Tucked away behind the display of 1800s European artwork at Denver Art Museum is a new exhibition titled What We’ve Been Up To: Landscape. It is a collection of pictures from the museum’s photography department which have never before been displayed to the public — until now. Entering the exhibition is almost like stepping into the museum’s archives themselves. An intimate, dark space filled largely with black-and-white photographs creates a murky, almost stagnant feel. As if, walking up to each one, you may be tempted to blow off a fine layer of dust.
But the fact that these pieces have never been exhibited is not due to a lack of talent or, crucially, a lack of purpose. Each one is bent around a quiet subtlety. They may lack the snappy, eye-catching aesthetic that typically graces the posters of large exhibitions, but that is because the photographs in this collection are meant to be absorbed. Slowly. Intentionally. Each picture demands a kind of agreement with the viewer; the photographer will offer a snapshot of something which feels important, to their experience and the wider culture, and the viewer will accept it as such.
The exhibition works in unexpected ways, too. Judging by the name of it, visitors are likely to expect vast, impressive landscapes from across North America — mountain ranges touched by clouds or sweeping prairies coated in grasses. But, as the museum’s opening dialogue explains, these pieces challenge the idea of “what a landscape photograph might be.” From a portrait of a weeping willow bent over a pond to an abandoned basketball court and a barn drenched in snowdrifts, the pictures feel more like individual cross sections of the photographer’s experience. Each one is a glimpse into what the artist feels is at the centre of the American experience. As a result, it is the exhibition itself which becomes the landscape, rather than specific pieces. They come together like tiles in a mosaic to create an almost tangible sense of what America has been — and what it may become in the future.
As in many regions of art, the negative space in this series is almost as important — if not more important — than what is actually seen. In approaching photography which grapples with the nature of a nation and how it has changed, the viewer is likely to expect to see people, in one form or another: crowds packed into city streets, frontier families posing outside cabins, or even just travelers on a road. But human figures are distinctly absent from this collection. That isn’t to say that the title is misleading, however. Because the “what we’ve been up to” is certainly present in this quiet corner of the museum. Rather than the people themselves, it is the echoes of their actions, the results of what they’ve “been up to” that we see before us. Encompassing everything from beautifully designed gardens that offer a haven for wildlife to mass grave sites from the horrifying genocides of years past, all that humans are capable of seems to be captured within these photographs.
The collection seeks to dive into all the varied pieces that make up what America has been to each individual artist. The photograph Hideo (Heart Mountain) by Christina Fernandez from the series View From Here, for example, shows a concentration camp in Cody, Wyoming which was used to hold thousands of Japanese Americans during the second World War. The photo was taken from within one of the buildings looking outward, the unique perspective allowing us to step into the shoes of those who were forcibly moved there. In a similar vein, the collection does not shy away from the sparse and even ugly aspects which landscape photography can sometimes choose to omit. From a ‘70s-era telephone booth surrounded by beat-up caravans to rusting old cars piled up in a ravine, the show truly seeks to specialise in the good, the bad, the boring, and the ugly of the American experience from the last two hundred years or more.
As expected, the Denver Art Museum’s photographic exhibition is a chance to view the minute views, experiences, locations, and situations which have shaped the nation in subtle and unforeseen ways. It is contemplative yet thought-provoking and requires a settled frame of mind in which to take in the whispered commentary that each piece offers — both on its own and in conjunction with the others. The show runs until January of next year and is certainly worth spending an hour or two in if you happen to be in the neighbourhood on an unhurried afternoon.
