Archive Post-Landscape: Between Nature and Culture

Curator's Essay | Images from the Exhibition | Kim Abeles Sandow Birk | Laurie Brown | Elizabeth Bryant The Center for Land Use Interpretation | Wanda Hammerbeck Andreas Hessing | Sant Khalsa | Skeet McAuley Kathryn Miller | Diana Thater | Post-Landscape Home Page Archive - Fall 2001 Home

Wanda Hammerbeck

The work is an investigation of how a landscape photograph makes meaning and beyond that, how the land itself makes meaning. Utilizing landscape photographs and text to explore the basic phenomenology of being on the land and under the sky—those basic aspects of land that inform us about ourselves, about our relationship with the land and the civilization we build out of that relationship.

For a long time I have sensed that I live in a time of profoundly deep ignorance about our connections to the Earth as we become increasingly more dependent on information from electronic sources rather than natural sources. It is a time when vital knowledge humans have always possessed from their experience with the land seems beyond reach. Many of us have forgotten to reach because we do not even know where or for what it is we should reach.

As soon as I leave the others and begin to make photographs, I am conscious of being influenced no longer. I am no longer disconnected and the world comes to exist for me again, not as some foreign, distant, other to be looked at, but as a totality in which I am able to become immersed, whose parts are an extension of myself. They are continuous with me and I with them. Here, I learn things I have forgotten and I learn things I never knew. They are simple truths and I sense they are very important as I realize that what we do to the land we do to ourselves, for we are inextricably bound with the land in a totality.

The photographs serve as connections, as renewal points to help me reaffirm my affection for these places and for life and my commitment to caring about us, about who we are and who we will become.