Transformations and Aftershocks

By Suzanne Révy

For a long time, I disliked landscape photography. And yet, I had studied and admired 19th century practitioners such as Carlton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge and Timothy O”Sullivan. Eventually, I turned to the natural world in my own work. This has led me to discover and become inspired by several women whose use of color, light and form to describe the land and expand our notions of the photographic canon. Two such artists published books recently: Transformation of a Landscape by Victoria Sambunaris and Aftershocks by JoAnn Verburg. 

Book Covers (left to right):  Transformation of a Landscape by Victoria Sambunaris (Radius Books, 2024); Aftershocks by JoAnn Verburg (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2024)

Victoria Sambunaris travels around the United States in a camper for months at a time with a five by seven large-format field camera. A New Yorker, she likes to feel like an outsider in the western landscapes she visits. Transformation of a Landscape is her first book in ten years, and  it revels in the vast abstraction of the land that so many of us only experience from above when flying coast to coast. Traversing the west, she seeks places with evidence of human presence by focusing on freight trains, trucks, mines and industrial sites. Her aesthetic recalls the survey pictures made in the late 19th century that beckoned people west. Those pictures emphasized the land’s grandeur and seemingly endless resources, which laid the groundwork for human development and industrial expansion. 

“Untitled (Train Track) Port Lavaca, TX, 2015” by Victoria Sambunaris,  from the book Transformation of a Landscape (Radius Books, 2024). Book photograph by Suzanne Révy

“Untitled (Power Plant) Huntington, UT 2017” by Victoria Sambunaris, from the book Transformation of a Landscape (Radius Books). Book photograph by Suzanne Révy

“Untitled (Jump), Glamis, California, 2020” by Victoria Sambunaris from the book Transformation of a Landscape (Radius Books). Book photographed by Suzanne Révy

Sambunaris’ broad views engender these panoramic vistas with a sense of fragility and mutability; even some of the industrial sites appear vulnerable. We rely on this earth for our survival, and the land is interrupted by our intrusions that often exacerbate floods and droughts. In some pictures, people ride on recreational vehicles, leaving tracks in the sand of desert dunes where they gathered to enjoy being outside during the pandemic. Human activity threatens the stability of the earth, but playing outside can be a salve for the stressors of modern life. Sambunaris seems to be asking, how can we balance our needs and wants with that of the land’s? 

“Untitled (Evaporation Canal) Amboy, California, 2021” by Victoria Sambunaris, from the book Transformation of a Landscape (Radius Books). Book photographed by Suzanne Révy.

Ancillary booklets and ephemera from the book Transformation of a Landscape (Radius Books) by Victoria Sambunaris. Booklets photographed by Suzanne Révy

The large monograph with a couple of gatefolds and an open spine comes with three ancillary booklets that include notes, snapshots, and proof prints. They are an inviting addition that opens Sambunaris’ documentary practice to the reader and encouraged me to think about opting for the road the next time I want to travel west. 

“Big Pink (A Lover’s Dream)” by JoAnn Verburg, 2020, from the exhibition catalog Aftershocks (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Book photographed by Suzanne Révy

Like Sambunaris, JoAnn Verburg uses a five by seven large-format camera. Her images carry a different emotional tenor, despite sharing a similar sense of unease. Aftershocks is a response to a major earthquake and the many reverberations that Verburg felt in the town of Spoleto, where she and her husband, the poet Jim Moore, spend part of each year. During the nineties and early aughts, she photographed the olive groves of Italy, but then took a break to focus on other projects until the earthquake in 2016. Feeling safer outside among the trees during the months following the initial quake, she returned to photograph them.

“Gary / Garden ” by JoAnn Verburg, 2018, from the exhibition catalog Aftershocks (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Book photographed by Suzanne Révy

“An American Man” by JoAnn Verburg, 2021 from the exhibition catalog Aftershocks (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Book photographed by Suzanne Révy

Verburg weaves portraits throughout the project, including local acquaintances and several of Moore. He is often obscured among the groves and in several he is reading a newspaper. This antiquated method to learn the news paired with the slow and deliberate method of picture making infuse the work with a tension between the serenity of an agrarian countryside with the intrusions of current events. It can be unnerving to feel at peace in the garden knowing full well the threats we face environmentally and politically. 

“Reading Into Pinturicchio” by JoAnn Verburg, 2020, from the exhibition catalog Aftershocks (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Book photographed by Suzanne Révy

Leafing through the pages of this handsome exhibition catalog, readers are treated to expansive pictures, some of them as multi-panels presented on fold-outs, along with enlarged image details on the following page. Verburg’s attention to minutiae endow them with significance. For this reader, her images function as a metaphor for a tangled and complex web of societal hierarchies, where even the most insignificant member has value. But the overall ethos is one of trepidation for the future, while finding comfort in the history and myths of olive trees in the undulating hills of Italy.

“Tippy Sky” by JoAnn Verburg, 2024, from the exhibition catalog Aftershocks (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Book photographed by Suzanne Révy

Transformation of a Landscape
Photography by Victoria Sambunaris
Texts by Victoria Sambunaris and Angie Kiefer; Conversation with Dionne Lee
Published by Radius Books, 2024
https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/victoria-sambunaris-transformation-of-a-landscape

Aftershocks
Photography by JoAnn Verburg
Organized by Elizabeth Armstrong, with essays by Elizabeth Armstrong, Marvin Heiferman, G.E. Patterson, a conversation between JoAnn Verburg and Ping Chong with poems by Jim Moore
Published by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2024
https://shop.artsmia.org/collections/exhibition-catalogues/products/joann-verburg-aftershocks