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This summer, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) will shine a light on the power of landscape photography by exploring the ways in which the camera has shaped how the natural world is seen and understood. On view until 24 January 2027, Sightlines: British Landscape Photography, 1840 to Now spans nearly two centuries and presents more than one hundred photographic works, ranging from the pioneering botanical studies of early innovators William Henry Fox Talbot and Bessie Rayner Parkes to the charged images of industrial landscapes by Bruce Davidson and Rachel Whiteread.

Sightlines will run alongside John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined, which opens on 3 September expanding the exploration of the British landscape to two of the YCBA’s four floors.

“Britain has one of the great traditions of landscape art, and photography both inherited and transformed the ways the land was seen and understood,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, YCBA. “When we look at landscape photographs across time, from the early studies made directly from nature to later works that confront industrialization and its social consequences, we see the land continually remade. With the YCBA’s deep holdings in British landscape—and with our forthcoming John Constable exhibition—Sightlines offers a distinctive vantage point on this history, showing how photographs capture and reveal the ways the land is experienced and inhabited, and how profoundly it has been shaped by human action.”

Since the earliest days of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, the camera has been an essential tool for observing and depicting the environment. Landscape photography, in particular, embodies ideas about beauty, nature, history, science, and society. Some images romanticize the land. Others expose the social and environmental impacts of modern life. In every case, landscape photography does more than document the world around us. It actively constructs it and shapes how we understand it, reinforcing or challenging dominant ways of thinking, knowing, and feeling.

Taken together, the works in Sightlines invite visitors to consider photography’s complex cultural role: as a tool to build knowledge about the landscape; as an artistic medium to inspire, awe, and communicate; and, increasingly, as a vehicle to critically examine social and environmental conditions. “Landscape photography influences how we see, value, and inhabit our environments,” said Sightlines curator Jackson Davidow, Project Manager, YCBA. “It opens the door to an ongoing conversation between the artist, the viewer, and the natural world. In that way, this is a truly special exhibition, and we’re thrilled to show so many remarkable and important works in our space.”

Among its abundance of stunning images, the exhibition features majestic views of natural beauty, scenes of social life and industrial transformation, and surreal digital photomontages. It encompasses not only photographs but also works in other media related to the photographic image, including prints, drawings, and books, capturing the evolving nature of photography itself. A true testament to the pictures and the artists who captured them, Sightlines reveals British landscape photography as a dynamic and continually evolving field of inquiry that invites us to contemplate anew what a landscape is and can be.

Sightlines: British Landscape Photography, 1840 to Now
until 24 January 2027
Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, CT
See: https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/sightlines-british-landscape-photography-1840-now

Images: (Top): Henry Stuart Wortley, Clouds, 1863, albumen print from a wet collodion negative, 6 7/8 × 9 inches (17.5 × 22.9 cm). Yale Center for British Art, gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro in honor of Scott Wilcox; (Below, left): Bessie Rayner Parkes, photogenic drawing negatives, 1859, from an album of photogenic drawing negatives and prints, album 7 7/8 x 6 3/4 inches (20 x 17 cm). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund; (Below, right): Hugh Owen, Harvest Scene with Stooks, before 1855, albumen print, 6 3/4 × 8 3/4 inches (17.2 × 22.3 cm). Yale Center for British Art, gift of Hans P. Kraus.

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs celebrates its representation of John Davies (b. 1949) with the first solo exhibition of his work in the United States. Nominated for the Deutsche Börse prize in 2008, Davies is best known for his 1980s photographs documenting the broad, complex and changing topography of industrial and post-industrial Britain. Over a dozen large vintage and modern gelatin silver prints have been selected for presentation from his series The British Landscape (published in book format by Chris Boot, 2006). The Gallery is pleased to host an opening reception on Friday, December 8, 5-7pm.

John Davies’ engagement with documentary photography emerged as a response to the economic and social upheavals taking place in the UK in the late 1970s and 80s. This important transitional era was examined in the Museum of Modern Art New York’s 1991 exhibition and accompanying catalog British Photography from the Thatcher Years, which presented the work of John Davies, Paul Graham, Chris Killip, Martin Parr and Graham Smith. Davies’ exhibited images from A Green and Pleasant Land examined changes to the environment wrought on it by industrialization and urbanization. This 1986 title was the first book published by Dewi Lewis while he was Director of the Cornerhouse art center.

Working through long-standing British traditions of painterly and literary scenes, Davies utilizes the sharp descriptive power of large format photography for his fine gelatin silver prints to include a range of details that exceeds a complacent reading of the terrain, emphasizing instead its flux. He honors and preserves the layers of cultural history while the past is regularly erased and replaced. Tensions between Arcadian nature and engineered economy are also illustrated, informing an understanding of the earth as both symbolic identity and as a resource. Viewed from an elevated perspective, the pastoral lanes, gothic cathedrals, railroad bridges, coal factories, nuclear power plants and apartment towers captured in Davies’ images relate to classical landscape painting as well as the precision of map-making. His style has been credited as influential to contemporary artists, among them, Andreas Gursky.

Davies’ continued focus on the evolution of rural and urban environments throughout Western Europe over the course of almost 40 years has resulted in over twenty monographs and dozens of solo and group exhibitions. His most recent book, Shadow: Slag Heaps of Northern Europe, (Edition Loco) was published in 2016. The V&A Museum, London and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris are both presenting his work from their collections in current group exhibitions. The Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne also has his prints on view through 2018.

In addition to institutions throughout the UK such as the Barbican Art Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, the British Council, Arts Council of England, the National Museum and Galleries and the National Library of Wales, Davies’ work is in the collections of or exhibited by international museums including MoMA, NY and SFMoMA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Centre Georges Pompidou Paris; and MAXXI in Rome among many others in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Limited editions of The British Landscape book accompanied by a print are available through the Gallery.

For additional information or to request images, please contact the Gallery at +1 212 517-8700 or by email at info@lparkerstephenson.nyc

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs will present a selection of British Photography at Classic Photographs Los Angeles, featuring gallery artists John Davies and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, and work by Paul Hill, Chris Killip, and Marketa Luskacova.

In addition the Gallery will show work by Kikuji Kawada, Malick Sidibe, Jacques Sonck, and Witho Worms.

For additional information or to request images, please contact the Gallery at +1 212 517-8700 or by email at info@lparkerstephenson.nyc 

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Kids with Collected Junk, Near Byker Bridge, Byker, 1971

John Davies, Stalybridge, Cheshire, 1983

Marketa Luskova, On the Promenade, 1978

Classic Photographs Los Angeles will be held at

BERGAMOT STATION | 2525 MICHIGAN AVE. | SANTA MONICA, CA 90404

Admission is Free.

Hours are:

Friday February 2 (Opening Preview) 6-8pm

 Saturday February 3 11am-7pm

Sunday February 4, 11am-5pm.