Marketing Photos with Mary Virginia Swanson

From the Center for Creative Photography website:

“Gallery Walk
Thursday, June 17, 5:30 p.m.

Join exhibition curator, Dr. Kate Palmer Albers, for a walking discussion of Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies on Thursday, June 17th, at 5:30 p.m.   The exhibition continues through August 1st.

Inspired by the recent revival of the influential New Topographics exhibition from 1975, Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies traces the effect of newly available technologies such as GPS and Google mapping on today’s landscape photography.”   Guest-curated by University of Arizona photography historian Kate Palmer Albers, this exhibition includes work by Christiana Caro, Andrew Freeman, Frank Gohlke, Margo Ann Kelley, Mark Klett, Paho Mann, Adam Thorman and Byron Wolfe.”

Also continuing through August 1st:

West and West: Joe Deal

Drawing on the remarkable history of 19th-century survey photography of the Great Plains, West and West was also inspired by the landscapes Joe Deal saw as a child while driving west from his home in Topeka, Kansas, to visit relatives in Great Bend. Deal presents the Western landscape in a consistent format, dividing each scene with a horizon line and using the square-format negative. His depiction presents an endlessly fascinating and changing expanse as grasslands and sky unfold in equal share. The 21 images on view capture the full drama of the Great Plains, spanning the area between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, and from the Canadian provinces to the Mexican border.

The Center for American Places has published a book in conjunction with this show, WEST and WEST: Reimagining the Great Plains (112 pages, 51 duotones, 3 maps  10×11, October 2009).

From the University of Chicago Press’ website:

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 officially opened the Great Plains to westward settlement, and the public survey of 1855 by Charles A. Manners and Joseph Ledlie along the Sixth Principal Meridian established the grid by which the uncharted expanse of the Great Plains was brought into scale. The mechanical act performed by land surveyors is believed by photographer Joe Deal to be powerfully similar to the artistic act of making a photograph.To Deal, both acts are about establishing a frame around a vast scene that suggests no definite boundaries of its own.  Thus, when approaching his own photographs of the Great Plains, Deal viewed his photography as a form of reenactment, a method of understanding how it felt to contain the Great Plains in smaller, more measurable units.

In West and West, Deal, who was born and raised in Kansas, revisited the Kansas-Nebraska territory and applied his photographic understanding of the landscape grid and horizon line to illuminate the sense of infinite space that transcends the reality of the survey. As Deal writes in his concluding essay: “If the square, as employed in the surveys of public lands, could function like a telescope, framing smaller and smaller sections of the plains down to a transect, it can also be used as a window, equilaterally divided by the horizon, that begins with a finite section of the earth and sky and restores them in the imagination to the vastness that now exists as an idea: the landscape that is contained within the perfect symmetry of the square implies infinity.”

The stunning photographs in West and West present the Great Plains from a rare perspective. From this vantage point, Deal is able to distill and contemplate its expanse.”   You can read the press release here.

Author Biography

Joe Deal was born in 1947 in Topeka, Kansas. He has served as the provost of the Rhode Island School of Design. Deal has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and his work is included in numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles; and the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester.

Deal is represented by the Robert Mann Gallery in NYC, which in the winter of 2004 hosted the exhibition JOE DEAL: THE FAULT ZONE & OTHER WORK 1976 – 1986.  You can view all the work from the exhibition here, and read the complete press release here.

This exhibition marks the Center’s first opportunity to display a monographic Joe Deal show since acquiring his archive in 2009.