Curatorial Statement

It is a natural landscape, which we now share with a new life-threatening virus. It is a cultural landscape activated through righteous protests against racism, violence, and injustice. It is a digital landscape in which we gather and communicate.

We perceive through the lenses of innumerable cameras that it is a new landscape, but we do not yet understand it. Museums, art galleries, and cultural organizations must confront the challenge of seeing, engaging with, and translating the experience of the new landscape. Technology will play an outsized role in how we come to terms with it, how we close the distances.

We are not the first to face such a daunting task.

At the risk of being too literal, MoFA offers this virtual exhibition of landscape photography as an opening salvo in its campaign to address the new landscapes and test our ability to thrive within them. We have brought together historical and contemporary works by a range of artists, each of whom transforms a familiar landscape into something unexpected and revealing. These transformations were often by means of novel photographic techniques or interventions, but always with the intent to reorient viewers to a change, an interposition, a mark that denotes humankind’s struggle to apprehend this world in which we live together.