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Author Topic: What is a Landscape?  (Read 5637 times)

AWeil

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What is a Landscape?
« on: January 26, 2003, 06:12:50 pm »

Hank, I looked up the link - but could not find a photo related topic....
Angela
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AWeil

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What is a Landscape?
« Reply #1 on: January 27, 2003, 05:31:47 am »

Thank you for the description, I did manage to find the article - the trick was to register. Yes, I also would love to see this unique show.
Angela
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Hank

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What is a Landscape?
« Reply #2 on: January 26, 2003, 01:42:45 pm »

The description of this show makes me wish I was going to be visiting Boston in the near future.  Sounds provocative and educational.  Anyone seen it yet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2003....ion=top

Hank
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Hank

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What is a Landscape?
« Reply #3 on: January 27, 2003, 01:27:24 am »

Hmmm.  When I click on the link I provided, I get an article out of the Arts section of the New York Times entitled "Traveling Into Country Constructed by the Eye" by  Deborah Weisgall (January 26, 2003) about a photographic exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts.  It's called "Lens Landscapes."

In part, the article describes the exhibit this way:

"The organizers of "Lens Landscapes," Clifford Ackley, the museum's curator of prints and drawings, and Anne Havinga, curator of photographs, ask a simple question: What is a landscape? The answer depends on who the photographer is and what the photographer sees and shoots.

"Many people still think a photograph is about something, not by somebody," Ms. Havinga said in a recent interview. The show dismantles the lingering notion that a photograph must be in some way objective, that photography is not fundamentally an expressive medium.

Mr. Ackley and Ms. Havinga build the exhibition around the elements of landscape — trees, rocks, fields, water. So Ansel Adams's precise and magical "Surf Sequences" (1940), with their calligraphic waves, hang close to Hiroshi Sugimoto's austere abstracted seascapes (1990), which pare air and water to tonality. A darkly brooding swamp from Sally Mann's "Deep South" series, made at the beginning of the 21st century with 19th-century equipment and materials, seems an evocative reimagining of a Civil War-era view of moss-draped trees and a tomb in Georgia.

While many connections are made across time, "Lens Landscapes" also succeeds in placing photographic work within a historical framework. Groups of images illuminate relationships among photographs that were made at roughly the same time; the admirably condensed labels suggest that photographers were thinking about the same ideas that concerned other artists. In 1911, Alvin Langdon Coburn framed his view of "Yosemite Falls" in a black lace of leaves, evoking the American fascination with Japanese ideas of decoration and space.

At the end of the 19th century, Frank Jay Haynes's pictures of Yellowstone National Park capture the same sense of sublime nature as Thomas Moran's paintings. The French photographer Edouard-Denis Baldus's "Pont de la Sainte" (1854), reflects the landscapes of his contemporary, Courbet; Harry Callahan, an American photographer working nearby more than a century later, produced in "Aix-en-Provence" an image of brambles as chaotic as a Jackson Pollock. And "Dunes, Death Valley," shows that Edward Weston was already abstracting landscape in the 1930's."

If that link isn't working for you for some reason, try going directly to the NYT site and checking their Arts section for the 26th.

Hope this helps, because it's a really thoughtful read.

Hank
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