Promise and Peril: Recent Acquisitions in American Landscape Photography

Promise and Peril: Recent Acquisitions in American Landscape Photography brings collectively works acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts since 2022. Marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, the exhibition traces the stress between promise and peril throughout greater than 160 years of photographic observe. While capturing the sweetness, abundance, and scale of the nation’s various landscapes, pictures has borne witness to the results of human ambition, together with histories of useful resource extraction, inhabitants displacement, and neglect. 

In this exhibition, iconic pictures of monumental wilderness and pure abundance stand in dialog with images that register the impression of human intervention on the setting, together with deforestation, industrial enlargement, and suburban progress. Some works current the panorama as a website of reverence and solace; others confront scenes of destruction and vulnerability. Still others assert the presence of girls and folks of colour, increasing a panorama custom that has too usually excluded their views and relationships to the land. The images on view reveal American panorama pictures as a dynamic observe during which nationwide beliefs collide with lived realities.   

Promise and Peril: Recent Acquisitions in American Landscape Photography is curated by Dr. Sarah Kennel, VMFA’s Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center.