Group Exhibition The View from Here

Landscape photography crosses personal, documentary, and contemporary positions, making it a particularly fraught site of negotiation. As art critic Lucy Lippard notes in The Lure of the Local, landscape photography is “at once subject to personal vision and attributed the objectivity of scientific precision.” This meeting of the personal and dispassionate often produces a kind of doubling, as emotional responses to a place leave as strong an impression as the optical information.

In The View from Here, five artists explore landscape as subject and object, drawing on notions of the tourist gaze, contrasting the documentary impulse with the hallucinatory fictions produced by nostalgia and the often uncanny result. Using a variety of stylistic choices and technical processes—employing found images and artifacts, innovative forms of analogue post-processing, and video-game based algorithms—these artists address photography’s ability to both resemble the world and to make it strange, inviting viewers to question how the medium both re-presents and shapes landscape.

Curated by Kendra Ainsworth