Landscape and Nature Photography

Photographs of land, sea, wilderness and nature, from 19th-century survey plates to the altered landscapes of today.

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About

Photographers turned to landscape almost as soon as the medium existed, despite slow exposures and heavy glass plates. Roger Fenton photographed Welsh rivers and Yorkshire abbey ruins in the 1850s, and Carleton Watkins hauled a mammoth-plate camera into Yosemite in 1861; his prints helped the case for protecting the valley in 1864. Timothy H. O'Sullivan recorded the canyons of the American West for government surveys.

Ansel Adams made the national landscape a drama of silver and shadow, as in Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941). In 1975 the exhibition New Topographics, with Robert Adams and Joe Deal among others, looked instead at tract housing and parking lots spreading across the land. Richard Misrach's Desert Cantos, begun in 1979, find fires, floods and bombing ranges in the American desert, and David Hockney's photocollage Pearblossom Hwy. (1986) reassembles a roadside view from hundreds of prints.