The Time Being

RaMell Ross, South County, AL

Baldwin Lee, 1980s

Rereading Barthes and Misrach.

Marc St. Gil for DOCUMERICA, Louisiana, early 1970s

You have only to consider that the differences which a blind man notes among trees, rocks, water, and similar things through the medium of his stick do not seem less to him than those among red, yellow, green, and all the other colors seem to us; and that nevertheless these differences are nothing other, in all these bodies, than the diverse ways of moving, or of resisting the movements of, this stick.

Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) was another early 20th century woman who photographed the landscape. Her gauzy pictorialist photographs emphasize an intimacy with the landscape that is neither  masculine nor feminine, but as photo historian Martha Sandweiss writes, representative of  "a new humanistic strain in landscape photography that regards people and the physical landscape as an integral whole, an approach offering great possibilities to all artists, men and women alike.”

Janet Williams, the proprietor of the Camerons’ estate moved to Montana in 1907 at the age of twenty-four to claim her piece of land promised by the 1862 Homestead Act for two dollars and fifty cents an acre. This was not unusual; in fact, as Sarah Carter explains in A Field of One’s Own: Montana Women Homesteaders, “seventeen percent of homesteads in Montana’s Valley County (more than nine hundred) were owned by single women.” This rare mobility and legal status as landowners, professionals, or farmers, made the West a fertile landscape for first-wave feminism. Cameron’s photographs of cowgirls and women’s labor bears witness to this history as well as to her participation in and appreciation of this shift in gender norms that was occurring at the end of the nineteenth century, as her photograph of Mabel, May, and Myrtle Buckley on horseback, taken around 1910 illustrates.

Jared Soares, Fireworks in Roanoke, Virginia

Debbie Fleming Caffery, Praying, 1976

Austin photographer, Katherine Squier has recently updated her website with these ethereal portraits of two sisters and recent photographs of musicians. 

Adrian Mesko in Austin for The End of Austin

I had the great pleasure to see this photo in person today in Houston. It could be a still from Beasts of the Southern Wild, but it's really a photograph of Island de Jean Charles in Louisiana by Stacy Kranitz.

Lucy Lippard, Undertones: Nine Cultural Landscapes, 1995