REVIEW Excerpt: “In Response to Place”
Here is an excerpt of a longer review of the Clay Center photo exhibit “In Response to Place,” up through Nov. 5. To read the whole review, click here. “Bay,” The image above is William Wegman’s “dogscape” of one of his famous Weimaraners.
By Rebecca Burch
For the Gazette
‘I don’t go looking for twisty and sprawling images, but I find them. I guess it suits my personality. When there’s not much water available, plants will fight to grow and all hell breaks loose. I like that.” – Lee Friedlander
The quote above is the perfect metaphor for the “In Response to Place,” photo exhibit at the Clay Center. The artists featured captured images from the Nature Conservancy’s “Last Great Places” list - a list of natural places threatened by development, pollution, and urban sprawl. Like Friedlander’s plants, these places are fighting to exist, and these artists have captured their struggle with stunning results.
Some of the them, like Annie Liebovitz, William Wegman, and Sally Mann, are best known for their portraiture. A fan might be surprised to see their names in an exhibit of landscape photos. In fact, their photos of nature take on an almost portrait-like quality. Liebovitz’s “Pitch Pines and Gray Birch” shows a grouping of almost human-looking, light-colored birch trees against the dark, velvety backdrop of pitch pines.
Fans of Wegman will be happy to see his famous Weimaraners in his landscapes. But instead of his typical anthropomorphic portraits of dogs in human poses, the dogs become part of the landscape itself. In “Bay,” you see only the dog’s back, forming a concave sort of “dogscape” against the background of a portion of Cobscook Bay, Maine.
