Landscape photography has long been a genre ideal for heroic posturing, romantic projection, and melancholic ritual. Historically, the depiction of earth has been a territorial assertion, one of acquisition in both a material and metaphysical sense. The photograph was a tool of conquest, an implement of manifest destiny and, indeed, colonialist greed.

This lineage came to mind while visiting Sam Contis’s “Overpass,” her solo exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Contis is a young American photographer whose earlier projects assessed the gendered mythologies of the American West or excavated the work of Dorothea Lange. For this outing, however, she turned her inquiry to England and its tidy relationship to the landscape and, more specifically, property. The artist has located a dynamic in the British tradition of the stile, an inventive structure of the pastoral boundary, both creative and practical, that allows human passage while preventing that of, say, bovines. Its origins as a charmingly British gesture of compromise and equanimity has since been codified as a legal obligation for right of way on the behalf of all, ensuring some public access to private real estate. (One is also reminded of A Line Made by Walking, 1967, English artist Richard Long’s documentation of a country stroll as sculpture, which highlights the importance of the photograph as a record of an ephemeral activity.) Read More