In the nineteenth century, landscape painters helped America understand itself. Hudson River School painters depicted a country of extraordinary scale and possibility as the United States expanded across the continent and developed an increasingly powerful sense of national destiny.

These photographs return to the locations depicted in those paintings and look at them again, examining the meanings we project onto land.

Ideas of progress, expansion and exceptionalism became intertwined with the nineteenth-century landscape. Mountains, rivers and wilderness could appear to offer evidence of a country whose future was almost limitless. Nearly two centuries later, America continues to debate its identity and its relationship with the world.

Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School painted The Course of Empire in the 1830’s. The series of five paintings imagines civilization as a cycle, beginning in wilderness and ending in destruction and desolation. Human achievement occupies only a brief interval; the landscape exists before it and remains after it.

That distinction between human time and landscape time sits at the center of these photographs. Each generation projects its ambitions and anxieties onto the land, yet those meanings are temporary. What may seem like a landscape available for conquest or interpretation instead reveals how provisional our presence within it is.

The landscape becomes less a subject than a witness. Political ideas claim permanence, but the land exposes their transience.

COMING SOON…