The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

We go to the national parks expecting nature at its most extraordinary and undisturbed. Yet much of a visit has been designed: the visitor center that orients us, the road that brings us to an overlook, the sign that tells us what we are looking at. The iconic photographs that made these places famous often leave that infrastructure out. America’s Best Idea puts it back. Across all sixty-three national parks, six photographic typologies examine the structures and visual conventions that shape the visitor experience: windows, signs, amphitheaters, lodges, roads, and the visitors themselves. By systematically photographing these recurring elements, the project reveals the parks as curated spaces, exploring how infrastructure, interpretation, and imagery shape our understanding of nature.

View photographs from America’s Best Idea

The National Park as a Constructed Experience

The project is grounded in the National Park Service’s dual mandate, established in its 1916 Organic Act: to conserve park resources while providing for public enjoyment in ways that leave them unimpaired for future generations. Public enjoyment requires access, accommodations, and interpretation, all of which introduce structures into places valued for their natural character. Roads, lodges, visitor centers, and interpretive facilities are not simply intrusions into protected landscapes; they are integral to making those landscapes accessible and meaningful to the public.

This infrastructure also functions as a form of curation. A national park is organized in certain respects like an exhibition: roads establish circulation, signs provide interpretation, viewpoints influence where visitors stand, and amphitheaters offer educational programs. The parks do not merely provide access to scenery; they organize encounters with it. The clearest expression of this is the prescribed viewpoint. National parks have an implicit “you stand here” culture: visitors remain free to explore, but much of their experience has already been spatially organized.

My photographs examine that organization by turning from the spectacular landscapes for which the parks are known to the ordinarily overlooked systems through which visitors encounter them. Where appropriate, the camera adopts positions established for visitors, so that the photographic act echoes the park’s own processes of selecting viewpoints, establishing frames, and directing attention.

The photographs treat mediation—the layers of access, interpretation, and design through which visitors encounter the landscape—as part of how nature is experienced in the parks rather than as a corruption of it. Access, interpretation, and direct experience can reinforce one another. My interest lies in making these relationships visible without questioning the authenticity or value of the encounters they facilitate.

From Nature to Its Presentation

For more than a quarter-century, my most sustained photographic undertaking was to document the landscapes of America’s national parks, resulting in my book Treasured Lands and associated exhibitions. Curator Francesca Hummler has described that body of work as a visual record that “has shaped how many understand the country’s natural heritage.” It involved making choices about how to communicate the character of each park, which landscapes to represent, and which elements to exclude.

Photography has played an important role in shaping the idea of America’s national parks, a history explored for example by curator Jamie M. Allen in Picturing America’s National Parks. Paintings and photographs helped make unfamiliar landscapes intelligible, desirable, and worthy of protection. Thomas Moran’s paintings and William Henry Jackson’s photographs of Yellowstone, and Carleton Watkins’s photographs of Yosemite, are historical examples. Iconic landscape photographs continue to establish visual expectations through their selection of viewpoints, compositions, and lighting conditions, often excluding the human infrastructure that makes those views accessible.

The continuing influence of such representations is examined by J. Keri Cronin in Manufacturing National Park Nature, which explores how tourist imagery shapes cultural expectations of wilderness. Visitors consequently arrive at national parks with preconceived images of the landscapes they expect to encounter. Once there, they encounter additional representations through interpretive displays and institutional imagery, which direct attention and influence their understanding. Visitors subsequently produce photographs of their own, contributing to a continuing cycle in which representations shape expectations, experiences, and further representations. The circulation of photographs through social media reinforces this process. Nature in the national parks is thus simultaneously a physical landscape, a cultural image, and the subject of institutional narratives.

America’s Best Idea shifts my attention from the landscapes themselves to how they are presented, encountered, and understood, and to the relationship among the landscapes, the institutions that manage them, and the people who experience them. The project extends my earlier work rather than rejecting it. Having contributed to the parks’ visual identity, I am now examining a process of representation in which I have participated. My new photographs are themselves acts of selection and representation, shaped by my choice of viewpoints, framing, and typological organization.

