What We’ve Been Up To: Landscape

What We’ve Been Up To: Landscape is a unique selection of photographs from the museum's collection that have never been shown to the public. Featuring acquisitions from the past 17 years since the Photography department was established in 2008, the exhibition represents the variety of ways landscape photographs help us see and appreciate other times and places and consider where the world has been and what it is becoming.

Photographs are informally organized by theme or subject matter, such as Meghann Riepenhoff’s large camera-less image of water and ice, flanked by photographs of rivers and oceans by artist Masao Yamamoto and others. Intimate photographs of nature include works by Linda Conner and Terri Weifenbach as well as a hypnotically detailed tableau by Tanya Marcuse. Landscapes by Christina Fernandez, Patrick Nagatani and Zora J. Murff confront troubling conflicts in our collective history. America’s scenic beauty is celebrated in works by Marion Post Wolcott, William Henry Jackson, Mary Peck, and Abelardo Morell. Steve Fitch’s photograph of a radio tower announces the near-universal presence of technology. Challenges of living in a changing, unpredictable world are the subject of photographs by John Ganis, Frank Gohlke and others, while Henry Wessel, Jr. evokes the easy pleasures of road trips.

Other pictures show more troubling aspects of the North American landscape, from the effects of natural disasters to dark moments in the history of slavery and conflicts with Indigenous people. All are bound together by the idea that landscape can serve as an autobiography of the people, societies, and natural forces that shape the world over time.