Photographer Robert Adams' dictum that no subject is too unworthy, unnatural or dangerous, might well apply to Terra Firma, the new series of photographs by Victoria Sambunaris, featuring large-format prints taken in 2008 and 2009.
In the tradition of landscape photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins or William Henry Jackson, Victoria Sambunaris has travelled throughout the American West, to the pipelines of Alaska and the mines of Nebraska, in search of upheavals in the landscape, provoked by geophysics or the intervention of man. "Victoria Sambunaris is looking back to the origins of the earth, while rendering its continued evolution, violence and beauty. In this most recent body of work, she concentrates on the Yellowstone hotspot and Idaho's Snake River Plain", says exhibition curator Cory Jacobs. Panoramas of our critical status quo: threatening, dangerous landscapes, partially tamed by the hand of man, through mines, farms and roads.
Victoria Sambunaris questions the place of man in the world. In the depths of the mines, or at the summit of a volcano, how do we inhabit and exploit our planet? A confrontation between Nature and human intervention that reflects the originality of Victoria Sambunaris's approach, and which inspired Cory Jacobs and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès to show her work.
