"I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards"
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The real sting here isn’t rejection; it’s the way taste gets laundered through committee. Rowell remembers being promised an essay slot - a dozen landscapes, the rare editorial real estate that says “this matters” - only to have the work dismissed with the deadliest adjective in picture-making: “postcards.” Not bad. Not wrong. Just too legible.
“Postcard” is an aesthetic accusation masquerading as a quality critique. It implies the image is pretty but empty, tourist-grade, instantly consumable. In the late 20th-century magazine economy Rowell worked inside, that label also policed what counted as serious nature photography. National Geographic wanted awe, but a curated, credentialed awe: pictures that feel definitive, not merely delightful. The subtext is that Rowell’s images may have been too generous to the viewer, too willing to traffic in beauty without adding the editorial grit that signals importance to gatekeepers.
Rowell’s phrasing is telling: “someone said,” not “they proved.” The judgment is casual, almost throwaway, yet it overrides a prior promise. That’s how cultural institutions protect their brand: not with overt censorship, but with shorthands that sound like common sense. Landscape photography lives in this trap. If it’s sublime, it risks being kitsch; if it’s challenging, it risks being ignored. Rowell is quietly flagging the paradox that defined his career: he chased light and wonder with the seriousness of a journalist, but the closer he got to beauty, the easier it was for editors to treat his work like souvenir merchandise.
The quote reads like a bruise that never fully healed - and a warning about how “taste” can become a veto.
“Postcard” is an aesthetic accusation masquerading as a quality critique. It implies the image is pretty but empty, tourist-grade, instantly consumable. In the late 20th-century magazine economy Rowell worked inside, that label also policed what counted as serious nature photography. National Geographic wanted awe, but a curated, credentialed awe: pictures that feel definitive, not merely delightful. The subtext is that Rowell’s images may have been too generous to the viewer, too willing to traffic in beauty without adding the editorial grit that signals importance to gatekeepers.
Rowell’s phrasing is telling: “someone said,” not “they proved.” The judgment is casual, almost throwaway, yet it overrides a prior promise. That’s how cultural institutions protect their brand: not with overt censorship, but with shorthands that sound like common sense. Landscape photography lives in this trap. If it’s sublime, it risks being kitsch; if it’s challenging, it risks being ignored. Rowell is quietly flagging the paradox that defined his career: he chased light and wonder with the seriousness of a journalist, but the closer he got to beauty, the easier it was for editors to treat his work like souvenir merchandise.
The quote reads like a bruise that never fully healed - and a warning about how “taste” can become a veto.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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