Manifest and Sublime

The 19th-century ideology of Manifest Destiny, a flawed yet powerful propagandistic tool that Americans subscribed to as a way of both urging and justifying settlement and industry westward across the continent, is virtually inextricable from our collective consciousness of the landscape. One of the fundamental contributors to this was the significant role of oil painting by the likes of Alfred Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and a litany of others, which in an era before photography provided glimpses of desert expanses, verdant mountain valleys, and rolling plains perceived as primed for development and agriculture. “This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it,” wrote John O’Sullivan in his manifesto “The Great Nation of Futurity,” published in 1839 in The United States Democratic Review.

The choice of the word “manifest” is therefore consciously loaded in Yancey Richardson’s group exhibition, Manifest and Sublime. From Ansel Adams’ iconic and breathtaking black-and-white images to David Hilliard’s multi-part panoramas, the gallery assembles a selection of work that interrogates our notions of land and landscape — the latter infused with cultural and geographic elements, defined in part by its being viewed from a specific vantage point, from a place just outside of that place. Despite the proliferous nature of landscape photos on our screens today, we are still awed by the immense uplift of the Rocky Mountains, the cerulean skies and colorful canyons of the Southwest, and beyond.

The feeling of being infinitesimally small amid a place—one facet of what we might describe as the sublime—is beguiling and difficult to explain to someone who’s never experienced it. Essayist Barry Lopez wrote about how even the distant view from an airplane doesn’t quite fulfill the same kind of uncanny wonder of standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, for example, or witnessing the particular crispness of snow falling on red rock cliffs. In his case, in particular, the glacier-fed Anaktuvuk River in Alaska spurred an almost divine wonder, where he perceived both near and far simultaneously. “What’s missing in views from high-flying aircraft is the sensual immediacy of a place,” he wrote. “The sound and the smell of it, the press of tempered air on the skin that accompanies what one sees. It’s the full reach of the landscape that’s not apparent, what you could call the authority of the land.”

In the photographic works of Victoria Sambunaris, for example, the West is viewed through the lens of contemporary human settlement and industry. Colossal freight trains extend snake-like across arid expanses, and tract homes emerge around inhospitable-looking rock formations. Daguerreotypes of U.S. national parks by Binh Danh emanate an otherworldly, ethereal blue aura, and Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) meditates on legacies of expansion and the forced removal of Native Americans.

Ansel Adams’ sharply contrasted black-and-white images are largely devoid of human presence, pristine and exquisite in their sheer gravity. His work contributed substantially to the American conservation movement—he hoped his photographs would illuminate for the public why protecting these places is so important, and it’s a fight that continues just as intensely today. Other works in the exhibition are more somber, such as Robert Adams’ Missouri River, Clay County, South Dakota (1977) or Hopinka’s What am I but half asleep daydreaming those teachings (2023). We find representations of landscape, which are in turn representations of landscapes, such as Hilliard’s image on the rear of a rented motorhome and Diane Arbus’ composition of a lake scene installed like wallpaper in a building lobby.

Manifest and Sublime leans into “how photography has represented the landscape in ways that have changed as dramatically as the country itself,” the gallery says. Additional artists include Mitch Epstein, Terry Evans, William Henry Jackson, Lisa Kereszi, An-My Lê, Richard Misrach, Andrew Moore, Tseng Kwong Chi, Carleton Watkins, and Charles Leander Weed. The show continues through August 7 in New York City. ✧

All images © the artists, courtesy of Yancey Richardson.