Politics & Power Quote by Galen Rowell

Rowell is doing two things at once: reminding you that “nature photography” didn’t start as a private, poetic hobby, and quietly arguing that it still shouldn’t be treated like one. By anchoring the tradition in the 1860s, he points to a specific American origin story: the camera as a courier between a remote West and an urbanizing, decision-making East. Those early images weren’t neutral souvenirs. They were evidence, persuasion, a way of converting awe into policy - the visual groundwork for tourism, rail expansion, and, crucially, the conservation movement that would later institutionalize “scenic wonders” as national heritage.

The subtext is about power and distance. The West becomes a stage; the East becomes the audience with the purse strings and votes. Photography collapses geography while reinforcing a hierarchy: the people who “have” the landscape and the people who get to define what it means. Rowell’s phrase “used for the environment” is tellingly blunt. He’s not romanticizing untouched wilderness; he’s describing images as tools - a technology enlisted in advocacy.

Coming from Rowell, a photographer known for athletic, luminous wilderness work and an explicit conservation ethic, this is also a defense of intent against cynicism. He’s preempting the modern critique that landscape photography is escapism or luxury content. His lineage says otherwise: the genre’s cultural job has long been to make distant stakes feel immediate, to translate grandeur into responsibility. The camera, in this tradition, is less a mirror than a lever.