Main content
Global cultures 1980–now
Course: Global cultures 1980–now > Unit 1
Lesson 13: Landscape and ecology- Desert to Suburb, framing the American Dream
- Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium
- Mapping nature's stunning beauty
- A desert on fire, Salgado photographs Kuwait
- Michel Tuffery, Pisupo Lua Afe
- James Turrell, Skyspace, The Way of Color
- Endangered coastlines and lifeways
- Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Earth’s Creation
- Inspiration at Yosemite
- Binh Danh, Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite CA, May 31, 2012
- The landscape remade, Thiebaud's Ponds and Streams
- Noel Harding, The Elevated Wetlands
© 2023 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Desert to Suburb, framing the American Dream
Stephane Couturier's photograph, Fenetre, East Lake Greens, San Diego, captures the transformation of a suburban community. The image shows a half-built house framing a view of newly completed homes, construction work, and the untouched California desert. It raises questions about our impact on the environment and the American dream.
Want to join the conversation?
- Why did the artist decide to include the very prominent diagonal plank in the window frame? It seems a bit like a symbolic "do not build" sign.(1 vote)
- whats the thing on the right side of the desert(0 votes)
Video transcript
(light piano music) - [Steven] We're in the LACMA Study Center for Photography and Works on Paper. This is a place where
we can bring photographs out to look at that are not on exhibition. And today we're looking at a work by Stephane Couturier, a large photograph called Fenetre, East
Lake Greens, San Diego. - [Elizabeth] This photograph comes from a series Couturier made. He'd been invited to photograph in the San Diego-Tijuana
region in Southern California. And his whole career up 'til this point has been looking at transformation, looking at urban environments
that are always changing. Here in this series, you
see a suburban community that is partially lived-in,
partially being built. And then in the background,
you get the whole sense of the vast California desert
that this housing community is taking over and coming up against. - [Steven] One important issue is the formal beauty of this print. We have the built environment
in the foreground, and then two zones beyond that. This parched desert where
seemingly nothing grows. But beyond that, this blue zone where we can just make
out distant mountains. - [Elizabeth] There's so
much visual information. But it's also the framing of it. We're standing in an unfinished
building, creating a window for us to look through
onto the settlement. There's the whole
history, both in painting as well as in photography
of using the window. And it's multilayered itself because it's how
photographs work in a sense. You need that open and
closed to get the light into the camera to capture the image. But it's also more metaphorical or symbolic of a window onto the world that photographers are looking at. So in very simple but very smart gesture, Couturier is referencing
that whole history as well as having us
look at this community that is being built in front of our eyes. - [Steven] Thinking back to Romanticism, the paintings of Casper David Friedrich, or even to the first
years of the Renaissance, that surface of the painting
itself is a picture plane through which we see into a world beyond. - [Elizabeth] You move up into
20th century photographers, and whether it's Alfred Stieglitz, photographers looking at
the very artistic qualities of the medium, street photographers who are doing more
documentary photography, this idea of the window plays
itself throughout all of it, as well as lot of
contemporary photographers. - [Steven] But here the frame is really part of the photograph. It is part of the subject matter. It is this half-constructed
house with raw lumber. - [Elizabeth] From where we're standing, we're inside of this house. Because of the crispness
in foreground on that ledge you can see a nail, you can
even see some of the marks that the construction workers have used. You get the sense of
this being in process, which I think is so important because that mirrors the subject in the other parts of the photograph. - [Steven] And that process
couldn't be more evident. We have just newly completed
homes in the foreground. We see two cars that sit in the driveway of one of those completed houses. - [Elizabeth] You see those two cars, you see the potted plants,
and then you start to notice the trucks from the construction workers parked on the street
behind those initial homes. And you see the roofing
materials stacked up. And then you see the landscape that hasn't yet been taken over
by the housing development. - [Steven] Taken over's the perfect word because this is a landscape in transition. And it poses, I think, profound
philosophical questions about our use of the landscape. More particularly, of this landscape. This is an arid environment,
not a hospitable environment. And yet, we're imposing our
vision of the American dream, of a free-standing suburban house with a perfect lawn in a desert. - [Elizabeth] California has
a whole history of water use, of settlement, going back
to earlier centuries. But when we think about the 20th century, not only Southern California but Arizona and parts of New Mexico, parts of Nevada, there's been huge growth in population through homes like this. There's also increased political power and re-centering of
certain national dialogues and political dialogue. (light piano music)