Manifest and Sublime

Yancey Richardson is pleased to announce Manifest and Sublime, an exhibition that considers the ever-evolving relationship between photography and the American landscape. To explore how photography has represented the landscape in ways that have changed as dramatically as the country itself, the exhibition brings together works that span the medium’s history, from mammoth plate collodion prints made by Carleton Watkins in Yosemite National Park to contemporary daguerreotypes made by Binh Danh in the very same place. Whether surveying the immensity of nature or lamenting the scale of change being inflicted upon it, the images in Manifest and Sublime return time and again to a landscape no less beautiful for the way it has been remade by human intervention. Featuring work by Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Binh Danh, Mitch Epstein, Terry Evans, David Hilliard, Sky Hopinka, William Henry Jackson, Lisa Kereszi, An-My Lê, Richard Misrach, Andrew Moore, Victoria Sambunaris, Tseng Kwong Chi, Carleton Watkins and Charles Leander Weed. The exhibition will be on view from July 8 through August 7, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, July 7 from 6–8PM.

Works by 19th-century photographers William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins show how, from its very inception, photography was used to ‘discover’ and document vast swaths of the American landscape. In these now-canonical images, the landscape is pictured as pristine, limitless, sublime and, ultimately, available for settlement. Where humans are present in these pictures it is often as bystanders to the great drama before them, one defined by mountain ranges and prairies, by waterfalls and dense forests.

The landscape that was depicted in the work of Jackson and Watkins was shown to be awe-inspiring, overwhelming and untameable. Working throughout the middle of the 20th-century, Ansel Adams took a different approach, one that removed explicit traces of human presence in order to present the landscape as spiritually moving as it was beautifully described. The sharp focus and long tonal range in his photographs were used to create pictures that Adams hoped would persuade the public and their elected officials to protect the landscape from being degraded and destroyed. Where Ansel Adams sought to make photographs that idealized the landscape while obscuring the real effects of human society, the work of Robert Adams looked both soberly and with sorrow at how urbanization and rampant construction throughout the American west had spoiled its fields, plains and prairies. Though often mourning what had been lost, Robert Adams did so by creating scenes that were full of natural splendour and possibility, all the better to remind us of what we still stand to lose.