EARTH NOW: American Photographers and the Environment

EARTH NOW: American Photographers and the Environment
EARTH NOW: American Photographers and the Environment

nsel Adams’s and Eliot Porter’s landscape photography fueled a growing concern for the environment in this country. Earth Now begins with the work of these two artists and moves on to a group of landscape photographers who came of age in the 1970s.

Adams and Porter worked independently as artists but also actively participated in placing their photographs in the context of environmental activism. Their idealized, unpopulated landscapes set the standard for twentieth-century nature photography, and each of their followers had to contend with the precedents they set. A gallery of images by Robert Adams, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Mark Klett, Terry Evans, Patrick Nagatani, Richard Misrach, David Maisel, and Bill Owens give a sense of the changing voice of landscape photography through the end of the twentieth century.

The exhibition’s primary concentration is on work made after the millennium, in response not only to artistic commentary in the preceding century but also in reaction to a critical shift in the human relationship to the landscape. The pictures stimulate visitors to think about their personal relationship to the environment and to consider the impact of the choices we make as a society and as individuals.

The artists represented in the second section of the show are Subhankar Banerjee, Bremner Benedict, Michael P. Berman, Joann Brennan, Suzette Bross, Christine Chin, Dornith Doherty, Chris Enos, Daniel Handal, Beth Lilly, Brad Moore, Matthew Moore, Brook Reynolds, Laurel Schultz, Christina Seely, Sharon Stewart, Carlan Tapp, Brad Temkin, Sonja Thomsen, Robert Toedter, Phil Underdown, Greg MacGregor and Victor Masayesva, Jr. Many are emerging artists whose work has not been shown in the Southwest, while others are more established artists doing new bodies of work, some of which have never been exhibited.
– Katherine Ware, Curator of Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art

Free public reception Friday, April 8, 2011 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. hosted by the Women’s Board of the Museum of New Mexico.