Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography - Stunning Wall Art for Living Rooms, Offices & Gifts

This is a collection of landscape photographs presented in an exhibition at four museums, including the Smithsonian, in 1992 and 1993. The principal thrust of the exhibition was to show how landscape photography in the United States had changed from the nineteenth century, when what was conveyed or pictured by landscape photographs usually was the grandeur, strangeness, or immense dimensions of the American landscape - imbued with a sense of awe and wonder at Nature. But after the European Americans conquered the land and then despoiled much of it to varying degrees, landscape photography itself evolved. BETWEEN HOME AND HEAVEN reflects, and illustrates, the new concerns of landscape photography as practiced by some of America's more skilled and creative photographers at the end of the twentieth century.There are about 130 photographs, mostly printed one per page, a few even over a two-page spread. They are about evenly divided between color and black-and-white. The printing and reproduction standards are good. In addition, there are three essays of about eight pages, each of which is accompanied by a handful of additional smaller photographs, some of which are in the old style of grand, awe-inspiring Nature (from Timothy O'Sullivan to Ansel Adams). The essay by the curator of the exhibition, Merry A. Foresta, is worthwhile. The essay by Stephen Jay Gould is the most inconsequential thing from his pen that I have ever read. The essays are printed in a stark, overly large typeface that detracts from the overall aesthetics of the book. And while they all mention to some extent the environmental degradation that the American landscape has been subjected to over the 150 years of photography, none hints at the irony that the exhibition and the book were underwritten by the Consolidated Natural Gas Foundation.The photographs are the reason to page through the book. A handful of them are manipulated in some way or another, a practice I don't much care for. (I guess I prefer to be left with my illusions, at least the illusions that are inherent in the photographic medium.) My two favorites are 1) a black-and-white riverscape shot by Lois Conner of the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge, with bridge, barge, pick-up truck, and railroad tank cars, all enveloped in mist, and 2) a color photograph by Len Jenshel, eerily lit by the setting sun and off-camera motel parking lot lights, of iconic Monument Valley in the background with torn-up asphalt paving and two orange cones in the foreground. Three-and-a-half stars.