In Focus: The Landscape

In Songs of the Sky, No. 2, one of twenty-seven prints featured in the Getty’s eclectic exhibition of landscape photography, Alfred Stieglitz tilts his camera upwards and photographs a silhouetted sky. It’s a small black and white print (not even 4 by 6 inches), but as powerful a depiction of natural beauty as any image in the exhibition. By including Stieglitz’s print, the exhibition blurs the distinction between landscape and cloudscape, broadening the scope of the former to include the latter. With this gesture, the curator acknowledges that any form of nature—including the celestial heavens—can conceivably create a “landscape” photograph.

Unlike the two neighboring photography exhibitions—Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “Basic Forms” and August Sander’s “People of the Twentieth Century”—“In Focus” occupies just one small room in the Getty’s photography wing. The landscape photographs, displayed in more or less chronological order, are situated close enough to each other to easily facilitate artistic comparisons, “to make the progression of aesthetic and technical developments apparent,” as the curator says. Presenting the prints chronologically also enables one to see how, in spite of having uniquely photographic techniques such as deep/shallow focus and negative splicing at their disposal, early landscape photographers still tended to mimic landscape painters—sometimes even painting or drawing over their negatives. In contrast, Stieglitz’s 1923 cloudscape abruptly signals the arrival of a new breed of photographer, the photographer as an artist in his own right.

Like Stieglitz, Edward Weston—another modernist photographer who embodies this new breed—also tests the limits of landscape photography with his print of a sand dune in the California desert. While Stieglitz’s image focuses exclusively on the sky, Weston’s limits itself to the curves and ripples of the desert sand. The photograph eschews traditional landscape composition to emphasize the inherent grace in detail; the coastal horizon is barely visible beyond the sharp-focus, high-contrast desert.

Deserts—in various renditions—are a recurring theme in the exhibition. From an 1867 sepia photograph of the Nevada desert to a 1995 color print of the Owens Valley in California, several artists document the desolate landscape of the American West. What unites the prints is not just the common setting, but the presence of humans, either literally or symbolically. In every desert image besides Weston’s (which, by virtue of its modernist style, betrays a human touch), the photographers depict human migration or its consequences. And while the early photographs tend to romanticize the West, the later prints—including Robert Adams’s—emphasize a more skeptical view of westward expansion. One notable exception, of course, is astronaut James Irwin’s 1971 lunar landscape, a photograph that glorifies exploration as enthusiastically as the desert landscape images of the 19th century.

On the surface, Robert Adams’s photograph of a quarried Colorado mesa may not seem quite as riveting as some of his other landscapes (especially the photographs in his 2006 Getty exhibition, Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance). In actuality, the print still demonstrates Adams’s deep environmental concern, but with greater subtlety than usual. From an aerial position of virtual omniscience, Adams captures a desert landscape marred by an endless series of tire tracks; the humans are absent, but they’ve clearly left their mark. Viewing Highway 54 from a more human perspective forty years earlier, Dorothea Lange’s print, The Road West, depicts a similar transformation with less censure, emphasizing the social over the environmental.

The final image in the exhibition, a color print by Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, succeeds in reconciling the social and environmental concerns of Lange and Adams into a single landscape photograph. The print’s composition—blue sky, snowy mountains, and desert shrubs—would form a very conventional landscape photograph if not for the intrusion of rusted, man-made furnishings in the foreground. Before westward expansion, this patch of land in the Owens Valley was home to a Native American tribe. As Americans moved west, however, the tribe lost its land to an apple orchard, which eventually lost its water to Los Angeles. Decades later, during World War II, the land became the site of an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, the remnants of which are visible in the image. By evoking the plights of these diverse groups, the photograph records the disfiguring of a pristine environment and bears witness to a history of social injustice.

In Focus: The Landscape
August 26, 2008-January 11, 2009 at the Getty Center, curated by Brett Abbott
www.getty.edu