Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970
Makeda Best
Yale University Press
English
Hardcover, spiral bound
262 pages
254 x 203 mm
2021
ISBN 9780300260083
Devour the Land considers how contemporary photographers have responded to the US military’s impact on the domestic environment since the 1970s, a dynamic period for environmental activism as well as for photography. This catalogue presents a lively range of voices at the intersection of art, environmentalism, militarism, photography, and politics. Alongside interviews with prominent contemporary artists working in the landscape photography tradition, the images speak to photographers’ varied motivations, personal experiences, and artistic approaches. The result is a surprising picture of the ways violence and warfare surround us. Although most modern combat has taken place abroad, the US domestic landscape bears the footprint of armed conflict-much of the environmental damage we live with today was caused by our own military and the expansive network of industries supporting its work. Designed to evoke a field book and to nod toward ephemera produced by earlier artists and activists, the catalogue features works by dozens of photographers, including Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Dorothy Marder, Alex Webb, Terry Evans, and many more. This book also includes interviews with Sheila Pree Bright, Terry Evans, Ashley Gilbertson, David T. Hanson, Stacy Kranitz, Jin Lee, Richard Misrach, Barbara Norfleet and Oscar Palacio.
(source: https://www.waterstones.com/book/devour-the-land/makeda-best/steven-hoelscher/9780300260083)
About the Editor
Makeda Best is the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. Her current exhibitions are Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art and Winslow Homer: Eyewitness. Her forthcoming book, Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy will be published in spring 2020 by the Pennsylvania State University Press. She recently published an article in the Archives of American Art Journal on the painter William H. Johnson. The subject of her current book project is American landscape photography.
(source: https://afvs.fas.harvard.edu/people/makeda-best)
