Joe Deal and Views of the Altered Landscape

This winter the Henry pays tribute to American photographer Joe Deal, who passed away this year at the age of 62. Drawn from the Henry’s Monsen collection, this exhibition highlights Deal’s significant work in picturing a natural landscape reshaped by human hands. Deal broke with the romantic tradition exemplified by Ansel Adams’s images and turned his camera toward tract houses, industrial sites, highway projects, and other changes taking place in the built environment. In an uninflected style, Deal pictured mundane, manmade developments across California, the Southwest, and western states. A selection of work by his peers Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Catherine Wagner, and several others are on view to flesh out this important shift in photography that occurred in the mid 1970s.