Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
John Pfahl
American (b. 1939)
ALTERED LANDSCAPES (1976)
3 c-prints
each 8” x 10”

STYLE: 70s PHOTOGRAPHY

  

John Pfahl received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Syracuse University and an honorary doctorate from Niagara University. He taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology for fifteen years and has been an independant photographer since 1986. His work is widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the world. Pfahl is best-known for his innovative photography of the natural landscape. Rather than simply going out with his camera to celebrate the beauty of the natural world, Pfahl starts with an idea, a concept that shapes the body of work he is creating. His thematic series of works include ARCADIA REVISITED, in which he photographed scenes that had been illustrated 100 years earlier by printmaker Amos Sangster; Smoke, photography of industrial smoke; Missile/Glyphs, juxtaposition of the markings on bombs and missiles with petroglyphs found in Southwestern caves; and this series, Altered Landscapes, in which Pfahl physically transforms a landscape with the placement of various objects and then photographs it. The objects, which vary widely, are carefully placed so that they emphasize a prominent element in the landscape or suggest the look of a map, plan, or diagram.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Peter Bunnell, introduction, Altered Landscapes, Friends of Photography/Robert Freidus Gallery, 1981
"In these pictures Pfahl creates, usually within twenty ot thirty feet of the camera, a construction that is given order and perfection through the manipulation of the optics of the camera...These pictures are a celebration of both the photographer’s art and his deliberation. Their quality lies in the demonstration of forcing nature to rival art. By addressing his camera to scenes that he feels, as some others do, are on the edge of cliche or novelty, he actually imposes more of himself than might otherwise be the case...Pfahl’s contribution to us comes to us through the true pleasure of his wit and his doctrine of spotless technique...While the obviousness of the demonstrated acts--stringing rope, laying tape, wrapping foil--might be seen as only superficial, these gestures...reveal the inner artist."
Essay, Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, ©lacma.org
“John Pfahl is a photographer who works completely within the straightforward, documentary tradition of photography, yet his work also defies that tradition. He uses our expectations of photographic truth to demonstrate how "facts" can be manufactured. In the Altered Landscapes portfolio, each image is the result of painstaking technical work on the site to construct ingenious and witty illusions of perspective. In a more recent body of work, Power Places, Pfahl photographed the sites of nuclear power plants in the grand style of nineteenth-century photographers who captured the beauty and monumentality of nature. He thus creates an ironic commentary on the place of such plants in the modern landscape.
For Triangle, Bermuda Pfahl stationed his camera in an intertidal zone where he constructed the base of a triangle: its other two legs run into the sea-wash. Pfahl photographed what appeared before his camera, but the objects he recorded are not actually where they appear to be. The monocular camera has compressed space to give the illusion that the rock in the background and the pegs in the foreground really lie in the same plane. The image reads as a string drawing yet also conveys scale and distance, creating a disconcerting shift between simultaneous yet contradictory perceptions of real space.”