Recent Landscape Photography

The Museum celebrates the new Print Study Room and the reopening of the Cohen Gallery with Recent Landscape Photography: The Intimate and the Sublime. Inspired by exceptional acquisitions in contemporary photography, this exhibition charts important thematic approaches to the subject of landscape. It includes 25 works by an international spectrum of photographers from America, Europe and Asia.

The artists featured in Recent Landscape Photography have struck out in new directions, away from the impulses toward objectivity and detachment so prevalent in photography in recent decades. They have sought out evocative, resonant qualities of landscape through means that are more expressive and experiential. Some of the artists choose to work in their local environments and record subtle encounters with nature in intimate spaces.

Others evoke the experience of the sublime, creating awe-inspiring images of wilderness, particularly seascapes that form a substantial part of the exhibition.

The works of Simone Nieweg and Lynn Davis exemplify the two thematic poles of this exhibition. Nieweg finds her subject in the small communal gardens on the outskirts of modern German cities that serve as places of escape from hectic city life. In Cabbage Field, there is an intense concentration on the specificity of the scene—the vivid colors of the cabbages and the texture of the earth. In contrast, Davis journeys to the remoteness of the Arctic to train her camera on the magnificent icebergs that reside in isolation from the hand of mankind. Her elegant black and white images evoke a sense of awe at the vastness and mystery of nature.

Within the extremes of these two approaches, the photographers in this exhibition continue to explore notions of what constitutes nature and to express attitudes toward human habitation of the land. Whether reinterpreting visual conventions or stretching the conceptual boundaries of landscape photography, these artists make images of extraordinary beauty and presence.

Recent Landscape Photography: The Intimate and the Sublime is curated by Eric Lutz, assistant curator of prints, drawings and photographs, and is on view May 26 through September 17 in Cohen Gallery (313).

Pressetext

Recent Landscape Photography: The Intimate and the Sublime
Kurator: Eric Lutz

mit Lynn Davis, Simone Nieweg ...