With Transformation of a Landscape, American photographer Victoria Sambunaris publishes her first book in more than a decade. Released by Radius Books, the large-format volume brings together work from the past ten years while continuing her long-term project Taxonomy of a Landscape, an ongoing body of work she has pursued for more than twenty years.
For her practice, Sambunaris spends several months each year travelling alone across the United States. Equipped with a 5x7-inch large-format camera, film, a video camera and extensive research materials, she documents the ongoing transformation of the American landscape. Her focus lies on the traces of political, technological and industrial intervention that continue to reshape both the appearance and use of the land.
Rather than pursuing romantic notions of untouched wilderness, the New York-based photographer is interested in the complex intersections between landscape and human intervention. Railroads, mining sites, power plants, pipelines, border infrastructure and vast logistics hubs appear throughout her work as visible markers of social change and economic interests. Her photographs connect the monumentality of geological time with the comparatively fleeting traces of human infrastructure.
Sambunaris describes this approach through the term “social geography”: "I think of ‘social geography’ as a term to describe my photographic work and methodology… The photographs that I produce question traditional and clichéd notions of landscape, our place within it, and the collective roles and responsibilities in how and why we shape it the way we do.” (Radius Books)
The publication combines large-scale photographs with extensive archival material from the artist's personal research process. Maps, travel journals, road logs, notes, geological literature, found objects and mineral specimens reveal the depth of her investigations and offer a rare insight into the working methods of a photographer who has systematically examined the American territory for decades.
Victoria Sambunaris (*1964, Lancaster, Pennsylvania) studied at Mount Vernon College before earning her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1999. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. Today, her photographs are represented in major public and private collections.
With Transformation of a Landscape, Sambunaris presents far more than a traditional landscape photography book. The publication functions as a visual investigation into how history, politics, economics and technology shape our understanding of landscape - and how these forces become inscribed into the seemingly endless expanses of North America.
Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape
Radius Books, Hardcover, 210 pages, 197 illustrations
Texts by Victoria Sambunaris and Angie Keefer, including a conversation with Dionne Lee