Katherine Ware – författare

Since its invention, photography has been used to document and interpret the landscape. Survey photographers in the 1860s were the first environmental advocates, arguing for the U.S. national park system. During the first half of the 20th century photographers Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter were central figures in influencing American attitudes toward wilderness and conservation. This book traces the development of environmental photography beginning with Adams, Porter and others, and the next generation of landscape photographers -- Robert Adams, Richard Misrach, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Patrick Nagatani, Mark Klett, whose works confronted the issues of landscape and the environment in less idealised terms. Shifting from the historical framework, the book presents new work by twenty-three photographers working in the U.S., the next wave of artists using the camera to engage the environmental issues of the day. Works by Michael Berman, Subhankar Banerjee, Joann Brennan, Dornith Doherty, Greg Mac Gregor, Christina Seely, Sharon Stewart, and others are among the ninety-one black-and-white and colour images presented, many being published for the first time. Ranging from documentary to conceptual, the photographs touch on topics such as land and water use, the human place in the landscape, mounting consumer waste, industrial pollution, roof gardens and the green roof initiative, local food production, energy consumption, and the effects of industry on humans and animals. Katherine Ware's text offers insightful commentary on photography and the ways that environmental issues have been framed and advanced through the medium of photography. This is a powerful commentary on global environmental issues as seen through the lens of the newest wave of environmental photographers. This book is published to coincide with an exhibition to open at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, in April 2011.

The luminous work of Bill Armstrong has long stretched the boundaries and expectations of contemporary photography. In his explorations and subversion of the ostensible objectivity and precision that have distinguished photography among the visual arts, Armstrong foregrounds the medium’s qualities that photographers had been attempting to exploit since the beginning of the twentieth century: colour and focus.All a Blur showcases Mr. Armstrong's Infinity series, an ongoing project he has been working on for over 25 years. The book presents 21 different portfolios, all made by using his unique process of photographing a collage of found or appropriated images extremely out of focus or distorted by handheld time exposures. The variety of subjects and results he achieves with this process is so broad it has been said that he has developed a medium of his own invention that lies at the intersection of photography, painting and collage.  With mysterious and poetic images that reflect on history, philosophy, identity and spirituality, Armstrong conjures a unique alternate reality that might exist in dreams, in memory, or, perhaps, in a parallel universe. At the same time, the subject of the work is colour. By taking away focus and the usual expectations of photography, Armstrong is able to investigate the qualities and effects of pure colour in a profound way, freed from the limits of representation.