NYAB Event - John Pfahl "Métamorphoses de la Terre"

John Pfahl "Métamorphoses de la Terre"

Janet Borden

This event has ended.

Janet Borden presents an exhibition of distinctive new digital photographs by the acclaimed landscape photographer John Pfahl. It is both a charming rumination on the digital age, and an echo of the important environmental concerns that have marked Pfahl’s work, since the Altered Landscapes of the 1980s

The concept of “Métamorphoses de la Terre” came to him while reviewing some pictures of lava formations surrounding a Hawaiian volcano that he took in 1993, but never printed. The flow-patterned, hard basalt landscapes prompted him to experiment with his computer to simulate accelerated geological forces of nature. What was formerly liquid and then solidified, magically, through his ministrations, became liquid once again.

Many of the landscapes photographed were formed over long periods of time by the forces of fluid dynamics. Multiple layers of limestone, sandstone and mudstone deposited by vast inland seas over the millennia were sculpted by wind and water into an aggregation of different shapes, textures and colors. They represented for the artist a manifestation of deep history written in nature. These baroque, digitally inspired transformations are, in many cases, no more extreme than the originals he found in the landscape.

“Métamorphoses de la Terre,” the title chosen for this series, comes from a French translation of a tome by the great English philosopher and scientist Humphrey Davy.

John Pfahl is among the world’s foremost landscape photographers. Since the publication of his 1977 book, Altered Landscapes, he has been well-known as an artist whose work balances a conceptual approach with prints of extraordinary technical facility. His monographs include Altered Landcapes, Picture Windows, Arcadia Revisited, A Distant Land, Waterfalls.