‘There are no people in these photographs’: Human scarcity, the Sierra Club aesthetic, and the politics of presence

Abstract

Abstract The 1960s saw Californian environmental group the Sierra Club attempt to aestheticize conservation politics through an ambitious photographic publishing programme. Praised within the decade, prominent environmental organization leaders credited the initiative for increasing the ranks of conservation groups, catalysing public sympathy for the American wilds, and popularizing the idea of ecology. Yet critics contended that the programme created and popularized a landscape aesthetic predicated on human absence. In doing so, the Sierra Club was seen to obscure urban, class- and race-based environmental problems and help entrench a vision of nature that was separate, fantastical and elitist. In an attempt to communicate how such publications constructed nature, other studies have discounted the club’s own debates about human presence in their publishing content. This article places ideological debates about the inclusion of people within conservation photography in centre frame. It explores how the role of human presence in late 1960s conservation photography was simultaneously connected to a nostalgic desire for the return to pre-war preservationist practice and – somewhat paradoxically – to the emergent, broadened agenda of environmentalism. Furthermore, it connects disputes over presence to growing concerns about the public image of American environmentalism.