Untrammeled: A Model for Wilderness
Working in black-and-white with a large camera, the artist Michael P. Berman acknowledges his place in the landscape photography tradition established by Ansel Adams. Like Adams, Berman's emphasis is on a profound appreciation of the land that is based on direct personal experience of the places he photographs. While Adams advocated for legislation aimed at protecting some of the continent's most dramatic and unusual geographic features, Berman has concentrated his attention on lands damaged by neglect or overuse. Some are public spaces that have received too much attention, while others are protected from human traffic by extreme aridity, political boundaries, military use, or the presence of toxic substances.
In this keynote address for the exhibition Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment, Berman brings together his training as a biologist and a photographer to discuss the concept of “untrammeled wilderness” and why it may be a useful strategy in mediating human demands on the landscape. A series of the artist’s photographs will be screened during his talk.
Michael Berman lives and works in San Lorenzo, New Mexico. His photographs are in the permanent collections of many American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson; and at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, among others. He has an M.F.A. in photography from the University of Arizona in Tempe and a B.A. in biology from Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In 2008, he was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
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St. Francis Auditorium; lecture is free admission.
