Homeland Photography

“What’s so special about this then? The field looks like this every day!”

The development of agriculture 10,000 years ago allowed for humans to begin the rapid process of starting societies and civilizations. Crops and livestock allowed for us to settle in one place as opposed to the wandering that was necessary before. However, since the industrial revolution, a vanishing minority of people is still involved with the production of food in most of the Western world. This relative invisibility and our expectation of a reliable food source has made us both dependent on and oblivious to systems happening just outside our peripheral vision.

In contrast to our cultural detachment, the artists in this exhibition focus their lenses on this terrain in the American and German contexts to reveal this fundamental part of our collective existence. They remind us of our bucolic agrarian roots, the human cost of these systems, and warn of potential catastrophe should we not pay enough attention.

The citrus industry of Southern California paved the way for the entertainment and aerospace industries to come. These fields, as shown in Lewis Baltz’s Irvine Ranch from his early Prototypes series, would give way to miles and miles of tract homes and office parks. They are hauntingly covered in white sheets, as if hiding a body underneath. Even still, these pockets of fruit are intertwined with the urban landscape. In works by Simone Nieweg, Mark Ruwedel, and Ron Jude, we get a sense of the agricultural spaces that still surround us, even in developed environments. There’s Nieweg’s grapefruit tree producing a single perfect fruit in the heart of the Inland Empire, and then the citrus growths in Ruwedel and Jude’s works in the greater Los Angeles area that show the potential and former abundance of the region. If we look carefully, they reveal traces of our recent past.

Zooming out a bit, we can see the nascent industrialization of both agriculture and other industries in groups of photographs by Frank Gohlke and Heinrich Riebesehl, which show the intersection of farm machinery on the land, and specific structures to make agriculture more efficient. Riebesehl shows large cabbage fields with wooden crates, simple wheeled carts, and frozen cows in an almost romantic view of German farmland. In one particularly resonant image by Gohlke, an aerial view of the edge of Minneapolis presents a kind of overwhelming industrial landscape that is used to process the agricultural products of nearby farms. This particular view amplifies our increasing alienation towards the processes of harnessing products of the land.

As a result of this increasing distance from the land, we have become all too comfortable removing ourselves from the various arrangements that allow agriculture to flourish. We have allowed indiscriminate attacks on the farm laborers, who go unrecognized by the public. Christina Fernandez has focused on this small minority and the hardships they face since her Untitled Farmworkers card series of installations. For this exhibition, she combines aspects of that work with her other series View from Here, which provides alternative views of history via her camera. This iteration considers the impacts of the current administration on the organizers of the United Farmworkers Union and the ways in which we might all have to deal with the fallout from these actions.

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg presents us the haunting remains of the once fertile valleys of Mesopotamia, our earliest civilization, in a set of four stark black and white photographs. The effects of climate change have only started to make themselves known. Abundance is shown to be impermanent, and what we take as a given might not always be so. Water disputes are increasing all over the world. In Schulz-Dornburg’s work, we see the rise and fall of civilizations past, and if their lessons are to be ignored, then undoubtedly our own future will be as well.

In light of current events we will be donating ten percent of sales from this exhibition to The United Farm Workers Foundation (UFWF). Gallery Luisotti has dedicated its programing for the past thirty years in Los Angeles to issues of landscape and development in the West. We stand in support our Latinx immigrant community that is being openly targeted by the current administration.