Landscape & Place

This print viewing addresses various approaches to the genre of landscape photography from the mid-20th Century to the present. Students will be exposed to numerous ways photographers have imaged the land, its use, and its place within the popular imagination. Additional works by the photographers featured here and others can be accessed from the MoCP website. A curriculum guide on landscape photographs held in the MoCP collection can be found here

Artist: Robert Adams Date: 1976 Printed: 1982 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Image: 9 in x 11 ¼ in Mat: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Museum Purchase Ansel Adams American, 1902-1984

Ansel Adams's documentation of the western landscape has taken on iconic significance as one of the defining purist visions of both the American West and of the photographic medium. Images such as this one, taken within the National Park System, have frequently been used to promote tourism and preservation of the landscapes they portray. Compositionally, Adams tends to frame these monuments of nature so that their iconic character and sublime beauty is evoked, and to this aim, he avoids including the tourists and signs of habitation that surround the sites. Known as a master of camera and darkroom technique, Adams usually photographed with an 8x10 view camera and meticulously worked on his prints in the darkroom to accentuate the beauty and grandeur of the scenes he photographed.

Title: Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite National Park, CA Date: 1927 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Image: 7 5/8 in x 9 5/8 in Mat: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Gift of Arnold & Thelma Gilbert Robert Adams American, b. 1937

Robert Adams’s photographs offer views of natural landscapes transformed by their intersection with civilization. Adams was one of many photographers to challenge the grand and romanticized view of landscape photography dominant in the first half of the 20th century, visible in the work of Ansel Adams and others. In his photographs, Robert Adams notices human impact on the landscape and often finds beauty at that juncture. His work was included in an exhibition titled, New Topographics: Photographs of Man-Altered Landscape curated by William Jenkins for the International Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York in 1975. The exhibition ushered in the new era of landscape photography and it showcased the ideals of the new approach: landscape could not be artificially separated from cultural and social counterparts, and landscape photography had to abandon the limited and idealized sense of style it had inherited from the previous half century. The exhibit was a milestone for a new generation of landscape photographers and it drew attention to the novel idea of a social landscape. Calm and Somber, Adams’ images are an aesthetic articulation of a concern regarding man’s shifting conception of place and environment. Other landscape photographers in the MoCP collection whose work was included in the New Topographics exhibition are Lewis Baltz; Henry Wessel Jr.; Frank Gohlke and Stephen Shore.

Title: Clear-Cut & Burned, East of Arch Cape, OR Date: 1976 Printed: 1982 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Image: 9 in x 11 ¼ in Mat: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Museum Purchase Terry Evans American, b. 1944

For a large portion of her career, Terry Evans has photographed the prairie, from its natural, untouched state to its care, development, use, and abandonment. Photographing from both ground and aerial perspectives, she focuses on the issues of specific places and how ecological, economic, agricultural, and cultural patterns physically shape the landscape. As her documentation ranges from responsible land management like cattle rotation and erosion prevention to careless industrial pollution in her aerial pictures, Evans is consistently interested in the tension between specificity and abstraction. The distanced perspective offers a wide- reaching, detached, and revealing view of the landscape. Her images clearly articulate this duality inherent in the relationship between the landscape and those who live in it.

Title: Terraced Plowing, Saline County, Kansas Date: 1990 Medium: Chromogenic Development Print Dimensions: Image: 14 ¾ in x 14 7/8 in Paper: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Gift of Jeanne L & Richard S Press

Title: East of Childress, TX Date: 1997 Medium: Chromogenic Development Print Dimensions: Image: 14 ¾ in x 14 7/8 in Paper: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Gift of Jeanne L & Richard S Press Lee Friedlander American, b.1934

With a prolific and influential career spanning more than sixty years, Lee Friedlander is known for his humorous and ironic style, often composing images on the street in which fragments of elements such as signs, light posts, buildings, pavement, and fencing interact to create a layered, at times overwhelming vision of the urban environment. Friedlander frequently includes his own reflection in a window or mirror within a scene to show us that this is his vision. Or, he shoots through objects or barriers such as from the vantage point of a car window or mirror, which positions the viewer of the image as the person doing the looking. To create the below photograph in the heart of Chicago’s loop, Friedlander avoided the typical photographic perspective highlighting Chicago’s orderly grid and world-famous architecture to instead focus on the visual noise of the city. Friedlander's unique vision underscores the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and the potential for photographs to contain varying levels of reflection, opacity, and transparency.