Six Typologies: Different Modes of Mediation

The project consists of six typologies: sets of photographs examining recurring components of the national park experience through deliberately consistent photographic strategies. The methods are followed more strictly in some series than in others and have evolved during the project’s development. The intended scope is systematic: one photograph for each of the sixty-three national parks wherever the relevant feature exists.

The project is approaching completion. The two earliest series, The Window and The Sign, begun in 2011, contain respectively 61 and 58 photographs, each requiring only two more for completion (three parks lack interpretive signs). The two latest series, The Lodge and The Theater are less than a dozen photographs from completion. Although the full typological undertaking remains ongoing, the existing work already provides sufficient breadth and depth for a substantial presentation, with enough images in every series to establish its visual patterns and support comparisons across parks.

The typological method reverses the conventional photographic treatment of national parks. Rather than emphasizing what is distinctive about a particular place, the typologies reveal patterns that recur across the park system. Repetition shifts attention from individual objects to the structures and conventions through which the visitor experience is organized. At the same time, it invites comparison, revealing how recurring institutional forms vary across dramatically different landscapes and architectural settings.

The project retains the vivid color palette associated with transparency film and nature photography rather than adopting the more restrained aesthetic often found in contemporary conceptual landscape work. This choice maintains continuity with my earlier photographs and with the visual tradition that has shaped public expectations of national parks. Yet the same visual language is now applied to subjects that conventional landscape photography generally excludes. By combining a typological approach with the aesthetics of nature photography, I investigate the conventions of landscape representation without abandoning the appreciation of nature that motivated my earlier work.

The Window: Framing Nature Through Reflection

Visitor center windows place the landscape and the institution that interprets it on the same surface. Photographing from outside, I use the reflective glass to capture the surrounding landscape, sometimes superimposed on interior displays, objects, and architectural elements, including other windows visible through the glass. I frequently use lens shift to keep the camera out of the reflection, allowing the visual layers to interact without distraction. The surrounding walls frame each composition and reveal the diversity of architectural approaches across the park system. Markings, decals and signage on windows can add another layer of information. The approach has an affinity with Abelardo Morell’s tent-camera photographs, which project landscapes onto the ground. Whereas Morell combines the landscape with the terrain on which its image falls, my windows bring it onto the architecture of the institution that presents it. Several visual layers converge within a single photographic plane, and the window becomes, literally and conceptually, a threshold between landscape and its institutional representation.

John Pfahl’s Picture Windows photographed landscapes seen from inside buildings. I reverse that viewpoint, photographing from outside with my back to the landscape, recalling the Claude glass of the Picturesque tradition. This historical connection extends into the national parks themselves: Mary Colter’s Desert View Watchtower at Grand Canyon contains reflectoscopes, which employ black-glass mirrors to present reflected views of the landscape. My photographs instead use the reflective surfaces of existing windows to bring together the surrounding landscape, park architecture, and institutional interiors.

The Window also serves as a visual bridge between the project’s typologies. Some photographs incorporate reflected interpretive signs, connecting the series to The Sign. Others reveal small pictures of the parks inside visitor centers, displayed as merchandise, decoration, or interpretation, echoing The Lodge. In several photographs, my small reflection appears at the left edge, anticipating the recurring figure of The Visitor. Two photographs even incorporate my earlier landscape photographs displayed inside visitor centers. Another of my photographs appears on an interpretive sign in The Sign series. These instances make the project’s self-reflexive dimension tangible: my earlier representations of the parks have become part of the institutional environment I now photograph.

