Benson has devised a novel printing technique by which he isolates the photograph’s constituent parts into different layers, printing each separately after making minute color adjustments. Yet Benson offers a vision of America that verges on kitschy Americana.

Victoria Sambunaris, who drove twenty thousand miles along the border to take the photographs in her new, ongoing series, “The Border,” 2009–, aims to “transcend political, ethical, or environmental ideology.” Yet political questions give these serene, large-scale, mostly uninhabited views a palpable undertow.

Published on Artforum.com on April 23, 2010. To see the review in context, click here. For more information about the exhibition and related book, click here. Wandering, Pac-Man-like, along Manhattan’s street grid on a sunny afternoon, it’s easy to romanticize the Pacific Northwest: air heavy with moisture, smeary gray sky, carpet of deep green foliage [...]

Published in Aperture 199, Summer 2010. “Joe Deal: New Work” was presented at the RISD Museum of Art, Providence, September 4, 2009–January 3, 2010. A version of the show is on view at Robert Mann Gallery, New York, until May 8, and will then travel to the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, June 5–August 1, [...]

Epstein began with a straightforward if ambitious premise—to depict our nation’s varied energy infrastructure—but quickly expanded his remit to include several notions of power that course through American society as invisibly as does electricity through the national grid. Cooling towers and reactors factor in many of the images, yet each kind of power—not only literal, but also political, economic, and the power of nature—impacts upon the others.

8 Natural Handstands (1969) is emblematic of the small but potent body of sculptures, photographs, and performances Kinmont created in the late 1960s and early ’70s, many of which were also on view in this exhibition, his first solo show in thirty-eight years.

Stewardship of the land remains as contentious an issue today as it was one hundred years ago, when Theodore Roosevelt laid out his vision for conservation and ran into opposition from corporate lumber and mining interests. In The Big Burn, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan tells the story of Roosevelt’s prophetic vision for America’s landscape and the debates he gleefully exacerbated. The book focuses, with cinematic flair, on the August 1910 forest fire that ravaged three million acres in the northern Rockies, while providing an opportune challenge to the newborn US Forest Service.

Michael Sorkin is a New York–based architect, urban planner, educator, and the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Variations on a Theme Park (1991), Exquisite Corpse (1994), and After the World Trade Center (2002). His latest book, which examines the history and changing face of New York through the lens of [...]

Published in Artforum, April 2009. To see additional images from the exhibition, as well as read the press release, click here. Last summer, Yale University Press published a book of Ruwedel’s photographic series, with an essay by Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery. It is a remarkable book; I recommend it. At the conclusion of [...]

Paradise Found ranges across five centuries of North America’s ecological history and narrates a striking diminishment of earlier natural abundance. Steve Nicholls offers copious evidence that even today our society is far from embracing as members of our “community” all of the earth’s living organisms. Yet, in recent decades, the sense of connection to the natural environment felt by figures like Leopold has swelled into what sociologist James William Gibson labels a “culture of enchantment” that is potentially broad, deep, and socially transformative. [...]

Fifteen months after I visited Iceland, the country’s economy crashed in spectacular fashion, and the autopsy reports now being published suggest that I may also have been experiencing one side effect of an enormous bubble [...]

The CJR writer Elinore Longobardi favorably compares Labash’s 10,000-word report with other recent analyses of “Detroit”—not the city, but rather the metaphor for the US auto industry. As the executives from the Big Three automakers were paraded in front of Congress, I thought back to my experience in Detroit and crossed my fingers that some enterprising journalist or writer would soon travel there and report back to the rest of us what it is actually like. [...]

This morning, while waiting for water to come to a boil, I read the brief titular essay in Wendell Berry’s collection What Are People FOR? It was first published in 1985. An hour later, opening today’s Times to the Op-Ed page, I came across “A 50-Year Farm Bill,” an editorial Berry coauthored with Wes Jackson. The [...]

State by State re-creates, in condensed form, the American Guide series, a collection of 48 books published between 1938 and 1941 as part of the Federal Writers Project. Practicality, however, is set aside; whereas the earlier books were published by each state and intended for tourists’ use, this volume offers decidedly personal literary endeavors.

The Asia- and Europe-based photographer Michael Wolf is known for his fine-art and editorial photographs depicting rapid growth in Asian cities. A new series of photographs made in Chicago, “Transparent City,” goes on view this week at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and is collected in a book just published by Aperture. Interview, [...]

Published in Artforum, November 2008. To see images from the exhibition, click here. In a passage in his journal dated February 5, 1855, Henry David Thoreau asserted, “In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or characters of the day, as it affects our feelings. That which was so [...]

Director Lance Hammer’s debut feature film, Ballast, won awards for dramatic directing and excellence in cinematography at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. It opened on October 1, 2008, at Film Forum in New York and on October 17 in selected theaters nationwide. Interview, in the subject’s voice, published on Artforum.com on October 1, 2008. To [...]

Robert Pogue Harrison, chair of the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University, is a literary scholar and translator whose interests include the Italian lyric, Dante, Renaissance humanism, and phenomenology. The University of Chicago Press has just published Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Interview, in the subject’s voice, published on Artforum.com on [...]

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, a 1,000-page anthology, represents a Herculean effort on the part of author and activist Bill McKibben, its editor, to bring together the texts most relevant to an audience unfamiliar with the topic. It is matchless in its heft, generous in scope (included are Sierra Club founder John Muir and Marvin Gaye), and, with a detailed chronology in its back matter, serviceable in its depth. [...]

Published as “Bottled Water” on Artforum.com on May 14, 2007. STYKKISHÖLMUR, ICELAND—Certain artists and writers mark a location with an indelible stamp. Venice, for example, is often filtered through the eyes of Turner, Mann, Ruskin, and the poet Joseph Brodsky. After a two-day journey to Iceland to catch the opening of “My Oz,” Roni Horn’s [...]

Published in Artforum, May 2007. Agnes Denes is perhaps best known for planting a two-acre wheat field at the southern tip of Manhattan in 1982, during the development of Battery Park City. An iconic photograph of the artist—waist-deep in golden sheaves, skyscrapers looming nearby—appears in many surveys of environmental art. But this work, of seemingly [...]

The Cirkut camera, introduced just after the turn of the 20th century, charted—by means of a patented spring-arm rotation technology with a 360-degree range—the development of American society for the better part of 40 years. [...]

Published in Artforum, January 2007. According to the press release for “Break Camp” (Helen Mirra’s second solo exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc.), the artist’s practice “involves no power tools.” It’s a prosaic statement that nonetheless hints at two important aspects of Mirra’s reticent art, elucidating her devotion to the handmade while also suggesting her political [...]

Published on Artforum.com on June 19, 2006. To see the review in context, click here. The three midsize canvases in this Los Angeles–based artist’s exhibition, each a slightly different view of the same rocky outcrop, would be of little interest were they not so well executed; instead, they argue convincingly for the value of painting [...]