Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography - Softcover

Foresta, Merry; Gould, Stephen Jay; Marling, Karal Ann

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9780826313645: Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826313647 ISBN 13: 9780826313645

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press, 1992

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Three noted academics describe a new exhibit for the National Museum of American Art that uses the landscape photography of the eighties to show how visual artists have attempted to grapple with environmental issues. Simultaneous.

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From Library Journal:

These three striking exhibition catalogs augment the growing field of photographic landscape studies. While each has a different focus, shared themes emerge: the vanishing American wilderness, the fragile coexistence of nature and human culture in the late 20th century, the dramatic march of urban development, and the often lopsided balance of nature and civilization. Between Home and Heaven features 99 works by 39 young photographers dating from 1979. From the Edenic Arcadias to nuclear waste dump sites, it charts the diverse paths today's photographers are taking through the enigmatic terrain of contemporary America. The catalog also includes paragraph-length artist biographies and three topical essays: a historical review of landscape photography by Merry Foresta, an essay on the social meaning of landscape by Karal Ann Marling, and reflections on geological time by Stephen Jay Gould. Important for most libraries. Deal's stark black-and-white altered landscapes may initially strike readers as cool and aloof. Closer examination, however, reveals a keen sense of the ironies inherent in Los Angeles's population and building explosion that makes them resonate with the tensions of society's relationship to the earth. Three series--"The Natural Environment," "The City," and "The City's Edge"--and three thoughtful essays roam from manicured lawns in what were once desert arroyos to cities built on the beach, settings with profound sociological implications that are never far from view. For regional and specialized photography collections. The most personal book of the three, Revealing Territory chronicles Klett's nine-year odyssey through the Southwest, primarily Arizona and southern Utah. His full-strength black-and-white photos examine the ways in which people have occupied and experienced this arid land and the evidence they left behind, from ancient rock art to modern engineering feats like the Hoover Dam and the Central Arizona Water Project. While celebrating the region's complex beauty--deep canyons, startling rock formations, and striated cliffs--they also probe with gravity and playfulness the ways in which changes to the landscape reflect our shifting image of ourselves. Southall's biographical essay traces the evolution of Klett's work and its relationship to such predecessors as 19th-century survey photographers and 20th-century landscape masters; Limerick links Klett's photos to new definitions of the West. Of regional and academic interest.
- Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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