Artists & Works

STYLE: photography,
landscape

In 1982, the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University accepted an etching portfolio by artist Amos W. Sangster (1833-1903) entitled The Niagara River and Falls from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. A gift from the Bethlehem Steel Corporation of Lackawanna, New York, this monumental portfolio contains fifty full-plate etchings 103 vignettes, and a 36,000 word commentary on the history of the Niagara Frontier by James Warner Ward.

A Niagara Falls-based committee, formed to help research and publicize the Sangster portfolio, decided to commission an internationally renowned photographer to create a contemporary series of landscape photographs that would closely parallel Sangster’s etchings of the entire span of the Niagara River. The committee publicized this intention and received a wide variety of proposals from a number of photographers. They eventually decided to entrust the project to photographer John Pfahl, who had long been investigating 19th century pictorial conventions in such exquisite landscape portfolios as Power Places (1983), Picture Windows (1981), Altered Landscapes (1976), and other works. With a grant from the Visual Artists Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Castellani Art Museum commissioned Pfahl to photograph the river over a period of nine months during 1985-86.

Pfahl attempted to use the working methods of Amos Sangster as closely as possible, spending many days hiking along the Niagara River, finding his vantage points, and, most important, approaching his subject with the same reverent appreciation of the Niagara scene and painterly aesthetic evinced by Sangster. The photographs that result are serenely picturesque vistas, incorporating a sense of the awesome and sublime that belongs to Pfahl’s own, uniquely spiritual attitude toward nature. Fifty-two horizontal Kodak Ektacolor color-coupler prints were produced.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Pfahl artist statement for Arcadia Revisited,
Santa Fe University Press, 7/85
"Before I even began to photograph, I immersed myself in all the historical, geographic, and aesthetic data on the river I could find...Would it still be possible to find the nineteenth century lurking in forgotten corners, bypassed by the exigencies of modern time? And, much more practically, would these magical places still be accessible or would they be blocked by that modern nemesis of photography, the chain-link fence?...Indeed, certain areas, most notably around Goat Island, had even reverted from a melange of paper mills and tourist snares to a more natural, even idyllic appearance...Even the later panoramas were effortlessly organized into familiar European conventions as if the river, in some time-jumbling way, were the progenitor for all those idyllic schemata that have been passed from one era and continent to the next...Almost every photograph contains at least one revealing detail that anchors the scene securely in the present...The Niagara River is well known to be one of the most toxic waterways on the continent. Its banks glisten with overt and covert seepage of the most deadly persuasion. There is an almost unbearable irony to the act of recording an achingly romantic meeting of shadowy forest and luminous water while suffering the stench of untreated sewage dripping nearby...Perhaps these devastating issues are peripheral to the thrust of this body of work and can best be confronted in other venues, but disquieting thoughts will inevitably figure into the ultimate meaning of these images."

Estelle Jussim, “Arcadian Vistas: John Pfahl's Niagara,” in Arcadia Revisited, Santa Fe University Press, 7/85
"Pfahl carries the idea of the picturesque vista to new heights of charm....Anybody who has tried to make significant landscape pictures in any medium knows that the landscape is a most difficult subject...That photographs contain pictorial ideas is not surprising, but it takes someone with the talent of a John Pfahl to render the pleasures of the image immediately accessible while the pictorial strategy remains the framework unconsciously perceived...Pfahl's imagery incorporates the awesome and the sublime with the beautiful, all ingeniously combined in the late nineteenth century formula for the picturesque view...He talks about some of the Niagara pictures as if they were stages ready for the actors to perform within a proscenium arch...With the camera as the ideal instrument for stopping time, Pfahl frequently evokes the dream quality associated with timeless Arcadia, where all is peaceful and joyous, and where the human race lives in harmony with nature."