Michael Lundgren

Matter is culled from nine years of picture making, a tightly woven sequence conjuring elements of the supernatural across multiple terrains. Carrying a metaphoric visual trope throughout¬ the photographs depart from the confines of the descriptive landscape. Rendering cultural and natural transformations democratically, Matter reveals an unaccountable world where water seeps red, cement cubes fall from the sky and green foxes are unearthed.

Historically, landscape photography was used as a means of documenting geographic and scientific exploration. Later it transitioned into a way to record nature and the spectacle of human progress. Rarely has it been employed more abstractly to convey an atavistic or ecstatic experience as it is in the new work of Michael Lundgren. This volume collects the Phoenix-based photographer's images of the Sonoran desert, which he has been shooting since 2003. Using the desert's constant flux to his advantage, Lundgren records the shifting effects of light and atmosphere to create stunning black-and-white images. These photographs express a lust for the primitive, and they reinvigorate the realm of landscape photography with notions of the sublime. Lundgren elaborates in his statement, "The landscape is only discernible because of the presence of what is fundamentally absent. Myth and metaphor remain unfixed, open." This volume includes a text by the acclaimed critic, historian and best-selling author, Rebecca Solnit, as well as an afterword by the noted scholar and professor William Jenkins, who curated the influential 1975 New Topographics exhibition.