Exhibit Explores Approaches to Photographing the Landscape

The traditions of landscape photography are as old as photography itself—older, if you consider how photographers have been influenced by the traditions of landscape painting. From July 14 to August 4, Viewpoint presents four photographers—Gregory Gilbert, Chris Schiller, Steve Smith, and Robert B. Taylor—whose approaches to photographing the landscape suggest the breadth of the genre at the beginning of the 21st century.

For over 30 years, Mendocino County native Robert Taylor has searched the rural California landscape for images that “seem to possess magical qualities”, putting him solidly in the tradition of his early influence, Ansel Adams, and other West Coast photographers such as Wynn Bullock. “On the personal level I find myself drawn to themes that have abided in me since childhood, such as the love of nature and a nostalgic view of the passage of time,” he declares. “However, other photographs seem enchanting due to the lyrical and emotive qualities inherent in the silver image itself. Subtle qualities of light and tonal nuance seem to charm the psyche regardless of theme or personal preference. The quest for such photographs is both elusive and exhilarating.”

Chris Schiller is another West Cost native working in the Ansel Adams tradition, striving for expressive images that, in Adams’ words, “help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and the wonder surrounding him”. For over 20 years he has sought out places and views rarely or never photographed before. Frequently, his images are made far from any road, in places that can be reached only on foot with a backpack full of cameras and lenses. He uses his camera as another way to explore the places he visits, bringing his images a sense of discovery and delight. “When making images,” Schiller states, “I am interested in the connections between things… There is a delicate tension of order and disorder, of the living and the lifeless.”

Gregory Gilbert also explores order and disorder, but in a very different landscape and with an aesthetic far removed from the sublime. The photographs Gilbert is exhibiting were taken in Ancil Hoffman County Park, a 77-acre natural area in Carmichael (a suburb of Sacramento). Bordered on three sides by homes and on the east by the American River, the park is, in Gilbert’s view, “a sort of ‘suburban wilderness’ in the midst of typical suburban sprawl.” Gilbert, who studied with Lewis Baltz and Norman Locks at UC Santa Cruz, works in the New Topographics tradition that eschews romanticized or utopian treatments of an often-human less landscape in favor of an unsentimental and inclusive representation of the world we inhabit.

Born and raised in Utah, Steven Smith went to college with the intent to become a painter. It was Robert Frank’s book The Americans, followed by the work of Gary Winogrand, that showed Smith how photography could serve his artistic ambitions. Later, he found in Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and the New Topographics movement an approach to the landscape that resonated with what he saw happening to the landscape of the West—changes he knew intimately as a construction contractor in Los Angeles. Using a view camera and black-and-white film, Smith made photographs that expressed his ambivalence about how we are changing the landscape of the West, resulting in a body of work recently published in the award-winning book, The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West. Currently Professor of Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, Smith has been awarded a Guggenheim and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship for Photography.

There will be a Second Saturday reception for the artists on July 14 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.