Questions regarding “the gaze” and its associations with power have been raised in disciplines such as critical theory, film theory, and tourism studies, to name just a few. Who gazes upon whom (Foucault 1977), and who gazes back (hooks 2003)? Is the gaze male (Mulvey 1990; Butler 2004)? Is the gaze tourist (Urry 2002)? Who is the object of the gaze (Kaplan 1997)? How is the gaze framed (Goffman 1959)? This collection of questions are at the heart of Framing Wetlands, which links this theory of visual consumption and power with contemporary urban studies scholars who identify the “conversion of nature into an accumulation strategy” (Katz 2005, 46) or who highlight the “ontological principle that living organisms, including humans, need to transform (metabolize) ‘nature’ and, through that, both humans and ‘nature’ are changed” (Swyngedouw 2015, 613).

Framing Wetlands explores the historical relationship between man and nature through the case of Charleston, South Carolina, a coastal city in southeast United States that today serves as a popular tourist destination, its main attractions being its natural wetlands, warm climate, and historical preservation. When evaluating the 350-year-old genealogy of Charleston since its colonization by Great Britain, its wetlands have performed a dual-role in the narrative of the city. On the one hand, the wetlands have been framed as an idyllic object, a recreational landscape, and a valuable asset for the city’s economy—from enabling trade (of goods as well as enslaved peoples), rice production, a naval base, and tourism. On the other hand, as a city created by a submerged coastline, located in a high-risk flood and hurricane zone, Charleston’s wetlands have been simultaneously framed as a threatening, destructive, and illegitimate landscape.

The window frame is a key site of this exchange of gazes between man and nature, yet the power dynamic is not so black and white. As Malm suggests in his scholarship on wilderness, “landscapes in a perfectly pristine condition, with no trammelling from humans: those areas are long dead and gone” (Malm 2018, 7). If, due to the processes of urbanization, there is no longer such a thing as pristine nature in a city like Charleston, then the window becomes a site not of the power struggles between man versus nature, but between man and his own reproduced nature, which has been re-constructed through several infill land projects, re-framed to tourists, and re-valued over again. 

The final output of this research is a series of digitally-created collages created from historical maps, sketches, photographs, advertisements, and other visual artefacts. Each collage highlights a particular century of Charleston's history since its colonization in the 17th century, in total creating a five-part narrative of the city's relationship to its wetlands. The intent of using this medium is to deconstruct the popular discourse surrounding man’s relationship with the natural environment in a way that poses to the viewer the question of who is gazing at whom, but also what does that gaze value. The collages have been created by carefully combining the visual and textual materials to display the history of Charleston and its appropriation of nature, while using the window frame to emphasize ideas of representation, accumulation, and appropriation. The use of the collage is relevant because it uses the idea of assemblage, which is noted by Swyngedouw when he suggests that nature is “socially mobilized, discursively scripted, imagined, economically enrolled (commodified), and physically metabolized/transformed to produce socio-ecological assemblages that support the urbanization process” (Swyngedouw 2015, 610). Additionally, the process of creating a collage enables the maker to de-contextualise each element and re-contextualise it into a new form. In doing so, the maker himself assigns new values to the “raw” or “natural” materials as they are reordered in a way that complicates what is natural and what is produced.