Roger Balm is an instructor in the Department of Geography in New Brunswick and the department’s director of undergraduate education. Originally a landscape artist, Balm was curious about how the landscapes he painted came about. “Seeing a landscape is one thing,” he said, “describing a landscape’s features and explaining how they interact is another.” Balm took up geography to learn more about the interconnections and develop expertise in the visual aspects of the field. His research has taken him to the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru to study how an early 20th-century explorer documented what he saw in photographs, and to the high Andes in Ecuador to see how a 19th-century artist portrayed the landscape in an oil painting. Balm returned with his own photographs and paintings, and showed how the earlier visitors’ preconceptions of those lands were evident in their documentary and artistic portrayals. FOCUS spoke to Balm about how landscape art influenced social and political thought in the past and continues to do so today.

FOCUS: How do art and geography intersect, and how do we benefit from this unique pairing?

Balm: Geography tells us where we are; art tells us who we are. Put the two together, and the connection is powerful. Artists have by-and-large given us our view of nature and shaped our decisions to preserve or develop our natural resources.

FOCUS: Why the 19th-century fixation with landscape art?

Balm: Frederic Church’s 1859 painting of the Ecuadorian landscape, “Heart of the Andes,” was a blockbuster in its day. It attracted thousands of viewers when he put it on exhibit and made him a revered artist. Later acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it remains a cherished object to this day. His art interpreted what German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt reported when he made the same trek 50 years before Church: The world was an orderly place filled with precisely grouped elements. It was a reassuring view; one that Charles Darwin would shake up later by proposing the mechanism of natural selection.

The later 19th-century American artists who painted the West, such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, reflected our fascination with places that were bigger than us. And where better to do that than in the American West? It was expansive – horizontally and vertically. Before we had skyscrapers, we had mountains. Moran’s paintings influenced Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

The landscape art of the time also said something about America’s values and view of itself. We were creative and independent, versus the regimentation of European countries. And in a darker sense, the United States was looking toward Central and South with an acquisitive eye. Church’s idealization of South America played right into that attitude.

FOCUS: What struck you the most from your South American journeys?

Balm: The extent to which the explorers, however well-intentioned they may have been, portrayed what they wanted to see. Explorer Hiram Bingham’s 1911 photos of Machu Picchu emphasized the remoteness of the mountaintop city at the expense of capturing the fullness and detail of its architecture. And Church, in order to make a rhetorical statement about what the ideal landscape should look like, painted a river and waterfall in the foreground. But Ecuador’s higher elevations can be quite dry, and there is no river and waterfall where Church stood.

FOCUS: Why is a sense of artistic value important in geography today?

Balm: Since our views of nature have been informed by artistic interpretation, those views influence critical decisions we need to make about development and preservation. Artists have largely said, “green is good.” Forests and farmland are romantic and desirable. John Frederick Kensett, another 19th-century artist, is known for his sublime paintings of the Shrewsbury River, at a time when New Jersey was more open.

Trouble is, we’re now the most densely populated state in the union. We want to preserve open space and our striking natural features, yet we need to accommodate residential and commercial development as part of a healthy economy. When geographers advise policymakers on how land should be used, they have to be aware of their own esthetic values and be in tune with the esthetics of the population.

Also, our stock in trade – mapmaking – is a form of art. Maps interpret reality. Along with being spatially accurate, they have to employ visual techniques to convey their messages about resources, land use, and population.