Shaping Landscapes illuminates the state’s history, using photography as a platform for exploring technology, identity, and activism.
Shaping Landscapes: 150 Years of Photography in Utah
September 16, 2023–March 3, 2024
Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City
The sprawling vistas of Ansel Adams were to photography what Thomas Moran was to the generation of landscape painters before him, each codifying the sublimity associated with the region. While romanticization of the American West persists, decades of scholarship, political engagement, and experience demonstrate with searing clarity the complexities and contradictions underlying this idealization.
In Shaping Landscape: 150 Years of Photography in Utah, UMFA’s new curator of modern and contemporary art, Emily Lawhead, draws from the museum’s collection to illustrate the state’s multivalent history of photography, showcasing the medium as an arbiter of awe, but also a tool of technology, identity, and activism. Placing a centuries-plus survey in a modest gallery is both confident and deliciously contrarian.
The exhibition begins with historical photographs like William Henry Jackson’s small trio of albumen landscape prints from 1870, and Charles Roscoe Savage’s Saltair (ca 1905), which depicts one of Utah’s most iconic resort structures, alongside George N. Ottinger’s stunning Red Canyon (1931), one of an album of hand-colored gelatin silver prints, displayed behind protective glass.
The artists featured on the opposite wall embrace a form of photography that captures the anti-picturesque and the impact of industry on our environment, as seen in two 1983 works by Craig Law. The show makes room for both the political—in Drex Brooks’s images of the Mountain Meadows Massacre site—and the personal, in Ernesto Pujol’s Lost (America) (2007) picturing the artist’s curled form amid Utah’s barren salt flats.
Adorning each end of this space are perhaps the exhibition’s most striking works. On the south wall is Edward Burtynsky’s 1983 photo illustrating the raw beauty of an industrial copper mine. In it, the perpendicular terraces that are cut into the landscape resemble an ancient Greek amphitheater converging on a bright teal pool of water at its center. Similarly jarring in its confluence of horror and beauty is Diné and Ho-Chunk artist Russel Albert Daniels’s work Fracking in the Uinta Basin, Utah (2023), which depicts an aerial view of oil and gas reserves speckled along a landscape that has been exploited for centuries.
As curator, Lawhead envisioned the exhibition as a means of familiarizing herself, and by extension, the public, with sections of the museum’s collection that were seldom viewed in isolation. The exhibition demonstrates why such works are indeed worthy of our attention.
