Distinguished Visitors Talk by Alison Nordström, Independent Scholar/Curator of Photographs ▪ Museum Associate, Peabody Museum, Harvard University ▪ Visiting Scholar, Graduate Department of Photography and Integrated Media, Lesley University

Talk on Wednesday, April 10 at 4:30pm in Chase Auditorium (tea at 4:15pm)

“Lens and Landscape:  Thinking about Photographs of Place”

Abstract:  What is a landscape? Why are some photographs of places considered landscapes and some not? What is the difference between a painted landscape and a photographed one? How have the look and meaning of landscape photographs changed over time? Lens, Land, Landscape is a generously illustrated lecture on landscape photographs and the changing intentions, understandings and uses that their makers and viewers have brought to them since their making. 

Beginning with pre-photographic art as a shaper of the genre, the lecture will consider nearly 200 years of photographic efforts from the earliest images of Les Excursions Daguerriennes to recent multi-media productions. The lecture will touch briefly on work made in other parts of the world, but its emphasis will be on the United States, both for its influence on the genre elsewhere and for its particular connections to past and present ideas about wilderness, expansion, national character, and patriotism.

 While “landscape” must be understood as an artistic genre, the lecture will pay particular attention to such work as the expeditionary photographs of the American west made after the Civil War as descriptive documents that were subsumed into influential art in the mid 20th century. The survey will position key works within the various schools of photographic art, from pictorialism to modernism to contemporary practices, but will also survey the various uses of landscape images in families, tourism, advertising and propaganda.

 The lecture will introduce its audience to landscape as both concept and artistic product. It will offer a chronology of the landscape photograph as it has been critically understood since the mid-19th century, as well as some ideas and vocabulary for approaching this broad category of visual material. A final selection of work by contemporary artists will affirm the continued vitality and diversity of landscape photography today.

Hosted by the Department of Fine Arts in conjunction with the Distinguished Visitors Program.