Roger Minick’s “Woman with a Scarf at Inspiration Point, Yosemite Valley, 1980,” reproduced here under Fair Use guidelines for purposes of criticism, is hanging these days at the Getty Museum right now as part of the exhibit In Focus, The Landscape. The exhibit is small but worthwhile, with photos from photographers as diverse as Steiglitz, Porter, and Weston, Adams and Lange, and covers a century and a half of landscape photography.
Minick’s ironic photo has become an icon in the post-modern, post-Ansel world of landscape photography, a literal foregrounding of something many nature photographers would sprain themselves to avoid portraying: the tourist. I’ve seen it — or more properly, low-res reproductions of it — so often that I hardly even see it anymore, the same way you might not really hear an overplayed song when it comes on the radio. I was thus a little surprised that The Raven, who hadn’t seen the image before, had as negative a reaction to the photo as she did when we viewed it yesterday afternoon. It’s an expressly humorous image, and The Raven felt the humor came at the expense of the tourist.
It’s an interesting point. Minick merely documented an image that struck him as he visited Inspiration Point, a juxtaposition of sublime landscape and trivial snapshot. The landscape’s very sublimity has prompted its overdocumentation, almost a neutering through reverence. Yosemite is a Holy Place. It is therefore portrayed, in romantic-influenced landscape photography, as Edenic, nearly if not wholly unaffected by human industry. The prevalence of such images serves to obscure the growing effect human visitation and industry have on the landscape. If Yosemite photographs show the alpenglow on rock walls and not the Camp Curry parking lot, the parking lot can be ignored. Minick’s image subverts that process, reminding the viewer that people are an overwhelming presence in Yosemite Valley, at times even overshadowing the giant rock walls — especially if you’ve just spent a week in the backcountry, emerging into a summer afternoon full of tourist traffic and wind-blown hamburger wrappers.
The tension between these two competing views of Yosemite’s landscape reaches back to the beginning of Yosemite landscape photography. A concurrent Getty exhibit, Dialogue among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California, provides examples. Watkins is responsible for the earliest artistic photos of Yosemite, and his work is clearly influenced by painterly contemporaries in the Hudson River School. (Though Watkins couldn’t exaggerate scale the way Bierstadt might, he did frame shots carefully to accentuate scale.) Watkins was no Luddite: much of his work consisted of loving, geeky documentation of 19th Century technology and engineering. But with few exceptions, his Yosemite was devoid of obvious human presence or influence. His sometime-assistant Eadweard Muybridge and other contemporaries, however, rather regularly included people and their artifacts in their Yosemite images, many of which in Muybridge’s case were deliberately shot from the same vantage points Watkins had used for earlier photos.
The issue made an appearance during the Modernist era as well. Ansel Adams’ Sierra Nevada photos are emblematic of the unpeopled wilderness school: his protegé Rondal Partridge, son of Imogen Cunningham, sparred with Adams over the issue. Partridge’s “Pave It And Paint It Green,” for instance, stands as counterpoint to Adams’ Edenic vision (again, Fair Use):
Partridge’s shot doesn’t single out an individual tourist the way Minick’s does: even in the human-built parking lot, actual people are relegated to the background. It’s not so much the individuals who are the issue, the shot seems to imply, as the cumulative effects the individuals have en masse. Minick’s shot personalizes the intrusion into the landscape.
It thus makes sense that an observer might take Minick’s image, well, personally.
“Woman With a Scarf” is far better known than “Pave It And Paint It Green,” so it’s clear Minick’s image has found a more enthusiastic audience than the equivalent shot by the generally better-known Partridge. Critics have referred to the image’s humor, the ironic mirroring of the fall in the background with the fall on the scarf. But in 1980 the commodification of Yosemite images had long been in full swing. By 1980 a photographer would have been far more likely to encounter a tourist with El Capitan, or Bridalveil Fall, or Half Dome on a T-shirt or ball cap than a woman wearing a scarf. Images of people wearing pile jackets with Half Dome embroidered on the breast, the actual dome in the background, are trivially easy to find. It’s clear the repetition of the image isn’t the key to the humorous resonance that ‘Woman With a Scarf” has found among the environmental crowd.