Chicago Date: 2003 Printed: 2004 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Image: 15 in x 15 in Paper: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Museum Purchase Gohlke, Frank American, b. 1942

I was clear, however, about one thing: the grain elevators could not be considered in isolation from the landscape; the building and its context were inseparable. At the same time, I was beginning to realize that the landscape is not a collection of fixed objects on a static spatial grid but a fluid and dynamic set of relationships. – Frank Gohlke in Measure of Emptiness, 1991

Frank Gohlke’s black and white pictures of the American landscape confront the enduring and the transient elements of our surroundings. Within a year of moving to Minnesota, Gohlke’s fascination with a vernacular landmark of Midwestern landscape led him to begin a series documenting grain elevators (1972-77). He then expanded his view to further document the American landscape including the aftermath of human-made and natural disasters such as the eruption of Mt St. Helens in 1981. Gohlke works in the tradition of the “New Topographic” photographers (see Robert Adams) holding the camera straight and level in order to emphasize the strong vertical and horizontal axes of the landscape, while minimizing lens distortion and other artifacts that would suggest the vision as a photographic construction at the expense of its power as a document.

Title: Marsh Fire, Bolivar Peninsula, TX Date: 1978 Printed: 1980 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Image: 14 ¼ in x 17 ¾ in Paper: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Gift of the Artist Bob Thall American, b. 1948 Evanston, IL

Bob Thall is known for formally rigorous and deadpan portrayals of the urban and suburban landscape of his native Chicago, photographing in black and white and using a view camera. In the 1970s-80s Thall created a visual record of the changing architectural landscape of Chicago, in sparse, un-people views. Work from this series was published in the monograph The Perfect City (The John Hopkins University Press, 1994).

A series he produced in the 1990s focused on the "edge cities" of Chicago — the quickly constructed suburban communities near O’Hare International Airport surrounding both Chicago and its older ring of suburbs on the northwest side. Capturing the sleek artificiality of new developments, his images convey the power, pervasiveness and emptiness of suburban corporate architecture. This work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in 1999 and published in the monograph The New American Village (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

Title: Kennedy Expressway & Cumberland Drive Date: 1991 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Image: 13 in x 17 ½ in Paper: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Gift of the Artist Title: Chicago (Near Ohio & Fairbanks) Date: 1979 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Paper: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Gift of James J. Brennan

Title: Chicago (Lake & Franklin Street) Date: 1979 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Paper: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Gift of James J. Brennan

Title: Schaumburg, IL Date: 1992 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Paper: 16 in x 20 in Credit Line: Gift of Ralph & Nancy Segall Richard Misrach American, b. 1949

Richard Misrach's dedication to the Southwest's desert at first seems to echo a landscape documentary tradition more than the social-documentary work with which he began his career. Yet Misrach's lifetime project, the Desert Cantos series, with its individual segments divided up between the terrain, events (the landing of a space shuttle, military testing), floods, and fires, has as much to do with social issues as with man's presence within nature. Begun in 1979, the Desert Cantos series takes its name from its location and the structural term for a subsection of a long song or poem. The cantos vary in subject matter, the amount of time they span, and the number of works in the final grouping. Misrach thinks of all his desert pictures as part of a single great work, divided into cantos by smaller themes, each canto numbered as it is completed. Misrach uses the lush desert palette to paint an elegant picture of the strangeness and upset balance of human activity in an alien landscape. Misrach photographs with an 8x10 view camera using long exposure times to create lush, beautiful, and seductive images that often hint at destruction.

Title: Swimmers, Pyramid Lake Indiana Reservation, NV Date: 1987 Printed: 1993 Medium: Chromogenic Development Print Dimensions: Image: 18 ¼ in x 23 ¼ in Paper: 20 in x 24 in Credit Line: Museum Purchase

Title: Desert Fire, #135 Date: 1984 Pinted: 1993 Medium: Chromogenic Development Print Dimensions: Image: 18 ¼ in x 23 ¼ in Paper: 20 in x 24 in Credit Line: Museum Purchase Mark Ruwedel American, b.1954

For over twenty-five years, Mark Ruwedel has photographed sites in the American West where historical and contemporary marks on the land exist as a geographical palimpsest. He enjoys the irony of our celebrating and preserving the scratchings of prehistoric cultures on the land, while we decry the ways in which we alter our environment today. Combining photographs of ancient trails and remnants of 12,000-year-old ceremonial sites with modern tire tracks and roads, Ruwedel questions how different these intrusions really are. His ongoing body of work entitled The Ice Age is photographed along the relic shores of dried glacial melt lakes, including Lake Manly, now Death Valley. Because of the extremely arid climate in the Basin and Range Region, nature's reclamation of both human and natural processes takes thousands of years – nineteenth century rail lines crumble side-by-side with ancient footpaths. Both remnants are evidence of the most advanced technology of the time, yet quite different in their impact on the land. And while the cultural resources expended on a trail and on a railroad are vastly different, they are disappearing at the same rate in this environment.

