In the Western landscape, what we physically see and how that is visually represented doesn’t always align. Technologies originally designed to make places visible often became instruments of surveillance, severing Western lands from the populations that depended on them. To examine how visual technologies, artistic interventions, and the workings of state power have evolved in tandem with the Western landscape, Out of Site focuses on three technological revolutions: wet-plate photography, used to understand and explain geological processes; aerial photography and pattern recognition; and the increasing use of drones, satellites, and other long-range photographic technologies to image secretive sites, military installations, and other technologically-mediated locales. The exhibition features 80 artworks, archival materials, and devices ranging from mammoth-plate cameras to drones. Carleton Watkins’s Nevada mining photographs, 19th-century geological reports and stereoviews, and Margaret Bourke-White’s aerial surveys published in LIFE magazine in 1936 are juxtaposed with contemporary photographic and video pieces by Michael Light, David Maisel, Steven Yazzie, and other artists.

Exhibition catalog