Toward a new typology of landscape

These photographs were taken near the eastern Washington community of Othello, in a geographic region called the Channeled Scablands. The region was shaped by two cataclysmic geological events that still loom over the present. The first is the large-scale basalt lava flows in the Columbia Basin, 10 million years ago. These flows cooled slowly from the outside inward to form the characteristic layering of entablature (fractured rock) and colonnades (upright columns). The second event is the ice age mega-floods caused by the sudden releases of ice-dammed Glacial Lake Missoula in western Montana, 15,000 years ago, which carved away the basalt bedrock, leaving exposed rock escarpments.

This work engages with Carleton Watkins’ photographs of the monumental landforms of Yosemite Valley and the Columbia River Gorge in the 1860s. Watkins and other early photographers pioneered a visual vocabulary for how the landscape of the American West would be recorded, which tended to place monumental rock landforms in a position of centrality. This work explores other ways of recording the landscape. The work starts with a series of images in which the basalt columns of the Channeled Scablands are portrayed from a monumentalist perspective, recognizing the interplay between photographer and landscape in creating such images. Other types of photographs, arranged into series, invert or negate the monumentalist perspective. There are photographs of the spaces formed by fissures between basalt columns, and of two-dimensional rock surfaces, where all that remains is color, texture, and the biomorphic forms of lichen.

This work is an exploration of the potential for a new typology of landscape, a sort of visual library of characteristic forms. Whether such an effort could ever be fully successful seems open to question, given the variety of forms; nevertheless, continued pursuit seems worthwhile.