Exhibitions : Past Exhibitions
Altered Land, Photography in the 1970s
Date(s): August 7, 2009 thru January 3, 2010
In the latter part of the 20th century, many American landscape photographers began to shed their 19th-century Romantic ideals about the natural purity of their subject. They started taking greater stock of the rising tide of human intervention on the land. Bracketing their purist ideals, they created work reflecting the inescapable tension between the environment and human presence.
By the 1970s, the decade of this photographic survey, photography had turned its attention to the physical results of this tension. The artists of this decade, reviewed in this exhibition, include Thomas Barrow, Joe Deal, Betty Hahn, and Steve Yates. They, among others, experimented with both external references to topography as well as self-reflective, artistic references, noted, for instance, in physical markings made upon the land as well as the print. Some photographic elements were manipulated, tinted, and rearranged. Others were presented as Xerox copies, hand colored, and sewn with thread.
Artists of this pivotal era traversed a new terrain; they crossed a conceptual divide, trading idealism for modes of interrogation, and questioning the purist of all representational media: photography—which was revealed to be an art form and not simply a recording device.
Altered Land showcases the work of many important artists who emerged in the 1960s and matured in the 1970s. Their experiments redefined the medium of photography, taking it to a point beyond which there is no return to purity.
To view artwork in this exhibition, please click: Altered Land Slide Show
In connection with this exhibition, Sheldon invites photographers to share their landscape images to create a slide show in the Altered Land gallery. For details, please click: Altered Land Photo Sharing
Location: Sheldon