I suspect the perceived humor of the image comes not from the mere repetition of the image, but from a sense of kitsch. Most enviros can imagine themselves wearing a t-shirt with Half Dome on it, or a ball cap with a giant sequoia embroidered thereon. But what greenie would wear a scarf like that? Maybe a hipster with a heavy dose of ironic detachment. No irony shows in the photo; neither attitude nor pose. The woman contemplates the void, seriously for all we can tell. One assumes the scarf is being worn unironically.
The humor, then, arises from perceived tackiness. It’s one thing to commodify Yosemite’s iconography on a hundred-dollar Polartec jacket, or, for that matter, an archival print from a revered Yosemite photographer. But a garish, two-dollar scarf? That’s just gauche.
Incongruity lies at the root of most humor, and it’s not hard to see how that might work here. Fashionable outdoor gear isn’t incongruous in a national park setting, so it passes without notice. But wearing something declasse like that scarf? It’s unhip, and therefore the person wearing it is unsophisticated, an outsider on whom the majesty of the park is almost certainly lost. Or so the straw-environmentalists of my imagining might feel.
This is a lot of freight to load on that one photograph. One could as easily read it as innocent kitsch, a woman on vacation in a cloth coat that seems to invite children’s hugging, striking due to Minick’s artful framing and the bright color in the scarf, with any humor or condescension involved belonging solely to the viewer. But the standard interpretation of the photo’s appeal, that it’s an ironic commentary on commodification, allows a wealth of other examples of commodification of those same icons to escape scrutiny, and the photo’s popularity suggests that something is at work other than mere pleasant image.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this picture before, and my response is the very opposite of humor. This is *worship*: the woman is wearing the tokens of her worship into her church. Given the period, the kerchief and her posture both say to me “Catholic at Mass”—a Mass where she may not understand all the words, but the Cathedral tells its own stories.
I like that take very much, Doctor S.
I had also never seen this picture before, and I completely misread it on first glance.
I thought it was a paid model facing the photographer with her hands tied behind her back and her face masked completely by the scarf in a “nature as an abused woman” themed shot, and I was like “wait, you’re surprised she had a negative reaction?” before I realized that I was looking at it wrong.
It’s not just ‘a tourist,’ though, is it. It’s “A Woman…”.
The open mockery of the person in the photograph (which I respond to the same way The Raven did), carries additional and very specific cultural freight not yet mentioned, which is clear enough that I react to it as a pretty unmasked insult.
To a feminist eye used to contextualizing images of women and examining what not-so-hidden messages they carry (based on norms and the violations of them in service of a message of one kind or another), she is not an immortalized or celebrated model, she is not random. She’s a mockery of class, as you say, but also age and particularly gender. Her bra straps cut into her back emphasizing the fact that she’s broader and larger than an image of a woman who is allowed to be perceived as ‘good’ (ie: attractive - and this was as true in 1980 as it is now). Her jacket’s style suggests she’s in middle age or above. She is tacky, because the scarf is tacky. We are told enough by the cultural information in the photo to know that if she turned around we could expect to see lots of lipstick probably badly applied, maybe gaudy jewelry or maybe a cross around her neck, a big chest, some fat, etc.. This kind of information can come across ‘intuitively’ not just because women who look like this exist (women exist who look a lot of ways, but this is the particular image the photographer chose to compose) - but because this particular woman speaks to stereotypes of sex, class, and age, whether consciously or unconsciously.
People often react to criticism of media images as though the images ‘just happen,’ but they don’t: they are carefully composed with intentional choices. How would this photograph’s meaning and ‘humor’ change if the person in the center of the frame was a thin, young, conventionally attractive woman or an elderly man leaning on a cane or a young black man wearing hip fashion or a child with a balloon? The whole narrative shifts.
