Surveying Grandeur: Cyrill Lachauer’s Moon and Half Dome (Greetings to Muir and Adams) (2020)

by Karen Irvine

Cyrill Lachauer probes the political and environmental implications of the U.S. American West’s mythology through the legacies of two of its icons, conservationist John Muir and photographer Ansel Adams.

Cyrill Lachauer, Moon and Half Dome (Greetings to Muir and Adams), 2018-2020. Camera: Immanuel Hick, S­16mm loop, 6’23’’ (b/w, silent). Courtesy of the artist; and Sammlung Goetz, Munich. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

Originally developed for the home market in the 1930s, 16 mm film was the primary vehicle for educational, industrial, government, and television news productions by the 1950s. Largely due to its affordability and ease of use, it remained the dominant cinema format outside of the Hollywood studio system until the 1990s. More refined than 8 mm yet not as polished as 35 mm, 16 mm is idiosyncratic, producing a grain that gives the film a timeless quality and a noticeable texture. Essentially, 16 mm renders a flawed image.

Moon and Half Dome (Greetings to Muir and Adams) (2020), by Cyrill Lachauer (Germany, b. 1979), employs 16 mm film to probe the history and mythology of the U.S. American West. Specifically, it evokes the legacies of two of its most fabled figures, conservationist John Muir (USA, 1838–1914) and photographer Ansel Adams (USA, 1902–1984). Taking one of Adams’s most seminal photographs, Moon and Half Dome (1951), as his starting point, Lachauer re-creates its composition perfectly in front of his camera’s lens, replacing the moon with a John Muir memorial quarter being held aloft by the artist’s own hand. The film’s “action” is limited to the coin reflecting and flaring the light of the sun as the arm struggles to remain still over the span of 6 minutes and 23 seconds.

Cyrill Lachauer, Moon and Half Dome (Greetings to Muir and Adams), 2018-2020. Camera: Immanuel Hick, S­16mm loop, 6’23’’ (b/w, silent). Courtesy of the artist; and Sammlung Goetz, Munich. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

Like Adams, Lachauer works with finicky analogue materials, but unlike Adams, he embraces their imperfections. Adams was known for his technical virtuosity and for establishing his famous zone system, which taught generations of photographers how to properly expose and develop film. As the sunlight bounces off Lachauer’s quarter, the flare is so bright that it burns through the emulsion of his film, creating completely blown-out highlights that Adams would have found sacrilegious. When the work is screened, these moments become empty spaces in the image that are filled by the projector’s white light—creating information voids within Lachauer’s conceptual fusion of Adams and Muir.

As the work underscores, the histories of Adams and Muir are intertwined. Born twelve years before Muir died, Adams often credited Muir as an inspiration, and throughout his career, he continually linked his photographs to Muir’s legacy. At the age of fourteen he joined the Sierra Club, a conservation organization founded by Muir in 1892, and remained active in the club until his death. He used Muir’s texts to caption his photographs in his 1948 book Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, and his heirs followed this trajectory by pairing the two in the 1997 publication America’s Wilderness: The Photographs of Ansel Adams with the Writings of John Muir. Like Muir, Adams was an active conservationist, and famously used his photographs to lobby the US government to establish the Kings Canyon National Park in the 1930s. Great public relations tools, Adams’s photographs of soaring sequoia trees, dramatic waterfalls, and majestic mountain ranges provided many U.S. Americans with their first views of the parks that weren’t paintings. Unpeopled, sharp, and well-composed, his photographs present a romantic view of nature. Like Muir’s writings, they became iconic and have played a central role in shaping the U.S. American public’s perception of what great landscapes look like.

Cyrill Lachauer, Justin, 2018-2020. Camera: Immanuel Hick, S­16mm film transferred on 2k video, 10’51’’ (color, stereo sound). Courtesy of the artist; and Sammlung Goetz, Munich

Also enamored with the area, Lachauer has traveled to Yosemite from his home in Germany every year for the past decade, and the park is a frequent point of departure for his works. In Justin (2020) he collaborated with a queer member of the Yosemite National Park staff, and filmed the park worker dancing in a meadow, injecting the hallowed national park space with an antidote to the inflated masculinity that surrounds the mythology of the West. In a slide-show work called Fire Fall (2020), footage culled from the 1954 film The Caine Mutiny depicts a tradition, since terminated, of pushing a bonfire over Yosemite’s Glacier Point as a spectacle for tourists. By resurrecting this ecologically destructive display from the past, Lachauer raises the question of why our ideal conception of nature always skews toward the grand and dramatic.

In Moon and Half Dome (Greetings to Muir and Adams) Lachauer probes our idealization of nature further by confronting the iconic status of Muir and Adams head-on. Indeed, John Muir and Ansel Adams were drawn to these majestic views, and in their own ways they both promoted the idea that any nature worth preserving should be extraordinary. By focusing their work on these remote and wild places, they underscored the conception that humankind and nature are separate entities in the world. Furthermore, the view that conservation should be focused on preservation shrouds the fact that widespread industry is the primary cause of environmental destruction. Taken together, Lachauer’s Yosemite works are microcosms of universal issues, inciting questions such as: why is nature considered a space separated from us? Why are we focused on preserving relatively small swaths of land when so many bigger areas are being rapidly destroyed? Why do we talk enthusiastically about the grandeur of nature, and give so much less attention to its subtleties?

TAKEN TOGETHER, LACHAUER’S YOSEMITE WORKS ARE MICROCOSMS OF UNIVERSAL ISSUES, INCITING QUESTIONS SUCH AS: WHY IS NATURE CONSIDERED A SPACE SEPARATED FROM US? WHY ARE WE FOCUSED ON PRESERVING RELATIVELY SMALL SWATHS OF LAND WHEN SO MANY BIGGER AREAS ARE BEING RAPIDLY DESTROYED? WHY DO WE TALK ENTHUSIASTICALLY ABOUT THE GRANDEUR OF NATURE, AND GIVE SO MUCH LESS ATTENTION TO ITS SUBTLETIES?

Cyrill Lachauer, Fire Fall, 2018-2020. Single slide projection.  Courtesy of the artist; and Sammlung Goetz, Munich

In Lachauer’s film he holds the coin aloft, asserting his presence as an author (a point also stressed by the “greeting” in the title), and serving as a direct affront to the idea that a camera is an impartial recorder of information. We are reminded that all photographs and histories are subjective. Lachauer’s hand also adds to Adams’s and Muir’s white cisgender male presence a third protagonist with the same identity, a deliberately self-aware admission of the artist’s own power. The mythology of the U.S. American West is dominated by the explorations of white European men like Muir, and in many ways their stories have racism baked into them. Muir, for example, kept company with Sierra Club members who advocated for white supremacy and promoted eugenics, and was completely dismissive of the indigenous native populations he met while exploring the West. He once wrote about Indigenous peoples of the United States that “the worst thing about them is their uncleanliness,”¹ and that they “seemed to have no right or place in the landscape,”² even though they had been living on North American land for well over 20,000 years.³ Indeed, his conception of a pure wilderness unshaped by human beings depends on the deletion of this population.

The technology required to show Lachauer’s Moon and Half Dome (Greetings to Adams and Muir) is a bulky projector that whirs and whizzes as the film cools while suspended between fast-moving reels. In an exhibition space today it is a novelty, but the clunky contraption is antiquated and competes for attention with the projected image. A deliberate choice by Lachauer, this anachronism alone is inconsequential. But equipped with a film that deflates two of the most revered conservationists of the twentieth century, the entirety of the installation unsettles the conception of nature that these men construed, suggesting that certain problematic narratives be made obsolete.