What Gets Kept, and Who Decides

Open Calls
Written By Brian Snider

Conservation isn't only about what is at risk. It asks us to think through who decides what is worth saving, and photographers have been making that argument for more than 160 years.

In 1861, Carleton Watkins hauled a mammoth-plate camera into Yosemite Valley. His prints were shown in New York the following year, and California Senator John Conness reportedly passed them around Congress. On June 30, 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, the first time the federal government set aside land for its scenery. Many historians still credit the photographs shared as a major reason it happened.

That story is usually told as proof of what a photograph can do. It also proves what a photograph can leave out. The valley Watkins framed as untouched wilderness had been home to the Ahwahneechee people, who were driven out by armed militia a decade earlier. The pictures preserved the granite and the waterfalls. They did not preserve the people. The images told a version of the place the Ahwahneechee people had never known.

Photography is one of the most powerful conservation tools we have, and it has always carried the point of view of whoever held the camera.

Tucson's Own History

Just a few blocks from Black Eyes Gallery, photographs played a central role in telling Tucson history. On March 1, 1966, Tucson voters approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project, Arizona's first major urban renewal effort. It targeted roughly 80 acres on the southwest edge of downtown, the state's most densely populated area. Most people called this area La Calle. For nearly a century, it had been the Mexican American heart of the city: small shops, restaurants, music, adobe row houses, and families who had been there for generations.

City leaders called it a blight, and wanted it removed. By 1974, it was gone, replaced by the convention center, a hotel, and La Placita. However, when historian Lydia Otero set out to tell the real story of La Calle, she built it from oral histories and from photographs. Decades later, those images showed a neighborhood that was poor in places but very much alive, and they undercut the official claim that it was nothing but a slum. When the Joel D. Valdez Main Library mounted an exhibit of those photographs, it asked former residents to help choose which ones to hang, giving the people who lived there a say in how it would be remembered.

Why Conservation

If you take those two stories side by side, a pattern shows up. A small number of people with access, equipment, and institutional backing usually decide what a place was and what deserved to survive. Their pictures became the evidence. Everyone else's memory became anecdote.

An open call deliberately breaks that pattern. It does not ask one photographer to tell us what matters. It asks hundreds of people with cameras in their hands to answer the question for themselves.

If photographs shape what gets kept, then photographers carry some responsibility for how.

The borderlands are changing fast. Springs are dropping, old trees are coming down, neighborhoods are being priced out instead of bulldozed. In twenty years, someone will try to explain what our world was like right now. They will reach for photographs, the way Otero did, the way Congress did in 1864.

The only open question is whose photographs they will find.

So before you think about what to shoot, think about what you would grieve. Not the most beautiful thing. The thing that, if it were gone tomorrow, would leave a hole only you could describe. That is where conservation starts. A photograph is how it gets remembered.

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Brian Snider