Centered in the photograph, this particular woman is the subject, and the subject of the photo is communicated as the blocking of beauty and natural goodness by ugliness and unnatural badness.
Photo composition is not random, and this is particularly borne out when a photo’s been interpreted for years and years as ‘funny’ (making it pretty clear it’s not innocent appreciation or notice of this ‘random’ person). What’s conveyed here, in social/visual code, can be seen as much a statement of value about particular kinds of women as it is about the landscape or environmentalism. I see this as the stereotype of the fat, tacky, loud, probably Southern or Midwestern, middle-aged/older woman tourist - the perennial human dartboard who ‘just doesn’t get it’ the way the enlightened do (again, as true a tension in 1980 as it remains now).
Hence, the historic (and continuing) perception of the traditional environmental movement as being polluted by sexism, ageism, and classism, and as being grounded in a kind of privilege many/most Americans don’t have.
So there’s a lot there, to my eye. She strikes me as not only a caricature of ‘tourist,’ but a caricature of the ultimate vision of human-as-litter - and the fact that she’s a woman is not neutral in the photo’s interpretation.
Absolutely, Tmorph. I chose to go off in the direction of class and landscape and such, but as you point out, there are deep and troubling criticisms to be made of the image from a basic feminist POV as well.
Exactly, Theriomorph! I’ve been struggling to express what disturbed me so much about the photo, and you’ve clarified it beautifully. Thank you.
That’s just gauche.
As a left-handed person (and possibly more importantly, a left-footed ex-soccer player), I object to the use of this word. I find the usage rather sinister.
I cannot add anything to the great topical comments already made, but I have a slightly off-topic observation (probably also pretty obtuse)—I didn’t realize until now that Raven is a “she.” I always had Raven pictured as a “he.” Don’t know whether that means anything.
One could as easily read it as innocent kitsch, a woman on vacation in a cloth coat that seems to invite children’s hugging, striking due to Minick’s artful framing and the bright color in the scarf, with any humor or condescension involved belonging solely to the viewer.
I have to admit that this is largely how I have viewed this image, albeit through the lens shaped by my background in environmental studies and the American West, subjects that have always included a good bit about the “tourist West”. I see it more in terms of the way that the West has been reduced to a series of iconic images, most intended for consumption, rather than having to do with the woman per se, or even much to do with the photographer’s intentions, whatever they might have been.
But then I’m also a person who fails to see the alienation and anomie that supposedly permeates Edward Hopper’s works; again, I find myself viewing the images more literally, as simple depictions of people at rest and alone, not performing but simply living their lives.
This woman in her scarf strikes me as neither contemptible nor troubling; she simply is.
Honestly, I find the second image a lot more intriguing!
I too, had never seen this photo before. However, it did instantly bring another closely associated caricature to mind - Velma Melmac, that iconic gin-and-tonic drinking, forest-floor vacuuming RV-dweller from Manteca who set up camp every summer in the Valley in Phil Frank’s Travel With Farley. Frank’s urban bears, Velma, park rangers, etc., epitomize the urbanized Yosemite we all know and love (?). I highly recommend the collection “Fur and Loafing in Yosemite”, which was compiled for the Yosemite Association in 1999!
That I can agree with!
Wow. Maybe I’m just old, but I think my take on that photo—which has been a favorite of mine since the first time I saw it—is closer to Rana Ravens’ than, well, most of ‘em here. I makes me grin and that grin is not a bit alienated or unfriendly, and the babushka in the babushka is clearly too short to be really blocking the photographer’s view. Who could dislike her? She’s somebody’s grammy!
Listen up: I myself have worn scarves just like that. On my own head. Tied just that way. No irony intended; just to keep my ears warm and my hair from blowing all over the place.
Whew. It’s an odd sort of telescoping alienation I’m feeling right now, though. I do hope Minick at least told the lady, “Great scarf!”