Adam Jeppesen walked from northernmost Alaska to the far end of South America, making a photograph a day—487 in all. Clifford Ross roped himself to a friend on shore and plunged into the surf off Long Island to shoot the megawaves churned up by a massive storm; he printed the images on 12-foot-tall sheets of wood veneer. John Chiara built enormous cameras, hauled around by flatbed truck, to make one-of-a-kind images on oversize pieces of photographic paper, bypassing the need for film.
None of these artists took a traditional approach to photography or landscape. And neither does the Denver Art Museum’s “New Territory: Landscape Photography Today.” Opening June 24, the exhibition features more than 100 works by 40 artists, including Messrs. Jeppesen, Ross and Chiara. Many of them have applied inventive, do-it-yourself technologies to the fundamentals of photography. The show explores how experimental work—focusing on process and concept—interacts with landscapes, said Eric Paddock, the exhibition’s organizer and curator of photography at the museum. It’s not always a pretty picture. Landscape, he said, “encompasses evil and wonder and danger and beauty.”
