Revisioning the Gendered Eye in Landscape Photography
​by Colette Copeland

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Crowell County TX, Crowell Inn, 2018 by Sisco-Cook

When Ginger Sisco-Cook first asked me to write this essay about the female eye within landscape photography, I wasn’t sure that I could make a compelling argument supporting the gendered gaze in 2018. In re-reading Deborah Bright’s iconic 1985 essay, Of Mother Nature & Marlboro Men, I wondered if 33 years later Bright’s suppositions would still hold true. The cultural myths of the landscape as “unsullied wilderness” and the visually sublime still prevail. In the Southwest, especially Texas, the cowboy still reigns as a powerful masculine archetype. And while I don’t disagree that knowing a photographer’s gender influences the reading of the image, I wondered if it should still matter. 
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I only had to ask the Google about the current top landscape photographers --https://www.phototraces.com/creative-photography/best-landscape-photographers/, to see that the patriarchal white male still rules the genre. I realized I was asking the wrong question. It’s not about whether there’s a binary gendered eye, but as Bright posited, how the photographs serve as historically charged indexical images that reflect personal and collective identities. In order to present a multiplicity of histories, it is essential to have eyes other than the hetero masculine. 

In looking at Ginger Sisco-Cook’s breathtakingly beautiful photographs of the West Texas and New Mexico landscape, I begin to decode the images through the currency of politics, desire and consumption. Sisco-Cook does not use beauty as a subterfuge to lure the viewer into craving touristic consumption. Most of the sites would not appear on must-visit bucket lists. Her images do not depict virginal uncharted lands; rather there is evidence of human intervention—telephone wires, a water tower, a stop sign, a railroad crossing. The beauty is a stark, desolate beauty--one that shivers with austere albeit sometimes neglected cultivation.  Sisco-Cook has captured the vastness that is endemic to this region. And the sky—the glorious Texas sky that never ceases to elicit jaw-dropping awe. 

Sisco-Cook’s image titles refer to the locations of the sites. Gaines, Bailey, Hall, Hartley, Kent, Dickens—small sparsely populated counties named after early settlers or defenders of the Alamo, as well as former home to the Native American tribes of the Comanche, Plains and Apache. The dirt is rich with blood shed in the name of pioneering power and civilization. Remnants of cowboys reside in the images of Lea and Howard counties. There’s the damning irony of the Yoakum County Cemetery photograph with the oilrig pumping in the background. And the subtle subversive humor of the Reagan County abandoned downtown street image (named after a different Reagan who was a U.S. Senator and 1st Chairman of the TX Railroad Commission). 

However, Sisco-Cook’s eye is not cynical or accusatory. Nor is it impartial. Two of my favorite images are the Gaines Co. Mennonite Women farming in the cotton field and Terry Co.—Spring Planting. The photographs communicate a generative resurgence in the land. Sisco-Cook does not leave the viewer mired in the past; she portrays the landscape as extant and resilient. A message that we could all take to heart.  

Yoakum County TX, Plains Cemetery, 2013, by Sisco-Cook

More about Colette

​Colette Copeland is a multi-media visual artist and cultural critic/writer whose work examines issues surrounding gender, death and contemporary culture. Sourcing personal narratives and popular media, she utilizes video, photography, performance and sculptural installation to question societal roles and the pervasive influence of media, and technology on our communal enculturation.
 
Over the past 22 years, her work has been exhibited in 26 solo exhibitions and 122 group exhibitions/festivals spanning 34 countries. She teaches art and digital media at University of Texas and Collin College in Dallas, Texas as well as writes for Glasstire and Eutopia publications. She proudly admits to being a Texas convert and revels in the magical diversity of the Texas landscape. She has been known to fall down on her knees in the presence of a majestic Texas sky.