Proposed
Exhibition
John
Ganis’s expansive series, Consuming the American Landscape, chronicles
environmentally impacted landscapes in every region of the United States.
The complete series consists of over 80 color photographs, and has not yet
been exhibited in depth. A fully illustrated book published by Dewi Lewis
is scheduled for release in October 2003, and will be available to accompany
the exhibition. The photographer will produce a set of prints specifically
for the exhibition, working with the hosting institution to determine the
number of prints appropriate for the space.
For
over twenty years, John Ganis has photographed the vast American landscape
in various stages of disrepair and ruin. His subjects are all too familiar—abandoned
wrecks, desolate strip mines, toxic pools, clear-cut forests, industrial parks,
landfills, and the leveling of terrains for housing developments—but his treatment
of these environmental blights is anything but ordinary. He approaches the
subject of over-used and contaminated land with a fair amount of irony and
despair, but also an abiding respect for the landscape. Through his subtle
handling of color and his aesthetic sensibilities for the picturesque, he
gleans the fragile beauty and resilience of even the most damaged landscape.
When
he began the series Ganis did not have a particular agenda, just an interest
in tracing the impact of industry and development on the landscape. But as
the work progressed, and he observed the extent of the damage, he focused
his efforts on restoring reverence for the land by revealing its persistent
grace. Despite the weight of his subject, his images do not moralize or admonish.
He introduces a certain degree of acerbic humor when possible—seen in a clumsy
pair of cement moose placed near a stream in Arkansas, or in a viewing device,
the kind typically found at scenic overlooks, stationed at the entrance to
a strip mine in South Dakota—but more often it is an unflagging beauty that
he finds along the edges or in the midst of these sites that engages the viewer.
As Robert Sobieszek writes in his accompanying essay, “…Ganis's work is really
about the edge, the margin that separates the uncultivated from the over-farmed,
the pastoral garden from the bleak wasteland, the "natural" from
the cultured, the past from the present.”He navigates this narrow path between the idyllic
and the apocalyptic landscape evenly, pointing to minor offenses and irreversible
ecologic disasters as equally worthy of notice. As a broad photographic survey,
his work presents a strangely romantic view of the landscape and its undoing,
deftly reframing contaminated and obliterated sites in golden light and dramatic
expanses. His seductive views draw us in for a closer look, inviting new thinking
about the landscape we have made.
Inquiries
welcome please contact:
John
Ganis
jganis@johnganisphotography.com
1(248)546-0583
John
Ganis was born in Chicago in 1951. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University he moved to New York City and studied independently with Larry Fink
and Lisette Model. He received his MFA in photography from the University
of Arizona, where he studied with Harold Jones, Todd Walker, and W. Eugene
Smith. His photographs are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art,
the Center for Creative Photography, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ganis is a Professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, where he has taught
since 1980.
http://www.johnganisphotography.com