Renate Aller: Mountain Interval

David Benjamin Sherry’s photographs of the American West remind us why nature is worth preserving.

– The New York Times

American Monuments is a landscape photography project that captures the spirit and intrinsic value of America’s threatened system of national monuments. In April 2017, an executive order called for the review of the twenty-seven national monuments created since January 1996. In December 2017, the final report called on the president to shrink four national monuments and change the management of six others, recommending that areas in Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans be offered for sale, specifically for oil drilling and coal and uranium mining. American Monuments focuses on the areas under review, with special emphasis on those that have already been decimated. 

David Benjamin Sherry documents these pristine, sacred, and wildly diverse areas using the traditional, historic 8 × 10-inch format. The resulting photographs not only convey the beauty of these important and ecologically diverse sites, but also shed light upon the plight of the perennially exploited landscape of the American West.

Limited edition of this book available HERE

Photography didn’t invent black-and-white imagery, but it certainly caused it to proliferate so widely that when color was introduced to the medium, it seemed almost unnatural. With his new work, Misrach appears determined to renew that sense of unfamiliarity—to revive the idea that color is unreliable, artificial. But he is careful not to put its seriousness at risk. It’s a tricky balance to strike.

– Nancy Princenthal, Art in America

Ansel Adams, a classical pianist as well as renowned photographer, compared the photographic negative to a musical score that can be interpreted/printed in numerous ways. John Cage, the avant-garde composer, compiled scores by numerous composers and artists and presented them as graphic art in the 1969 publication Notations. It is the merging of these two ideas, from these unlikely sources, that form the foundation for this project. Since 2006, coinciding with photographer Richard Misrach's shift away from analog film to working exclusively with a digital camera, he has been interested in the negative image in photography as an aesthetic experience in its own right. This body of work—and book—is an homage to the end of the analog era in photography.

Simultaneous, multiple activities on sloping sand hills appear as if layers of different people and activities were choreographed next to rolling waves of the sea.

German-born photographer Renate Aller’s Ocean | Desert is an extension of the ongoing series and sold-out book Oceanscapes (Radius Books, 2010). Aller has continued to make images of the ocean from a single vantage point, for which she is internationally known; for the last several years, she has also photographed sand dunes in New Mexico and Colorado.

In Ocean | Desert, Aller pairs the resulting images in a fascinating new series that continues her investigation into the relationship between Romanticism, memory, and landscape in the context of our current socio-political awareness. There is both a visual and visceral relationship between the two bodies of work, as though the minerals of the sand dunes carry the memory of the ocean waters that were there millions of years before. The desert images also capture visitors to the dunes, who engage in beach activities far away from any large body of water. 

“Lee’s true subject may ultimately have more to do with her interior landscape than the one in front of her camera.”

— Jean Dykstra, Photograph Magazine

Photography by Jungjin Lee
Texts by Jungjin Lee and Robert Frank

Four books in a slipcase
10 x 14 inches
188 pages / 106 images

Trade ISBN: 9781942185277
Signed ISBN: 9798890180070

Rare: $250

Limited edition of this book available HERE