Drawn from the Henry collection, A/political Rocks explores the role landscape photography has played in shaping experiences of the American West, paying particular attention to among the most superficially banal and apolitical of landscape subgenres: images of rocks. Through critical attention to the shifting circumstances in which these photographs were made, consideration of the changing contexts of their display, and attention to the writing of their history this exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the power and politics of landscape.

Spanning a roughly hundred-year period, the works in the exhibition range from documentary images produced as part of nineteenth-century geological surveys to modernist pictures made with artistic intent in the twentieth century. Taking several canonical American photographers as its focus, the exhibition includes work by Ansel Adams, Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and Edward Weston, among others.

Surveying a range of photographic approaches to landscape, the exhibition will also consider the formation of modernist camera aesthetics, evolving American attitudes towards nature, questions of race and citizenship, and photography’s complex entanglements with industrial capitalism and settler colonialism in the United States.