Critical habitat: Picturing extinction, conservation, and the American animal in the long twentieth century
type: CreativeWork
description: Critical Habitat’: Picturing Extinction, Conservation, and the American Animal in the Long Twentieth Century, looks at images of at one time endangered or threatened animals in order to develop what I have named a specifically American conservation aesthetic. Within a conservation aesthetic images are almost always dialectic – connected simultaneously to attempts to preserve biodiversity and the natural world while reifying tropes that lead to its destruction. Additionally, the conservation aesthetic is linked to legislation histories and practical actions both to preserve and destroy particular natural places or species – images within a conservation aesthetic can be never be read as isolated objects, but instead are always part of broader ecologies. Understanding this conservation aesthetic allows for an interpretation that extends beyond the traditional art historical understanding of American landscape as part of nation building, but rather reveals the potential each image holds for viewers in the here and now to think differently about the natural world, and their relationship with it. The conservation aesthetic becomes an analytic, presenting a new methodology for the incorporation of the study of material culture into the environmental humanities. The dissertation examines material culture from the long twentieth century. It begins with the early trap camera photography of George Shiras, a Pennsylvania Senator and amateur naturalist, who attempted to use photography as a means to replace gun hunting and preserve American game animals. Next, I compare the sporting art of Carl Rungius and the natural history murals of Charles Knight to analyze the place of nostalgia in extinction, species endangerment and representation within the conservation aesthetic. To understand the role of time and place within the conservation aesthetic, my dissertation analyzes the photography series Diorama by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Sugimoto’s images, uncanny photographs of the dioramas at…
abstract: Critical Habitat’: Picturing Extinction, Conservation, and the American Animal in the Long Twentieth Century, looks at images of at one time endangered or threatened animals in order to develop what I have named a specifically American conservation aesthetic. Within a conservation aesthetic images are almost always dialectic – connected simultaneously to attempts to preserve biodiversity and the natural world while reifying tropes that lead to its destruction. Additionally, the conservation aesthetic is linked to legislation histories and practical actions both to preserve and destroy particular natural places or species – images within a conservation aesthetic can be never be read as isolated objects, but instead are always part of broader ecologies. Understanding this conservation aesthetic allows for an interpretation that extends beyond the traditional art historical understanding of American landscape as part of nation building, but rather reveals the potential each image holds for viewers in the here and now to think differently about the natural world, and their relationship with it. The conservation aesthetic becomes an analytic, presenting a new methodology for the incorporation of the study of material culture into the environmental humanities. The dissertation examines material culture from the long twentieth century. It begins with the early trap camera photography of George Shiras, a Pennsylvania Senator and amateur naturalist, who attempted to use photography as a means to replace gun hunting and preserve American game animals. Next, I compare the sporting art of Carl Rungius and the natural history murals of Charles Knight to analyze the place of nostalgia in extinction, species endangerment and representation within the conservation aesthetic. To understand the role of time and place within the conservation aesthetic, my dissertation analyzes the photography series Diorama by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Sugimoto’s images, uncanny photographs of the dioramas at…
author: Landau, Jessica
language: en
keywords: environmental humanities, ecocriticism, American art, wilderness, conservation
date published: 2021-03-05T21:40:30Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:50Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109464