring landscape photography in the early 1980s, he had been making pictures for over a decade. He understood the medium’s potential for expression and, significantly, its capacity to present subjects directly, yet without any sacrifice of their ambiguity. The open and arid wilderness of the upper Midwest became his muse. As his work developed, he began to direct his photographic passion toward an exploration of the land of his ancestors that simultaneously affirmed the present. In images he could see the land of the upper Midwest through the eyes of those who had come before him. His work has since evolved into a visual gift of memory, sense of place, and heritage for future generations.
Through his relationship with his grandfather in Mountain, North Dakota, as a child Gudmundson began to absorb the stories and traditions of his Icelandic heritage. Years later, as an adult, a husband, and a father, Gudmundson would deepen that knowledge. Since the Middle Ages, Icelanders have forged literary and philosophical traditions inspired by a strong and respectful bond with the land. As the fifth president of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, recently wrote: “To be was to worship the land in good times and bad. Our identity and the love of our country were forged from images of mountains and waterfalls, lava fields and walls of ice, moorland lakes and the ocean.”2 Wallace Stegner has observed that a child exposed to a particular environment at a “susceptible time will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.”3 When Icelanders left the island-nation for North America, referred to as “western Iceland,” they brought with them their tradition of respect for the land.
Stegner wrote about our deep-seated need to connect meaningfully with the places where we choose to live: “A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it—have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”4 With the slow passage of time, we begin to know, to formulate, our relationship and understanding of our homeland. Gudmundson himself has pondered, “If there can be a bonding of landscape to person, to what extent can that be carried on generation to generation, and is there an accompanying sensibility that takes place?”5
In Gudmundson’s visual response to the austere landscapes of the upper Midwest, he melds his personal experience with his forbears’ relationship with their adopted land, a part of America that was, in Stegner’s words, “the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”6 Gudmundson’s insight was to recognize that these simple terrains can be deeply influential on the people who have lived and continue to live there. He developed through his photography a sensibility that neither condemns nor exalts its surroundings; it records as faithfully as possible the tableaux of a world inhabited by man and controlled by nature.
In arriving at his own expressive language, Gudmundson first responded to the work of modern masters Edward Weston and Walker Evans. Of the two, it is perhaps Evans, in his guileless portrayal of everyday life, who has had the most profound and lasting effect on Gudmundson. Evans thought that style, or idiosyncratic form, interfered with or even hid the truth of a subject. He merged form and content so that neither could be separated from the other without being diminished.
Gudmundson’s austere and vast landscapes are perhaps even more usefully compared to those of an earlier photographer, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, known for photographing the western territories on early U.S. government expeditions in the late nineteenth century. O’Sullivan’s work was rediscovered by Ansel Adams, who found it “surrealistic and disturbing,”7 and has been seen variously as either a precursor of modernism or mere scientific documentation. But scholarly debate is not the issue in relation to Gudmundson. The point of comparison is that both photographers use the camera to frame a vast and unpopulated wilderness in order to convey the information and the visceral experience it offers. They share a process and a subject. O’Sullivan has been closely studied for how he interpreted, or re-presented, the land. By virtue of making a photograph, he scaled down the expansive terrains, imposing a sense of cultural order on the wilderness. The photograph tamed the land and made it manageable. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographer alike conduct “mapping and imaging of a land as at once a physical reality, a national symbol, and an order of political and cultural control.”8 Though Gudmundson has no overt agenda, his pictures, by documenting and conserving a region, inevitably exert a social and cultural control over it.
During the late nineteenth century, through the efforts of O’Sullivan and others who followed—including William Henry Jackson and Hudson River painters Thomas Cole and Frederick Church—the western wilderness and its wide-open spaces would become an important symbol of the American experience. The Midwest and the western territories beyond became a visual icon for America’s sense of freedom and desire. O’Sullivan represented a land that was as yet “unmarked, unmeasured, and wild, a place in which man is not yet—and not without an immense future effort—the measure of all things.”9 In a different historical moment, Gudmundson focuses on the issues of humankind’s marking and measuring the land:
Photographically, I enjoy the layering of marks on the landscape made by the forces of man and nature. I’m fascinated by the presence of the Jeffersonian grid, by the location and variations of the railroad company’s platted towns, by the physical response of people to the considerable forces of the region’s harsh weather. I have always been interested in this occupied, although thinly, vernacular landscape. Human artifacts are still evident and act as testaments to previous optimism and epitaphs of failed efforts.10
The photographs by O’Sullivan have been described as portraying “tropes of the sublime.”11 The nineteenth-century experience of the sublime that informed O’Sullivan’s work and that of his contemporaries was seen as all-consuming, threatening to overwhelm humans with the vast and terrifying forces of nature, yet transmuted into awe through the distancing effect of aesthetics. Gudmundson’s landscapes often evoke a hint of a melancholy sublime. The marks of man are evident, but seemingly insignificant compared with the dominion of nature. The unpeopled snow-blanketed fields, abandoned buildings, disappearing roads, and endless and unbroken horizons suggest a land abandoned, left to the violent vicissitudes of natural forces.
Gudmundson challenges the traditional pictorial conventions of landscape imagery and represents the land not as beautiful spectacle or pleasurable Eden, but as the still-to-be-tamed wilderness that O’Sullivan first photographed some 140 years earlier. It is the same wilderness that Stegner hoped would not disappear under humankind’s relentless encroachment: “Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment.”12
Though Gudmundson’s art reflects a deep understanding of Stegner and other thinkers, and the picture-making principles of Walker Evans, these do not form its intellectual underpinnings. The deeper impetus is the land itself and the families who steward it. During the long process of examining the land of his birth, Gudmundson has represented the moments and spaces that are, for him, defining. His sense of the region is defined by obscure, out-of-the-way, seemingly empty vistas, with perhaps one building still left standing, one solitary road marker. Few others, if any, have photographed the upper Midwest as honestly as Gudmundson. His work evokes what Stegner focused his career on—the knowing of a place. Paraphrasing his friend Wendell Berry, Stegner remarked: “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are,” and went on to clarify what Berry was striving for:
He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of a place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is talking about the knowing that poets specialize in. . . . No place is a place until it has had a poet.13
Gudmundson is the visual poet of the upper Midwest. His familiarity with its many aspects is hard-won, deep, and intimate. The landscapes of Gudmundson’s melancholy sublime do not pretend to be the last word, or even to offer conclusions. The land still beckons.
1 Robert Adams to Wayne Gudmundson, Sept. 1984.
2 Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, “A Message from the President,” in Gu›mundur Ingólfsson and Wayne Gudmundson, Heimahagar–Homeplaces (Minneapolis, 1997), 3.
3 Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962; New York, 2000), 21.
4 Wallace Stegner, “The Sense of Place” (1986), Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (New York, 1992), 201.
5 In Dan Gunderson, “Icelandic Heritage Frames Photographer’s Work,” Minnesota Public Radio interview with Wayne Gudmundson, Dec. 30, 1997, http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/ 199712/30_gundersond_iceland/
6 Wallace Stegner, “The Wilderness Letter,” in Peter Forbes, ed., Our Land, Ourselves: Readings on People and Place (1967; San Francisco, 1999), 77.
7 Quoted in Joel Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 2002), 192.
8 Graham Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford, 1997), 60.
9 Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” 196.
10 Wayne Gudmundson to author, spring 2004.
11 Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” 197.
12 Stegner, “Wilderness Letter,” 77.
13 Stegner, “Sense of Place,” 205.