The title of Sean McFarland’s poetic, illusory exhibition refer to hiker-friendly peaks in National forests—there are Glass Mountains in West Texas, Oklahoma, and California. The term may have emerged from minerals that glistened to prospectors when the sun hit the landscape just so, but as a phrase it also suggests fragility, a mountain that could shatter.
Fittingly, the expansive exhibition is a fractured collection of variously scaled images, from tiny, contact-sheet strips to 30 x 40-inch pigment prints, carefully composed in mixed, staggered groupings that amplify McFarland’s sense of poetic construction. The images are all moody darkness and cloudy atmosphere. He shows brambles in extreme shade, misted valleys, and literal patches of gray. Only a series of small cyanotypes inject emphatic color, though the process’s signature blueprint tone portends future fading.
The large color works on view at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, such as Untitled (Small Clearing), 2013, are prosaic patches of forest that glisten in the dark, like the fur of a panther or the sheen of blackberries ripening on a thorny vine. Untitled (Dust), 2013, has a drier, but equally nocturnal illumination, though there’s a touch of the uncanny in the apparent moonlight. McFarland employs stylizations and photographic tricks that create a vision of nature. Long exposures emulate cinematic day-for-night shots, but the constructed velvety murk also evokes the darkly decorated apartment in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 symbolist novel Against Nature.
McFarland similarly employs artifice to generate atmospheric fictions. The color works resemble windows into small dioramas, imitations of life. These display a mixture of influences, the formality of California landscape photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, the composure of Sugimoto’s natural history museum still lifes, and the theatricality of Gregory Crewdson’s early suburban landscapes and Thomas Demand’s crafty recreations of sites. McFarland does not hide his tricks, but neither does he proclaim them. In an age of ubiquitous filter apps that make any phone snap seem aged with sepia or fading Kodachrome, few viewers expect complete truth. In the potent Three Falls, 2013, which resembles a black-and-white snapshot (3 1/4 x 4 1/4), there is evidence of multiple exposures through misty overlays. Yet the eye pieces them together, as McFarland has, into a somewhat seamless view. There may actually just be one waterfall, but we want to believe in the more abundant possibilities. His pictures do their best to help fuel the dream.
Isaac Julien's Pictures and Progress
Reinterpreting and expanding the conventions of film and photography, Isaac Julien examines the marred history of race relations in the U.S. through the life of Frederick Douglass.
Robert Calafiore
[caption id="attachment_35891" align="aligncenter"...
Candida Höfer Photographs Heaven on Earth
In her latest exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, curated by architect Toshiko Mori, Höfer captures the personality of a space.
Visualizing the Invisible: Edmund Clark and Trevor Paglen
From its inception, the war on terror has been a l...
Duane Michals: Storyteller
In late September, I interviewed the cantankerous photographer Duane Michals, now 87, who is known for composing photographic dramas that often include his handwritten text.
Free as They Want to Be: Artists Committed to Memory | National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati
Part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial in Cincinnati, the exhibition is inspired by archival materials, including vernacular photographs of Black Americans and formal portraits of Frederick Douglass.
Bing Wright: Broken Mirror/Evening Sky
[caption id='attachment_3297' align='alignnone' wi...
Matjaz Tancic: 3DPRK: Portraits of North Korea at happylucky no.1
[caption id="attachment_30798" align="alignnone" w...
Melanie Schiff: Lay Lie Lay, Patron Gallery, Chicago
Minimalist nudes and quiet still lifes comprised M...
Renate Aller's Immersive Landscapes
Large-scale landscape photographs from around the world explore the interconnectness of environments.
Eight Photographs. Eight Ways to Contemplate the Climate Crisis
In a special feature, photograph magazine asked eight professionals in the field of photography to each select a single photograph related to the climate crisis that resonated with them in the last year.
John Chiara
We asked John Chiara to tell us about a picture th...