The Sign: Interpreting Nature

Interpretive signs communicate what visitors are expected to notice and understand about a particular place. I photograph selected signs frontally, from their intended viewing positions, incorporating both their visual content and the landscape they interpret. The sign occupies the lower portion of the composition, while the corresponding landscape fills the upper portion, establishing a consistent visual relationship between institutional representation and the physical environment. I often use a lens tilt to render both sharply. I select signs whose images establish a meaningful dialogue with the surrounding landscape. Each resulting photograph contains three levels of representation: the landscape, the institution’s representation of it, and my photographic representation of their relationship. Differences between the depicted and existing landscape can reveal changes over time. The series makes the “you stand here” structure of park interpretation explicit: image, explanation, viewpoint, and landscape have already been coordinated for the visitor.

The Lodge: Nature as Decoration

National park lodges introduce domestic comfort into places associated with wilderness. I photograph lodge interiors where visitors casually relax and where pictures of natural landscapes hang as wall decorations. These pictures occupy only a small portion of each composition, while furnishings, architectural details, and other elements of the interior dominate. Their modest scale is significant: representations of wilderness have become ordinary objects embedded in architecture, hospitality, and leisure. Nature appears not as the physical environment being explored but as destination, image, and décor simultaneously.

The Theater: Narrating Nature

Park amphitheaters, generally situated within campgrounds, provide settings in which the National Park Service communicates the significance of protected landscapes through ranger talks, audiovisual programs, and other interpretive activities. Visitors are not simply invited to look at nature but are offered explanations of its history, ecological importance, and cultural significance.

Photographed from behind the seating, the empty amphitheaters position the viewer as a prospective audience member, facing the apparatus through which the surrounding landscape will be interpreted. The recurring geometry of benches and screens produces a visual system whose repetition emphasizes the strangeness of the structures themselves. Despite their consistent visual structure, the facilities range from large amphitheaters with substantial projection screens often covered to modest arrangements of just a few benches with no screens. Their varying scale often reflects the anticipated audience and intensity of visitation. Unlike The Window, which generally conceals the size of the visitor center, The Theater makes these differences in infrastructure visible.The incongruity of a blank projection screen surrounded by wilderness makes the institutional presentation of nature conspicuous: the landscape becomes both the setting and the subject of its own interpretation.

The Road: Accessing Nature

I photograph roads empty, bisecting landscapes characteristic of each park, generally from the driver’s position. The road embodies a central paradox of national parks: landscapes valued partly for their apparent wildness are experienced through infrastructure engineered to make scenery widely accessible. Roads allow large numbers of visitors to experience otherwise inaccessible environments, yet their construction and use also affect the landscapes being protected. Beyond their role as transportation infrastructure, roads shape perception. The landscape unfolds in a particular sequence, and the visitor’s experience is influenced by where the infrastructure permits travel, stopping, and looking.

The Visitor: Performing the Nature Encounter

The final typology turns from infrastructure to the person it serves. Whereas the Road series implies the visitor, here the visitor is depicted through my own recurring figure. A small performative self-portrait occupies the lower-left portion of a broad landscape. Comparable positioning and increasingly consistent clothing reduce individuality, moving the figure toward the role of an archetypal park visitor. The repetitions suggest the extent to which encounters with nature follow established conventions rather than arising entirely spontaneously.

The small figure echoes the Romantic tradition of the human before a sublime landscape and nineteenth-century Western survey photography, in which human figures often established scale. More recent precedents include Roger Minick’s Sightseer, which documents tourists at scenic destinations, and Tseng Kwong Chi’s East Meets West, in which the artist repeatedly stages himself in a distinctive costume before iconic landmarks and landscapes. While Minick examines actual tourists and Tseng uses performance to explore cultural identity and stereotypes, my recurring self-portrait investigates the conventions of national park visitation.

Here, the self-reflexive dimension of the project becomes visible within the photographs themselves. Having spent decades producing images of the national parks, I now place myself within the landscapes I previously presented primarily as scenery. The maker of park imagery becomes a visitor whose experience is shaped by it. The observer becomes part of the system being observed.

View photographs from America’s Best Idea