April 9, 2020 13
and, eventually, “mopping up after
the... mechanics” at a local garage. He
started attending an African- American
church in Albuquerque—where he
was soon accepted by the congrega-
tion—and began to explore the possi-
bility that he was of African-American
descent.
Horowitz writes vividly of these
years, when an independently wealthy
former Harvard professor was vol-
untarily working as a cleanup guy. In
her telling, Jackson emerges as a man
committed to realizing the meaning of
“landscape” that his work described:
a medium in which humans “live and
work and celebrate together.” Details
leap out from her descriptions: his
daily habit of walking to his mailbox
around midday “to deposit a refriger-
ated can of Coke for the mailman”;
the way he held an open house daily
between 1 PM and 3 PM, welcoming
visitors and neighbors for conversation
or to lend them money; his quiet fund-
ing of a local swimming pool. Jackson’s
will included a substantial endowment
fund left to the Santa Fe Community
Foundation, “to help long-time resi-
dents with emergency needs, including
property taxes.”
Horowitz met Jackson in 1973, when
as a young historian she reviewed his
book American Space: The Centen-
nial Years and visited him at Harvard.
They were friends and correspondents
until his death in 1996. Two years be-
fore Jackson died, Horowitz arrived
at his house to find him in the yard
outside his kitchen, burning his pa-
pers in a large oil drum. “I yelled for
him to stop,” she remembers. “He
answered, ‘The past is too much with
me.’” In another writer—Gore Vidal,
say—this might be taken for staged
melodrama, an episode knowingly pre-
fashioned for the biography to come,
right down to the rehearsed final line.
But Jackson’s seems to have been a
private act, unintended for witness or
interruption.
This urge to erase the past sits oddly
in a writer whose subject was precisely
the persistence of material human
histories. Yet Jackson’s own life, as
Horowitz shows, was characterized
by numerous erasures and suppres-
sions. His erotic and emotional life is
especially opaque. He claimed never
to have had a serious relationship,
but Horowitz discovered a marriage
notice that shows him to have been
engaged in 1943. He was appalled by
the prospect of details about his “per-
sonal history” being published after
his death, and forbade Horowitz—
whom he appointed as his literary ex-
ecutor—from writing or releasing such
material.
Horowitz ignored Jackson’s proscrip-
tion, however. Her necessarily incom-
plete account of his life—structured in
the form of nine intersecting essays—is
by turns loving and anguished, admir-
ing and angry. She describes a privi-
leged young man struggling, though not
always successfully, to become more
open and humane. She gives “Brinck,”
as she called him, short shrift for his
pre-war “blindness,” and notes that he
was still in “bigotry’s clutches” well into
the 1950s, making journal references
to “coons” and “Jew Names”—even
as she applauds his work advancing
a “vernacular” geography of demo-
cratic dignity and his generous supportof the “largely Hispanic community” of
La Cienega.In Jackson’s fine essay “Roads Belong
in a Landscape,” he discusses a bota-
nist named Edgar Anderson. Ander-
son was to botany what Jackson was
to geography. His expertise was the
common plant species of farmland and
urban margins—everyday weeds and
wildflowers. Anderson showed, writes
Jackson, an “unflagging curiosity about
[the] everyday landscape of cornfields
and backyards.” He took his students
to investigate the plant life in “dump
heaps and alleys.” Toward the essay’s
end, Jackson approvingly quotes An-
derson: “In the dump homo sapiens is
the most overwhelming of all the or-
ganisms in his primary and secondary
effects on the landscape.”
All earth is the dump now, though.
The naming of the “Anthropocene”
as a proposed new geological epoch
recognizes the overwhelming effects
of human activity upon landscape at
a global scale. The oceans are clotted
with plastic flotsam, more than 250,
tons of high-level nuclear waste wait
above ground for long-term safe stor-
age, biomass concentrates in a handful
of species (pigs, cows, chickens, sheep,
humans) as biodiversity plummets and
CO 2 levels build. T he “Capitalocene”—
as Jason W. Moore prefers to call the
Anthropocene, in recognition of its
origins in an economic system, and the
inequities of responsibility and vulner-
ability that this system produces—is in-
scribing itself upon landscape in ways
that will be legible in the strata-archive
for millions of years to come.I wish Jackson were here to write
about these times of ours. I’d like to
read him on so-called Planet-B plans
to terraform Mars for human occu-
pation when the earth becomes un-
inhabitable, on mega-dairies and the
California wildfires, and I’d like see
him grapple with the implications of
climate-intensified sea-level rise and
storm surges for poor coastal commu-
nities in America and beyond. I’d want
him to acknowledge that “disturbance”
can mean “damage,” and to engage
with the inseparability of environmen-
tal harm and social justice, especially
in the Global South.
Jackson sensed that big changes were
coming. In “Landscape as Seen by
the Military,” he anticipates the shift
in knowledge that will be revealed by
advances in “aerial or space photo-
graphy,” and other kinds of technol-
ogy that would “entirely transcend the
human visual experience.” These new
modes of analysis, guessed Jackson,
would allow us to “discover a new en-
vironment and a new relationship be-
tween that environment and man and,
I dare say, discover a new definition of
man.” He was right. They have. But
their discovery is not the “new land-
scape of harmony and order” for which
he hoped. Rather, advanced computa-
tional and remote-sensing technologies
have made the Anthropocene crisis
visible in terrifying ways: slumping
permafrost and raging bushfires, burn-
ing jungles and emptied ecosystems.
When, in the winter of 1944, that young
intelligence officer gazed out across the
devastated conflict zone of the Hürtgen
Forest, he was looking not only east-
ward in space but forward in time. QCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #48, 1979. Gelatin silver
print. Promised gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee.
Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.The exhibition is made possible by
Joyce Frank Menschel and the
Alfred Stieglitz Society.The catalogue is made possible in part by
the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Inc.Through June 28 metmuseum.org Catalogue available
Photography’s
Last Century
TH E ANN TENENBAUM
AND THOMAS H. LEE
COLLECTION