To The Ends of The Earth

Adamson Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its Fall 2011 program with a group exhibition entitled “To the Ends of the Earth,” which explores the relationship between humans and the natural environment. The exhibition takes its title from the enormous lengths that photographers Camille Seaman, Robert Polidori, Edward Burtynsky, and Alfredo de Stefano have gone to record the changing natural environment.  Through their extensive travels, these artists have been able to document these developments, producing images that are both beautiful and frightening; testimony to human impact on nature, and vice versa.
TED fellow Camille Seaman’s work has been featured in National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and many other publications. As part of a project called “Melting Away,” Seaman has spent months at a time over the last ten years, in the Arctic regions of Greenland, and Antarctica, photographing icebergs that are gradually melting. She notes, “I approach the images of icebergs as portraits of individuals, much like family photos of my ancestors. I seek a moment in their life in which they convey their unique personality.” For another project, the photographer drove 5,600 miles in under ten days, documenting a storm system known as a “Supercell,” producing images spectacular images of light, shadow, and cloud as individualistic as those of the icebergs. Seamen’s remarkable large-scale photographs are natural shots that look almost supernatural, reminding the viewer of the unfamiliar shapes that occupy our world, and reconfiguring the strange as the personal.  
Canadian artist Robert Polidori has documented the landscapes of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, creating a body of work that has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is the subject of a book from Steidl.  Using a large format camera and low shutter speeds, Polidori photographs disordered interiors and ravaged streetscapes populated by upended furnishings, stalled cars, and broken telephone poles. The resulting images convey a sense of stillness in the wake of extreme motion, a moment for contemplation that comes out of chaos. They stand in stark opposition to the photojournalistic images that have become familiar to us, but are no less powerful in their quiet urgency.
Alfredo De Stéfano, one of the most prominent contemporary photographers in Mexico, was born in Monclova, Coahuila, a city in the northeastern Mexican desert. De Stefano is fascinated with desert landscapes, and takes astonishing aerial photographs of desert scenes. His work combines natural and manmade elements in desert scenes: “ I construct and photograph intimate spaces: some of them are metaphors for the painful desertification of the planet caused by man, while others work as ironic allusions to our relationship with the desert.” His images are otherworldly in their beauty, inviting a reconsideration of desert spaces, long assumed to be barren, but in De Stefano’s work, full of different kinds of life.
This is Edward Burtynsky’s second show at Adamson Gallery. The artist, who photographs the effects of large-scale industry on the natural landscape, has documented the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a terrifying example of the potential destructiveness of this relationship. His aerial shots show the beauty of the bright blue water and the clouds above, and the plume of oil that has compromised this landscape. In one, a tiny ship is visible in the corner, underscoring the magnitude of the spill.
These four artists come from diverse corners of the globe, and take on subject matter from different parts of the world. Taken together, their work shows not only the spectacular range of landscapes in this world, but also the many ways in which they have interacted with human civilization. From the destruction of Katrina to the slow melting of the polar icecaps, with these striking images, the viewer is given an impression of the enormity of this ecosystem, but also its precarity.