Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape

Her first book in over ten years, Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape shares the nuance and majesty of the artist’s practice in a large-scale book format. Each year, Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape. Equipped with a 5×7-inch field camera, film, a video camera, and research material, she crosses the country alone by car for several months. Her large-scale photographs capture the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions.

Part of her ongoing, twenty-year series Taxonomy of a Landscape this book encompasses the past decade of work, including collected ephemera that form the essential and incidental elements of her practice as a photographer and researcher. Also featured are archival documentation of experiences and observations on the road, such as snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens, and artifacts. This title follows her first book with Radius, Taxonomy of a Landscape.

Victoria Sambunaris (b. 1964, Lancaster, PA) creates large-scale photographs that document the intersection of the natural and the manmade within the American landscape. She earned a BA from Mount Vernon College (1986) and MFA from the Yale University School of Art (1999). She has held teaching positions at Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College and is currently Guest Critic at the Yale School of Architecture. Her work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries across the US, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX.