Pic of the Day: Deconstructing the Fruited Plain

April 21, 2010

An email from Robert Mann Gallery announcing that the Joe Deal Archive has been acquired by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson inspired us to check out some of the photographer’s work currently on view in New York. In West and West, Deal, an influential member of the New Topographic movement back in the ’70s, shoots the Great Plains in a spare style that transports the viewer back in time; while of all these black-and-white images were snapped rather recently, they could have just as easily been taken hundreds of years ago.

Deal, who grew up in the Midwest, gives some background for the series in West and West , which was published in 2009 by the Center for American Places:

The act of making a photograph is not all that different from the act performed by the surveyors. Both are essentially visual; both impose a frame around something that has no clear boundaries of its own. In some respects, making these photographs was a kind of reenactment, a way of knowing what it must have been like to lay a straight line down over a vast plain. Only, in my case, and from my vantage point in time, the intention is to reimagine what lies beneath the grid. If the square, as employed in the surveys of public lands, could function like a telescope, framing smaller and smaller sections of the plains, it can also be used as a window, equilaterally divided by the horizon, that begins with a finite section of earth and sky and restores them in the imagination to the vastness that now can only exist as an idea: the landscape contained within the perfect symmetry of the square implies infinity.

Check out the show at Robert Mann through May 8, and click through below to see some of our favorite images on view.