The power of collective vision: landscape, visual media, and the production of American mountains

Abstract

ABSTRACT The way we view the landscape is socially constructed and influenced by media. Images from paintings to digital photographs influence how Americans see mountains and reproduce a collective vision. I describe the process by which this collective vision of nature and mountains in the United States has been constructed through the dissemination of visual media and the rise of domestic tourism. The progression of landscape representation modes over the past two centuries has continuously distanced the image from reality. Since the American collective vision of the mountain is a simulacrum, I use Jean Baudrillard's orders of simulation as a heuristic for understanding the diachronic relationship between the landscape and its visual representations. I argue that this collective vision possesses the powers to colonize, to nationalize, to exclude, and to constrain ways of seeing mountains. These powers inform one another to the present day and are all entangled with the collective vision of mountains. I trace the history of mountain representation in America and the process of American orogenesis to show how image production and distribution is linked to the orders of simulation and the power trajectory from colonization to nationalization to exclusion and ultimately to a myopic view of mountains.