Joe Deal is the photographer who perhaps best exemplifies the important approach to photographing the man-altered landscape that became known as the "New Topographics" when an exhibit toured and a book of that name was published in 1975. Deal's style is cool and dispassionate, his impeccable prints at first glance understated. But his keen observation and sense of the ironies of the population and building explosion in the Los Angeles Basin make his photographs resonate with the tensions of the human relationship to the landscape that are nowhere more evident than in southern California.Ultimately, Joe Deal's photographs are more than a survey of the urban landscape and vernacular architecture in earthquake country. From the manicured lawns in what were once desert arroyos to cities built on the beach, the sociological implications are profound and never far from view to the careful observer of these photographs. The essays provide thoughtful commentary on the far-reaching questions Joe Deal raises. Presenting these numerous series of photographs together for the first time, this book is a major contribution to late twentieth-century photography.

Joe Deal: Southern California Photographs, 1976-86

Deal, Joe

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff

Leffingwell, Edward

Johnstone, Mark

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery

Science & Math

Univ of New Mexico Pr

From 1983 through 1997, artist Joe Deal documented the site and construction of the Getty Center through a series of black and white photographs. Between Nature and Culture: Photographs of the Getty Center by Joe Deal presents 130 of Deal's photographs, offering an opportunity to view the evolving site through this artist's eyes, from the selection of the starkly beautiful chaparral-covered mountain top to the steel and travertine of the final stages of construction. With an introduction by Mark Johnstone that provides both a key to understanding Joe Deal's unique vision and commentaries on the thematic groups and individual photographs reproduced, this book offers a dramatic portrait of one of the Getty Center.

Between Nature and Culture: Photographs of the Getty Center by Joe Deal

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

J.paul Getty Museum

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 officially opened the Great Plains to westward settlement, and the public survey of 1855 by Charles A. Manners and Joseph Ledlie along the Sixth Principal Meridian established the grid by which the uncharted expanse of the Great Plains was brought into scale. The mechanical act performed by land surveyors is believed by photographer Joe Deal to be powerfully similar to the artistic act of making a photograph.To Deal, both acts are about establishing a frame around a vast scene that suggests no definite boundaries of its own. Thus, when approaching his own photographs of the Great Plains, Deal viewed his photography as a form of reenactment, a method of understanding how it felt to contain the Great Plains in smaller, more measurable units.
In West and West, Deal, who was born and raised in Kansas, revisited the Kansas-Nebraska territory and applied his photographic understanding of the landscape grid and horizon line to illuminate the sense of infinite space that transcends the reality of the survey. As Deal writes in his concluding essay: “If the square, as employed in the surveys of public lands, could function like a telescope, framing smaller and smaller sections of the plains down to a transect, it can also be used as a window, equilaterally divided by the horizon, that begins with a finite section of the earth and sky and restores them in the imagination to the vastness that now exists as an idea: the landscape that is contained within the perfect symmetry of the square implies infinity.”
The stunning photographs in West and West present the Great Plains from a rare perspective. From this vantage point, Deal is able to distill and contemplate its expanse.

West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains (Center for American Places - Center Books on the American West)

Photography & Video

Center for American Places

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