By MIA JOHNSON
Reviewer, Preview Magazine
March 20, 2006
Over the past 150 years, artists in Canada and the United States
have taken a number of approaches to landscape photography.
Four traditions have predominated: a romantic view of the “wild”
landscape; a presentation of its “taming” by civilized
forces; a reactive environmental focus; and a new realism highly
dependent on advanced camera, film and printing technologies.
The oldest tradition was inspired by early colonists in North
America. Photographers treated vast areas of their adopted landscapes
as “untouched” and even mystical by ensuring there
were no traces of human civilization in their dramatic images.
In the late 1800s and the early 20th century, photographers
proud of social progress in the new land focused on the re-structuring
of nature by railways, bridges and cities. By mid-century, a
sense of urgency developed among photographers keen to address
the impact of de-forestation, global warming, industrial zoning
and urbanization. In the late 20th century, a post-modern nostalgia
for the construct of "nature" prompted a new pictorialism.
Photographers began using long exposure shots and high quality
printing processes in an effort to capture the essence of landscape.
Roberta Bondar’s new desert photographs, ranging from
panoramic to intimate, demonstrate a complex mix of several
traditions. Bondar first showed an extensive collection of her
desert photographs, both black-and-white and colour, at the
prestigious Hoopers Gallery in London, England in the spring
of 2005. Ancient Ruins and Desert Dunes provided the
Western world some of its first glimpses of the Roman ruins
found in the Libyan portion of the Sahara Desert, as well as
panoramas of the deserts of Libya and Qatar.
Bondar had seen the vast deserts from space in 1992 while working
as an astronaut on board the space shuttle Discovery,
and had resolved to visit them. In 2002, Canada established
diplomatic relations with Libya and Dr. Bondar was finally able
to experience what she describes as these “deep”
deserts. The London exhibit included her photographs of deserts
in the American Southwest and the Canadian Arctic, which she
had begun taking in 1996.
For Desert in Time at the Diane Farris Gallery, Bondar
selected images that best represented the wide horizons of the
Libyan and Qatar sand seas; the eroded rock formations of the
Acacus with their prehistoric drawings, and the ruins of ancient
Roman cities Sabratha and Leptis Magna. The exhibit also shows
deserts in the Arctic, the American Southwest, Mexico, and intimate
images of small desert life forms.
In particular, Bondar sought to capture what she describes in
the accompanying catalogue as “the sharp edge of our planet
as it makes abrupt contact with the surrounding atmosphere…
[seen] best over vast expanses such as oceans and mountains
that create a horizon distinctly demarcated from the atmosphere
that we call the sky.”
Applying the earliest photographic tradition, Bondar’s
panoramas show the deserts untouched by civilization, divested
even of the vehicles and armed guards who drove her to each
Libyan location, and of the friends in every location who “followed
me more than once into dust storms, early hours before sunrise,
twilight, and the heat of daylight, watching for my safety,
even drawing me back from the edge of Earth itself.”
These pieces are reminiscent of the landscape photography of
Ansel Adams, an early American photographer inspired by both
a sense of the mystical in the natural world and a strong sense
of stewardship – one likely experienced by Bondar as well,
from the humbling heights of the space shuttle. Bondar similarly
shares with Adams a fascination with small plant forms growing
in remote areas.
In the context of a later tradition, Bondar shows remote landscapes
“tamed” by rock drawings and archeological ruins,
the latter by ancient desert people who managed to carve their
wilderness into exquisite architectural structures.
Bondar is also a socially committed photographer, enormously
concerned about environmental impact. With her photographic
work, she hopes to imbue the people of the world with a sense
of their environmental responsibility. Her book Passionate
Vision (2000) was published in large part to urge Canadians
to protect their natural resources. In Desert in Time,
she shows the global public their first glimpses of the Libyan
archeological ruins before other travelers were permitted to
visit and potentially alter their appearance.
In yet another photographic tradition, Bondar as a scientist
uses sophisticated camera equipment and printing technologies.
They are instruments of “truth” for her, used to
capture transient subject matter in bold, sharp images. And
transient many of them are. The deserts themselves are subject
to constant wind and water erosion. One of the small plants
shown in this exhibition grows for 35 years before it blooms,
and even then it proves very difficult to photograph.
Her strengths as a scientist, her inherited creativity, and
her passion for color and pattern have been formed by years
of studying how we see the world around us. Transcending her
scientific eye, however, is a more poetic expression of nature.
The exhibit might be called “the intimate and the sublime”
for the manner in which she seeks out emotionally-resonant qualities
of landscape.
Coupled with the naturally-ephemeral nature of photography itself,
Dr. Bondar’s images above all retain a strong sense of
spirituality.
© 2006 Mia Johnson
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Roberta Bondar, Dune Shadow,
© 2003-06
Ansel Adams, Sand Dunes. Death Valley,
California ©1948
Roberta Bondar, Three Prickly Pears
© 2001-06
Ansel Adams, Dogwood,
Yosemite National Park, California
© 1938 |
