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The Altered Landscape
The Carol Franc Buck Collection
August 15 – October 15, 2005
National Academy of Sciences
2100 C St, Rotunda Gallery
November 1, 2005 – January 25, 2006
Keck Center of The National Academies
500 Fifth St NW, First Floor Gallery
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No subject has been more prominent within the history of American Art than landscape. This was particularly the case in the West, where the notion of wilderness helped foster American national identity. For generations, photographers such as William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton E. Watkins, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Eliot Porter played a leading role in how we perceive the landscape. Traditionally, their imagery projected the idea of a beautiful and pristine nature – an essentially romanticized view of the environment.
The romanticized approach to the landscape persisted until relatively recently. By the mid-1970s, however, a small group of photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Frank Gohlke began to challenge this traditional view. In their influential exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1975 titled New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, these photographers focused on contemporary industrial culture – land transformed and affected by human presence. Collectively, they rejected the approach of viewing landscape simply for the “sake of art,” isolated from the context of culture. For the New Topographics photographers, landscape photography needed to reveal a distinct artistic viewpoint in response to the specific content of the imagery.
The Nevada Museum of Art’s Altered Landscape collection takes New Topographics as its starting point. The collection aims to trace the different trajectories taken by contemporary landscape photographers over the past three decades. From the outset, the Altered Landscape collection was intended to have a critical and theoretical edge, exploring the diverse strategies taken by landscape photographers in articulating their views of the environment. The collection also focuses on a range of subjects within the landscape, including earthworks, environmental crises or natural disasters, and land development among others.
The concept of the Altered Landscape, seen here as a phenomenon partially emerging out of the American West, is in fact being explored throughout the world in a range of different ways. Land use is a global issue. For the Nevada Museum of Art, the Altered Landscape represents a way of assessing our environmental history and sense of place. This collection is being assembled to contribute to the ongoing debates over land use.
This exhibition is supported by the Carol Franc Buck Foundation and by the National Endowment for the Arts. Curators of the collection include Nevada Museum of Art Curator Diane Deming, Trustee Peter Pool, and Trustee Peter Goin. The selection of works for the National Academy of Sciences exhibition was made by Diane Deming.
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