Your iphone can’t do that
DAM’S survey of contemporary landscape photography shows artists reacting to the reality that everyone is a photographer now
No doubt, there’s a little desperation in the work that serious art photographers do in the 2010s. And it drives the exhibit “New Territory: Landscape Photography Today” at the Denver Art Museum. For better and for worse.
More than 100 photos long, the show is both exhaustive and important, a definitive statement about where an entire art form, with important American roots, stands today. This is the territory of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, whose 20th century images — of the West, specifically — elevated environmental photography to the level of fine art, and the West’s leading museum has both the authority and the responsibility to pin it down.
Curator Eric Paddock does so diligently — and honestly. He uncovers some subtle masterpieces by artists, many well-known, who are seeing and showing things in new ways. They make the exhibit a joy to venture through.
But at the same time, much of the work feels frantic and overwrought, full of tricks and gimmicks.
Present-day photographers have competition that their processors didn’t — everyone on the planet. We all carry cameras with us and shoot dozens, maybe hundreds, of pictures a month. So how do serious artists stand out from the bunch?
They try very, very hard.
Like Abelardo Morell, who invented a camera that is “part tent, part periscope” that enabled him to photograph, simultaneously, the view around him and ground he is standing on, at various national parks. The result is images that are at once stunning and confusing. The “here” and “there” of the landscape co-mingle and it can be hard to tell the two elements apart. You can linger in the mystery of the work — or miss the clarity of scenery that makes landscape photography so satisfying in the first place.
There’s more trying. And it tries harder and harder. Matthew Brandt takes photos of the Hawaiian rainforest on Oahu and then wraps them in burlap and lace and buries them underground, letting the land he has photographed have its way with them for a while. There’s an entire room of the images on display at DAM and they’re quite captivating and colorful, and they do capture the overlap of a world where things that are organic and planetary mix with things that are man-made.
But — at least in the context of a landscape photography retrospective — they seem to give up on nature as a worthy subject for a photo. They feel removed, manipulated, more about the photographer than the subject.
Much of the work on display is in the middle of reasonable and reaching. Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman watch Twitter for tweets that have GPS coordinates, then go shoot the location, and present the photographs in frames, accompanied by the actual tweet itself.
Shimpei Takeda collects soil samples from the area around the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and then sprinkles them on photographic paper in a darkroom. His twinkling, monochromatic images are photos not of lights and darks, but of actual radiation.
Sometimes all this furious trying pays off. Adam Jeppesen walked alone, for 487 days, from the Arctic Ocean to Tierra del Fuego taking shots of the things he saw. One of his photos in the show, of a peak in the Andes Mountains, bears rough scratches and dirt marks. It’s as if he carried it in his backpack and we got to go along on his journey. The photo depicts a mountain off in the distance but it feels so personal.
Alison Rossiter’s photos aren’t actual landscapes, though they look like them. She seeks out vintage, expired photographic paper, then exposes it to light in various ways. Her finger marks and dips into the developer make beautiful images resembling hills and valleys. They don’t show anything real, but they do make us understand the reason we like landscape photos as a rule, that combination of shape and shadow that connects us to the world around us.
Gary Emrich challenges viewers to sort out the beautiful from the atrocious. He takes photos of the colorful nature scenes on the wrappers around bottled water then manipulates them on a lightbox using plastics and water, and then photographs them again. The final product is a mix of pleasing blues, reds and greens; lovely on the surface, but troubling when you think of the way plastic is wrecking oceans and forests.
The photographers in “New Territory” succeed most clearly when they confront the been-there, shot-that ordinariness of photography these days head on. Gregory Crewdson, famously, creates small-town scenes, with actors and carefully orchestrated lighting, and shoots them with a purposeful artificiality.
And for “18,297,350 Suns from Flikr,” Penelope Umbrico downloaded that number of images off the internet tagged “sunset” on a single day and arranged them into a grid that looks something like an Instagram home page. The piece deflates the ego of everyone who ever though their sunset pic was so special it needed to be blasted out to the entire world. It’s a humorous belittling of our shared human nature.
If anything becomes clear in “New Territory,” it is that photographers are more mindfully innovative than in the past and they are breaking free of the constraints of the camera itself. They all start there, but they’re not limited by what they can do with filters or lenses or through darkroom machinations. Anything goes.
That changes the art form in major ways. Photography has always been technical — machinemade rather than handcrafted, like a sculpture or a painting. The emphasis, traditionally, was on the final result, not the process; the “what” we see in the frame, rather then the “how” it was made. (Most folks didn’t understand it anyway, and still don’t, which is why I’m avoiding technical terms in this review.)
Painting and sculpture moved away from that “what” long ago, as modern and contemporary artists starting creating things based on ideas rather than making recreations of the people and things around them. Abstract art rules the day.
Of course, there has always been abstract photography, but it was always a subset of photo staples like portraits (Matthew Brady), or documentary projects (Dorothea Lange) or fashion (Helmut Newton), or yes, landscape photography (this show makes you want to seek out Adams and Weston).
Now, thanks to the pressure of the prevalent iphone, abstraction has become the successful art photographer’s go-to tool, as well. The line between artist and photographer is disappearing. This isn’t new territory at all, really, but land that’s been settled. Photography now invades it. For better and for worse.