Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs

There is a photograph of Spiral Jetty shot from directly overhead, the coil of black basalt turning through rose-colored water like a line of reasoning worked out in stone. Robert Smithson finished the jetty in 1970, and then, for long stretches of the decades that followed, the Great Salt Lake rose and closed over it. For most of the people who know the work, this picture is the jetty. The earthwork sits on a remote shore in Utah, visited by few. The image is what travels.

The land artists built far from any gallery, out where nobody could carry the result home: a Nevada mesa, a salt flat, a New Mexico grassland pinned under enormous sky. The point was partly to make art that resisted the market, that could not be crated and hung and sold. Almost no one saw these places in person. Gianfranco Gorgoni, an Italian photographer who landed in New York in the mid-1960s and fell in with the artists instead of the dealers, became the person who carried the work back to everyone else. This collection gathers roughly five decades of that errand: Smithson, Michael Heizer's trenches, Walter De Maria's field of steel poles, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's miles of hung fabric, Nancy Holt's concrete tunnels aimed at the sun.

Scale is the problem every one of these pictures has to solve, and the recurring answer is altitude. Heizer's Double Negative is two cuts facing each other across the lip of a canyon; from the ground it reads as a ditch, but from a low pass in a small plane it snaps into one displaced line, a single gesture split by empty air. Gorgoni went up again and again, leaning out of helicopters to find the vantage a standing visitor never gets. Then he would come back down and photograph a lone figure at the edge of the same cut, so the eye has a body to measure against. The book keeps setting those two viewpoints beside each other, the god's-eye and the human, and refuses to let either one win.

Here is the paradox the pictures keep circling. Land art was supposed to slip free of the photograph and the market, yet it reached its audience almost entirely as reproduction, which means the documentarian quietly became a co-author of sculptures he did not make. What the movement looks like, for everyone downstream, is what this one photographer chose to frame. He seems to have known it. The compositions are too deliberate, too aware of how a horizon or a shadow will read on a page, to pretend they are neutral records.

Walter De Maria's Lightning Field is a grid of four hundred steel poles in the high New Mexico desert, and the thing everyone pictures on hearing its name, a bolt splitting the sky above the array, almost never arrives on cue. De Maria was famously strict about how the work could be reproduced at all. So the rare frames that catch the strike carry an outsized load: they are not merely documentation, they are the closest most viewers will come to an event the artist spent years arranging the conditions for. A photograph of a place you cannot visit, of a moment that seldom comes, stops being a copy and becomes the primary encounter.

With Christo and Jeanne-Claude the stakes flip in a telling way. Their fabric works were always meant to vanish, taken down after two weeks, so the camera was never a betrayal of some permanent object; it was the plan. The photographs are the afterlife the artists designed. The task here was less about standing in for a place and more about fixing a duration, holding a wind-filled curtain or a running fence at the single instant that would have to stand for all the instants no one recorded.

There is also a quieter body of work threaded through the plates: the artists themselves, caught in studios and diners and at the raw edges of their sites. Smithson in a hard hat, Heizer astride heavy machinery, the whole loose federation of a movement that liked to present itself as solitary and monumental but ran, like every scene, on friendship and argument. Seeing the earthworks and the people who made them in one volume corrects a myth. These vast gestures in the desert did not descend from nowhere. They were hauled into being by specific, stubborn, sociable human beings, and the photographer was one of them.

Phaidon gives the plates the room they need. Desert light is punishing to reproduce, all glare and subtle grey, and the printing holds the tonal range without flattening the grit of the terrain. Sequenced across the years, the images also become an accidental record of the photographer's own eye loosening and sharpening, learning what each artist's work wanted from a lens.

That education shows.

Return to that overhead frame of the jetty and it reads differently now. The coil is not only Smithson's; it is also a decision about height, hour, and film, a second act of making laid quietly over the first. When the lake dropped and the salt-crusted rock surfaced again years later, visitors arrived already knowing exactly how it should look. They had seen the photograph. They came to match it.

Picture a commission to document an installation that comes down in a week, or a building the morning before the wrecking crew arrives. The thing itself will be gone by month's end, and the file on the card will be the only version anyone consults for the next fifty years. Whoever framed it will have decided, for everyone who comes after, what it was. That is the weight these pictures carry, and the reason a photographer handed such a job should study how Gorgoni carried his.