Art and the history of environmental law - part V: Art and the effects of environmental law

The latest in a series based on my article on art and history of environmental law. After looking at what art can teach us about the historical background of environmental law, we turn now to what we can learn from it about environmental law's effects.

James W. Earl, Twelve Square Miles, 2010 (courtesy of the artist)

Hugh Ferriss, Study for Maximum Mass Permitted
by the 1916 New York Zoning Law, Stage 4, 1922,
Smithsonian Design Museum, Cooper Hewitt collection
(courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution)

The effects of law on landscape are clearly seen in the case of land use law. The U.S. Northwest Ordinance’s imposition of Cartesian order on the living earth is perhaps best appreciated through often beautiful satellite or aerial images (e.g. above). The effects of New York City’s famous zoning ordinance of 1916 were given visual form in Hugh Ferriss’s drawings (e.g. right) and in photographs of the architectural icons built under the code (e.g. below). And the environmental upheaval wrought by American postwar suburban zoning ordinances was given early expression in the utopian/dystopian photographs of places like Levittown, Long Island (below).

Samuel Gottscho, Chrysler Building Midtown Manhattan New York City 1932

Thomas Airviews, Aerial view of Levittown, 1949
(courtesy of Levittown Public Library)

More wild horses

Last month we posted on the history of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. The always-interesting Gallery section in this month's Environmental History has more: "Leisl Carr Childers on The Gus Bundy Photographs and The Wild Horse Controversy".

Childers writes:

In the essay, I trace Gus Bundy's wild horse photographs from their creation as works of art in Nevada's Smoke Creek Desert in 1951 to their publication soon after in the regional press, which presented them dispassionately as illustrations of roundup work. I then follow their trail in the 1950s and 1960s as wild horse advocates read them quite differently as documentary evidence of animal cruelty and used them more than any other visual evidence to gain support for state and federal legislation protecting wild horse populations and regulating roundups. Finally, I turn back to the art world and to two 1960s gallery exhibitions to illustrate how the audience read the photographs in a radically new way from Bundy's original intention because of the path they had taken since he first printed them more than a decade before.