Between Home and Heaven. - book reviews

PSA Journal, July, 1992

by the university of New Mexico Press in association with the National Museum of American Art. Hardcover $50, paperback $35.

The University of New Mexico Press has published a lavishly illustrated book Between Home and Heaven containing nearly 150 photographs to accompany a major exhibit of landscape photography presented by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art.

Both the book and the exhibit address one of the most significant subjects concerning artists today: the fragile coexistence of nature and human culture in the late 20th century. Not since the last century has the question of how Americans use the land and live on it been so central to a generation of artists.

The photographs were chosen from the museum's new collection representing nearly 50 young photographers from all areas of the United States. Most of the images date to the late 1980s--the oldest is from 1979--and encompass a wide variety of styles and techniques.

Between Home and Heaven contains nearly 150 photographs and three topical essays, ranging from a review of landscape photography by Merry A. Foresta to an essay on the social meaning of landscape by Karal Ann Matting and reflections on geological time by naturalist Stephen Jay Gould.

The photographs represent a variety of themes and concerns of this generation. Many artists are deeply motivated by a nostalgia for the American wilderness, their work referring to an earlier romantic pictorial tradition. Whether photographs of the Everglades, the Delaware River or Hawaii's Haleakala volcano, these images are striking and sumptuous.

The encounter of nature and everyday life also catches this generation's eyes. Peter Goin, for example, shows the dramatic march of urban development, abruptly abutting a cleared "no-man's land" enacted in 1907 along the entire Mexican-American border.

A closer harmony of mankind and nature is visually symbolized in photographs of graceful spans of bridges crossing deep canyons and rivers, or even the delicate tracery of power-generating stations echoing the striations and veins of the cliff rocks on which they stand.

The concept of the book is summed up by Merry A. Foresta in her essay: "`As close as your own backyard' or `paradise on earth,' landscape in the late 20th century lies somewhere between the ideals of home and heaven. Like the older traditions of Arcadia and Utopia, the first promises a return to an edenic past, and the other suggests that innovation will make us a paradise in the future. Today photographers chart a territory somewhere in between: between the necessity of society making its home on Earth, and the hope that such a home can be heaven on earth."