Appreciating Nature Through Abstraction

A cartoon yellowing on my refrigerator door is captioned, “He didn’t know how to appreciate nature.” It shows a middle-aged man sitting in a stuffed armchair improbably set down in an open field. There are mountains in the background, trees to the right, and an attentive rabbit to the left. A balloon above the man’s head shows what he is thinking: “There’s no plot.” The cartoon, by Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK), came to mind as I looked at the 13 pictures in “Jem Southam: The Rockfalls of Normandy” at the Robert Mann Gallery. What am I supposed to see in these works?Jem Southam, who was born in Bristol in 1950, is one of England’s finest contemporary landscape photographers. Much of his work, including the recent “Upton Pyne,” is about the effect of man on the rural countryside, although nothing made by man is visible in “The Rockfalls of Normandy.” The pictures at Robert Mann are 46.5-by-55.25-inch chromogenic dye coupler prints. The large scale is appropriate here because the images encompass vast distances along the shore, immense geological features, boulders, rocks, pebbles, grains of sand, and lichen, all of which Mr. Southam wants us to see with sharp particularity. The complex processing is necessary to achieve the subtle, deep colors: ferrous oranges in the cliffs, dark seaweed greens in the tide pools, delicate pearly blue grays in the distant seacoast. The pictures have sonorous French place names — “Valleuse de Cure,” “Senneville-sur-Fecamp,” “Les Petites Dalles,” and “St. Pierre-en-Port” — and the pristine beauty of spots that are still too difficult to access for littering tourists.Still, nature has no meaning for me. I understand the intellectual, and even some of the spiritual, beliefs that produced the transcendental Hudson River School of painters, and the impulses that sent Ansel Adams up the Sierra Nevadas, and I have hiked, camped, and climbed. Although nature may be nice to look it, I am too far from the Druids to be inspired by it. What I see in Mr. Southam’s images is a meticulous use of found materials to produce complex works of abstract design. They are like the nonobjective paintings of mid-century except, of course, they are objective. Or they are like highly patterned Islamic art, except the patterns do not recur. Colors, shapes, and scale are the elements of these sophisticated compositions.Another element Mr. Southam incorporates, by way of providing a “plot,” is time. One picture was taken at Senneville-sur-Fecamp in February 2006, and another was taken from the same spot in April of that year. The first was shot at a low tide that exposed the rocky shelf abutting the cliffs and gave the scene a brownish cast; the second at high tide, when a wide swath of seaweed gave it a bluish green tint. Between the picture taken at Vaucottes in November 2005 and the one taken in February 2006, the disposition of the black pebbles on the beach changed considerably. The high cliff jutting seaward in the distance seems to be the same in each, but we understand that, given eons, it, too, will go. Whatever others find to appreciate in nature or in Mr. Southam’s precise renderings of it, to me the most discernible theme is those “awful notes, whose concord shall not fail” that the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth heard in nature, and wrote about in “Mutability.”The Yancey Richardson Gallery is also exhibiting landscapes, “Victoria Sambunaris: Yet All Remains,” and vintage photographs by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Frank Gohlke in the Project Gallery. Ms. Sambunaris’s work is similar to Mr. Southam’s in that her nine prints are large format, 41 inches by 57 inches, and chromogenic. But Ms. Sambunaris (b. 1964), being American, was influenced by the “sublime” landscapes of the West by such 19th-century photographers as Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins, and by the 20th-century New Topographers, whose black-and-white photographs Ms. Richardson hung near hers for comparison. Ms. Sambunaris took the images in “Yet All Remains” in 2007 when, under the influence of John McPhee’s “Annals of the Former World,” his geological history of North America, she followed I-80 west, ultimately driving 11,000 miles through territory that is egregiously American.“Untitled, Wendover, Utah” is a far perspective of scrub-covered prairie with a high mound rising in the middle distance and snowcapped mountains in the far distance. Around the base of the high mound is housing, some of it still being built, a strip with roadside shopping, and various roads, highways, and some railroad tracks. The man-made additions to the land, layered on top of its geological history, give the picture a “plot,” but to Ms. Sambunaris’s credit, she does not belabor it. The houses are ticky-tacky, and her print is detailed enough for us to make out signs that read “Cinema Video” and “175 Jacuzzi Suites” and “You Bet/Winnemucca/Just Ahead,” but the prairie is so broad that the most conspicuous thing about Wendover is how inconsequential it seems.Robert Adams explored a similar theme, development at the edge of the prairie, in “Dusk, West Denver, Colorado,” a 6-by-7-inch gelatin silver print from 1973. Where Ms. Sambunaris has some scrub in the foreground of her image to give a sense of scale, Mr. Adams has some junked cars, but in spite of the 35-year time lapse, and the differences in size and technology, there is a clear relationship between the two works.Telephone poles, a landing strip, earth-moving equipment, and the determined four-lane line of the interstate figure in Ms. Sambunaris’s pictures from Nevada, Wyoming, and Pennsylvania, the markers of our hold on the land.“Jem Southam: The Rockfalls of Normandy” at the Robert Mann Gallery until May 11 (210 Eleventh Ave., between 24th and 25th streets, 212-989-7600).“Victoria Sambunaris: Yet All Remains” at the Yancey Richardson Gallery until May 17 (535 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-230-9610).

Appreciating Nature Through Abstraction

Appreciating Nature Through Abstraction

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