Seven Oaks Magazine.

Images of the American West – the Tetons, Fin Dome, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon – serve as powerful icons that shape our perception of “nature” and our landscapes. Once representative of promise, grandeur and future, the exquisite photographs of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham depicted the power and beauty of this last expression of “wilderness,” an American West yet uncorrupted by human intervention. This traditional view of landscape photography as a reflection of the purity of nature that is separated from human context demonstrates a revelry for the romanticized untouched landscape, while it also exhibits a conservationist impulse to shield this natural world from the possibility of human corruption.

The current exhibition The Altered Landscape at Presentation House Gallery presents a comprehensive survey of contemporary landscape photography, which is often seen as a reaction to traditional methods of representation. These photographs developed out of a new awareness, with the recognition that contemporary vistas are rarely left untouched by the forces of modern life. Industries, machines and modern productive habits have left an irreversible mark on our natural surroundings. Thus, any contemporary examination of nature cannot be divorced from the context of culture.

The 110 photographs in this exhibition were drawn from the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, which in the early 1990s took the initiative to build a collection of contemporary landscape photography. To date there are 650 photographs in this collection. The impetus for this collection grew out of the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of Man-Altered Landscape, at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester New York, where the works of a small group of photographers in the mid 1970s, including Robert Adams (who is represented in this collection), Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Frank Gohlke, challenged traditional representations of landscapes as an expression of untainted beauty. Instead, these photographers sought to examine the effects of industrial culture and the impact of contemporary human life on our land. Their new practice, which came to be know as the “New Topographics” positioned the human and cultural context in a central relation to our perception of the natural landscape.

The stunning black and white, and colored works on display are all interested in exploring the effects of human industry on landscapes, although some works are more subtle than others in drawing our attentions to the relationship between the state of our present environment and the colonization of the American West by human forces. For example, Peter Goin's series “Nuclear Landscapes: The Nevada Test Site, 1987” through vivid yet stark representations of the vestiges of the Nuclear testing ground -- such as juxtaposing an abandoned wooden house with the text “How would a house withstand nuclear wind?” -- alerts us to the strangeness of the imposed artificial structures on the natural landscape. This process of defamiliarizing common human artifacts draws our attention to the potential destructive power of existent human inventions -- such as nuclear power -- on our landscape and on our habitat.

The effects of many other works, such as Robert Dawson's “Polluted New River, Calexico,” are achieved through visual puns. In this photograph foam floating on the river resemble the reflection of the clouds in the sky. This image exemplifies a common tendency of many of these photographs to find visual and aesthetic value from these altered landscapes, most stunningly with Ed Burtynsky's Nickel Tailings series. The tension between the role of the artist as engaged critique or detached observer serve to provide these photographs with another layer of value. Not only do these works ask us to question our contemporary relationship to our landscape, but they also problematize our position. Are we complicit in these exploitations through finding beauty in these sites of destruction, or are we made aware of the devastating effects of contemporary human life on our habitat?