Did you know that the Addison Gallery of American Art's collection of over 17,000 images and objects includes numerous resources that explore topics in this course?
The collection is available digitally in the Addison's online database and available by advanced request for study in our Museum Learning Center.
For JPEGs of these images, search the Addison collection online at http://accessaddison.andover.edu/ by typing in the name of the artist in a QUICK SEARCH, or click the image thumbnail on this page to be taken to its listing in the online database.
Questions? Email Jamie Kaplowitz, Museum Learning Specialist at the Addison Gallery, at jkaplowitz@andover.edu.
MLC Portfolio Guides and Image Lists are designed to familiarize you with the subjects, themes, artworks, and artists in the Addison collection.
Portfolio Guides and Image Lists can be downloaded from the Addison's website.
The anonymous painting He That By the Plough Would Thrive—Himself Must Either Hold or Drive portrays settlers taming and transforming the landscape by clearing and burning it into plowable fields and grazing areas. These 19th Century beliefs about use of land are suported by the artst's inclusion of the boldly painted saying at the bottom of the canvas made popular in Benajmin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack.
By photographing the ambiguous and often contradictory relationship between humans and nature, contemporary photographer Oscar Palacio investigates the intersection of these two forces.
Complimenting Oscar Palacio’s perplexing image of lawn care, Bill Owens‘s series Suburbia speak to the ways in which suburban migration in 1970s California altered both landscape and society.
Search each of these artist's names in the Addison Collection to see JPEGs of their photographs.
These resources can be used to explore questions including:
The Addison’s Green Roof can be viewed from the windows in the Museum Learning Center. Designed for the museum’s recent expansion, the flat roof planted with self sustaining plants mitigates the impact of the building’s increased footprint by absorbing runoff from precipitation and lessening the energy needed to heat and cool the museum’s interior.
In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Resettlement Administration, which later became the Farm Security Administration, to aid sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migrant workers whose lives were challenged by the Great Depression, and included a photographic unit called the Historical Section to document poverty and government efforts to alleviate it. Arthur Rothstein’s depiction of the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma illuminates ways in which over planting and poorly managed crop rotations combined with severe drought conditions to wreak havoc on the land and economy.
Jack Delano’s decision to photograph in color, as color film was made commercially available in 1935, imbues his documentation of eroded land in Georgia with warm tones that echo the dryness of the land.
Search each of these artist's names in the Addison Collection to see JPEGs of their photographs.
These resources can be used to explore questions including:
In the mid-19th century, paintings and photographs of Yosemite framed the landscape as the epitome of the sublime. To produce photographs of Yosemite, photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins had to transport enormous glass-plate negatives and camera, all of the necessary processing chemicals, and a darkroom tent on horseback. Watkins's resulting photographs, sent with letters to senators, were influential in persuading the United States Congress to pass legislation in 1864 preserving the Yosemite Valley.
In the 20th century, Ansel Adams patiently waited for the perfect light and utilized special lenses and filters to photograph Yosemite. Adams worked throughout his life as a commercial photographer, taking assignments from the National Park Service and companies such as Kodak, Zeiss, IBM, AT&T, and Life and Fortune magazines.
Contemporary photographer Roger Minick explores the ways in which we interact with nature as tourists and sighseers. In stark and ironic contrast to Watkins's and Adams's majestic views, Minick documents the paradox of our simultaneous admiration for and co-opting of nature.
Between 1997 and 2000, The Third View project, including photographer Mark Klett, revisited the sites of historic western American landscapes documented by photographers including Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Carleton Watkins. The project made new photographs, kept a field diary of its travels, and collected materials useful in interpreting the scenes, change and the passage of time. Explore work by Third View via their website.
Search each of these artist's names in the Addison Collection to see JPEGs of their photographs.
These resources can be used to explore questions including:
Carleton Watkins, whose magestic photographs of Yosemite aided in protective legislation in 1864, was also the pre-eminent photographer of extractive landscapes for gold, silver, and copper mining. In 1871 the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company commissioned Watkins to photograph their hydraulicking operation at Malakoff Diggins.
Stereographs, paired photographs taken with a twin-lens camera to create a three-dimensional effect when viewed through a stereoscope, served as 19th and early 20th century entertainment that also provided images and information about the world beyond daily experience. This stereoscopic view of the hard labor of mineral mining shows the ways in which seemingly unlimited natural resources became part of the national narrative.
Photographs made in the 1970s by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reveal the physical relationships between land and water, peaks and valleys, rivers and lakes. Documentation from NASA’s highly accurate camera systems is utilized in fields of agriculture, forestry, geology, land use management, hydrology, oceanography, and meteorology.
Search each of these artist's names in the Addison Collection to see JPEGs of their photographs.
These resources can be used to explore questions including:
Using a large-format camera, contemporary photographer Joel Sternfeld captures the American landscape, including many images that represent their subjects’ relationship to nature or the landscape around them. His documentation of the results of a flash flood in California explores the long-term repercussions of attempting to domesticate nature.
Photographer Katherine Wolkoff also uses the richness of color photography to examine landscape. In her series Katrina, New Orleans, Wolkoff carefully composes her images with light and color to speak to both the devestation and the quiet brought by Hurricane Katrina.
Search each of these artist's names in the Addison Collection to see JPEGs of their photographs.
These resources can be used to explore questions including: