Ansel Adams, Mt. Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1944; printed c. 1970s.
Robert Adams, Alkali Lake, Albany County, Wyoming, 1978; printed 1990.
Robert Adams, Arkansas River Canyon, Fremont County, Colorado, 1978; printed 1980.
Robert Adams, Missouri River, Clay County, South Dakota, 1977; printed 1991.
Robert Adams, Quarry Roads, Fremont Peak, Fremont County, Colorado, 1978; printed 1979.
Diane Arbus, A lobby in a building, N.Y.C. 1966, 1966.
Binh Danh, Lower Yosemite Falls, 2025 (Daguerreotype).
Binh Danh, Moran Point, Grand Canyon National Park, AZ, 2016 (Daguerreotype).
Binh Danh, Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park, 2016 (Daguerreotype).
Binh Danh, View of Upper Yosemite Fall, Yosemite National Park, CA, 2025 (Daguerreotype).
Binh Danh, Yosemite Falls, 2025 (Daguerreotype).
Mitch Epstein, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Six Grandfathers, South Dakota, 2018.
Terry Evans, Fent's Prairie, near Salina, Kansas, May 28 & 29, 2018.
David Hilliard, Final Destination, 2013.
Sky Hopinka, Northern Green, 2023.
Sky Hopinka, What am I but half asleep daydreaming those teachings, 2023.
William H. Jackson, Tower of Babel, Garden of the Gods, c. 1880 (Albumen print from wet collodion negative).
Lisa Kereszi, Cooler and Firepit Glyphs, Joshua Tree National Park, California, 2007.
Tseng Kwong Chi, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1987.
An-My Lê, Pleiades Cluster in Taurus, Joshua Tree National Park, California, from Way Station, 2025.
Richard Misrach, Outdoor Dining, Bonneville Salt Flats, 1992.
Richard Misrach, Pyramid Lake (Red and Yellow), 1991.
Andrew Moore, Whiskey Point, East Kingston, 2022.
Victoria Sambunaris, Untitled (Travertine Springs, Yellowstone National Park), 2008.
Victoria Sambunaris, Untitled, (river overlook), Glen Canyon, Page, Arizona, 2023.
Carleton E. Watkins, Pohono, The Bridalveil Fall, (940 Feet) Yosemite, California, c. 1878-81 (Albumen print, collodion negative).
Carleton E. Watkins, The Devil’s Canon, Geysers, Sonoma County, c. 1868 (Mammoth albumen print from wet collodion negative).
Carleton E. Watkins, The Domes from Moran Point, Yosemite, 1872 (Albumen Print).
Charles L. Weed, Yosemite Falls and Valley, with Fishermen, 1865 (Mammoth albumen print from wet collodion negative).
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 albumen 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 8 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.
Where Ansel Adams glorified the landscape and Robert Adams struck something of a plaintive tone, the work of more recent photographers reflects how the American landscape has gone from being understood as an untouched Eden to a space of commodification. Richard Misrach’s Outdoor Dining, Bonneville Salt Flats (1992) and David Hilliard’s Final Destination (2013) each highlight the process of commercializing nature, while Sky Hopinka’s What am I but half asleep daydreaming those teachings (2023) and Mitch Epstein’s Mount Rushmore National Monument, Six Grandfathers, South Dakota (2018) reflect on how our ideas of the American landscape are built upon legacies of violence and forced removal. What is retained in each of these images—regardless of tone or emphasis—is a belief in the landscape as a site of beauty, connection and even spiritual awakening, as expressed by An-My Lê’s Pleiades Cluster in Taurus, Joshua Tree National Park, California, from Way Station (2025). In these photographs nature can still enrich our lives and, in the case of Terry Evans’ Fent’s Prairie, near Salina, Kansas, May 28 & 29 (2018), remind us that the landscape, and our experience with it, is inseparable from the images we have made and the ways we have constructed meaning out of them.
