Marvels of Modernism

Rick McKee Hock (American, b. 1947).
MANHATTAN SQUARE PARK, Rochester, New York, 2008.
Digital Inkject print.

Kidney-shaped pools, boomerang curves, floating cantilevered decks, adventure playgrounds, sculptural Japanese maples, revolutionary new materials, the melding of Modern forms and classic sensibilities. Often experimental and innovative, these gardens and landscapes possess subdued transitions between indoors and outdoors, yet they have often been misunderstood and under appreciated.

To bring attention to these innovative designs and to the efforts to preserve them, George Eastman House, in conjunction with The Cultural Landscape Foundation looks at twelve important modernist landscapes through the lens of nine photographers.

The photographs displayed in Marvels of Modernism show how photographers’ choices both shape and are shaped by the built landscapes they have been asked to depict. The purpose of conventional landscape photography is to illustrate a place, to show, as much as possible, what viewers would see if they visited a particular architectural example.

This project, however, is as much about photography as it is about its subjects. Clear photographic choices have been made in this work, in technique, vantage point and printing style; they constitute a lesson both in seeing and in making something to be seen.

Marvels of Modernism highlights 12 endangered sites and features 10 artists, including Sam Sweezy, Debra Bloomfield, Lupita Murillo Tinnen, Heather F. Wetzel, Rick McKee Hock, Christopher Rauschenberg, Tyagan Miller, Marisol Diaz, and Tom Fox.

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