John Pfahl

For Immediate Release:

John Pfahl

Altered Landscapes

November 5 - December 13, 2019

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming solo exhibition, John Pfahl Altered Landscapes.  The exhibition will open November 5th and continue thru December 13th, 2019.  A reception is scheduled for November 23rd, from 5-8 pm.  The exhibition will present a selection of vintage dye transfer color photographs that the artist printed in the late 1970s, as well as larger archival pigment prints of the series most celebrated images. 

In his series Altered Landscapes, Pfahl physically changes the environment, fabricating the view to question our perception of the landscape through added elements that reference mark-making devices associated with photographs, maps, plans, and diagrams.  These gestures sometimes repeat strong formal components; fill in information suggested by the scene, or act upon information external to the photograph itself.  The picturesque scenes are at once interrupted and completed by the artist’s involvement in creating the photograph.

John Pfahl was born in 1939 in New York, New York and raised in New Jersey.  He studied art at Syracuse University, receiving a B.F.A. in 1961 and a M.A. from the School of Communications of the same university in 1968.  His position in photography has been one of both a celebrated artist and an important educator.  Pfahl taught photography for over decade at the Rochester Institute of Technology, educating many now important contemporary photographers and has served as a longtime adjunct professor in the Visual Studies department of the University of Buffalo.   In 2009, he was the Honored Educator of the Year by the Society for Photographic Education.   Other honors include two National Endowment for the Arts, Photographer’s Fellowships.

His work is in numerous prominent collections, including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman House, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Modern Art, Center for Creative Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, among others.

Monographs on Pfahls’s work include Altered Landscapes: The Photographs of John Pfahl (Friends of Photography 1982), Picture Windows (New York Graphic Society 1987), A Distanced Land (UNM/Albright-Knox Gallery 1990), Permutations on the Picturesque (Lightwork 1997) and Waterfall (Nazraeli Press 2000), and Extreme Horticulture (Verlag 2003).

To request further information or high resolution images please contact Joseph Bellows Gallery at info@josephbellows.com.  Established in 1998, Joseph Bellows Gallery features rotating exhibitions of both historic and contemporary photography, with a special interest in American work from the 1970s.  More information can be found at: www.josephbellows.com