Title: Death Valley: Ancient Footpath Along the Shore of a Departed Lake Date: 1995 Pinted: 2003 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print Dimensions: Image: 14 ¾ in x 18 ¾ in Mat: 24 in x 28 in Credit Line: Museum Purchase Kahn & Selesnick Kahn, Nicholas (American, b. 1964) and Selesnick, Richard (American, b. 1964)

Kahn & Selesnick’s project Mars:Adrift on the Hourglass Sea (2010) features two female protagonists wandering aimlessly in a bizarre Martian landscape that has formerly been inhabited. While there, they encounter detritus from the mysteriously vacated civilization, including pyramids, obelisks, giant balloons, and concrete boats. Comprised of photographs taken by NASA’s Mars rovers and by the artists themselves in the Nevada and Utah deserts, these landscapes have a surreal quality. Inspired by Edmund Burke’s quote from 1756, “Terror is in all cases the ruling principle of the sublime,” Kahn and Selesnick’s view of humankind and the universe is as frightening as it is beautiful. By blending references to both past and future time periods, using techniques of constructed tableaux as well as digital manipulation, their work probes our conception of time as a linear phenomenon. In their absurdity and ambiguity they reveal our deep-seated need to cling to what we think we know, and provoke us to let go and experience the fanciful.

Title: Distant Balloon Date: 2010 Medium: Inkjet Print Dimensions: Frame: 10 in x 10 in Credit Line: Museum Purchase Allison Carey American, b.1966

For the series Organic Remains of a Former World, of which Crinoids, Mississippian Period, 310-350 Mya (2005) forms part, Carey built intricate dioramas that recreate scenes from each of the seven periods of the earth’s Paleozoic Era. She sculpted the clay flora and fauna in each picture using illustrations from fossil guides, and then set up miniature worlds based on scientific evidence of what the past may have looked like. Printed as contemporary ambrotypes with liquid emulsion on black glass, these forms appear simultaneously alive and quietly preserved as fossilized remains.

Title: Crinoids, Mississippian Period, 310-350 Mya Date: 2005 Medium: Gelatin Silver Print; Emulsion Dimensions: Frame: 9in x 23 in Credit Line: Museum Purchase Joel Sternfeld American, b. 1944

In the tradition of the New Topographic photographers, Joel Sternfeld documents the American landscape noting the ironic, often destructive impact of human activity on the land. With a career spanning over forty years, Sternfeld is regarded as a major influence in contemporary landscape photography, in part as an early proponent of working in color. In Sternfeld’s image McLean Virginia, 1978, we see a fireman who appears to be shopping for pumpkins at a farm stand as a house dramatically burns in the background. Sternfeld claims that when he made this image, the farm and home depicted were scheduled to be demolished to make way for a housing development. The fire in this scene was actually a controlled burn training session for local firefighters.

Title: Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington Date: 1979 Medium: Chromogenic Development Print Credit Line: Museum Purchase

Title: McLean, Virginia Date: 1979 Medium: Chromogenic Development Print Credit Line: Museum Purchase Landscape and Place: Questions for Looking and Discussion

• Look carefully at the image or body of work. What pulls your attention? Why?

• What can you tell about how this image was made?

• How do choices made by the photographer such as his or her use of light, time of day framing, composition, or vantage point, contribute to your perception of this place?

• Are there clues in the image that suggest when and where this photograph might have been made? Describe.

• Is there evidence of human presence in this photograph? If so where?

• What do you think this artist was interested in or trying to communicate about this place when he or she made this work? Why?

Deeper Reading: Adding Context We can learn a lot about some images just through what we observe in the photograph. In many cases learning about the artist, their process, and the cultural and historic context in which the work was made adds much to our understanding. For example, learning about the tradition of the New Topographics (see Robert Adams) provides great insight into contemporary landscape photography.

With at least a few of the images in this set, after students carefully look at the images and consider the above questions, ask them to read about the artist and their work and learn about the cultural and historic context in which the work was made. The teacher or docent could also provide some of this information. After students have learned some context surrounding the work, ask them to reconsider the images and how this additional information impacts their understanding.