Book of the Year
*Flak Photo*
Sambunaris researches as much as she can before departure, but
reserves plenty of space for happenstance and happy accident in her
process. It is unlikely she’ll return to most locations (there’s a
whole lot of America out there), so she takes her time. Sambunaris
often remains in a single location, waiting days if necessary for
the right light. At this pace, she realizes it’s a journey best
taken alone.
*Wired*
Best Photobook of 2014
*Hafny*
The travel photographs of Victoria Sambunaris are like no others.
They are landscapes that record the terrain and the hand that man
has played in altering these landscapes. Sambunaris engages in a
solitary journey to record these places, also collecting encounters
with the inhabitants and artifacts from her trips, whether mineral
specimens, travel books, or maps.
*THE Magazine*
The pictures in Ms. Sambunaris's 'Taxonomy of a Landscape' (Radius,
126 pages, $60) explore such accidental collaborations between
industry and the elements, the ways that man's and nature's delight
in pattern blends.
*The Wall Street Journal*
Sambunaris captures all her images with a large-format camera, a
piece of equipment that requires not just a tripod, but an
elaborate and careful process for each shot. Most of Sambunaris’s
time is spent scouting with a smaller camera and searching for the
perfect light. Once all the conditions are right, which may take
days of waiting, Sambunaris travels with her cumbersome equipment
and usually only shoots two sheets of film per locale. “Photography
is a solitary act and forces you to look hard and observe. It
requires patience and is almost meditative, especially shooting
with a large format camera where there is time involved setting up
and waiting,” she writes in an e-mail. “Photography is my vehicle
for understanding the world and our place in it.”
*Smithsonian*
One of six best coffee table books to own.
*Interview*
Landscape photographer Victoria Sambunaris has logged tens of
thousands of miles and gone through five cars in her travels across
the American landscape. A collection of these photographs is being
published this spring by Radius Books in a new book called Taxonomy
of a Landscape. The photographs in the book illustrate how natural
and man-made forces shape the land and how these forces coexist.
For example: we see freight trains dwarfed by vast swaths of Texas
desert, an oil pipeline dwarfed by the Alaskan wilderness. There
are images of massive open-pit mineral mines as well as vistas of
breathtaking rock formations and geysers in Yellowstone National
Park. In one image, the U.S. Mexico border is rendered as a thin
black line cutting through otherwise uninterrupted desert. In
another, a beautiful lake turns out to be a massive deposit of
uranium waste.
*BreakThruRadio’s “Art Uncovered.”*
The American landscape photographer Victoria Sambunaris has
completed her first monograph, Taxonomy of a Landscape. Sambunaris
studied at Yale and still teaches there, although her main passion
is the regular road trips she takes into the American interior. The
monograph brings together many of the images she took in South
Texas - a rich natural landscape that is also shifting fast due to
the demands of the energy industry - covering over a decade's worth
of shooting...The book is designed by David Chickey, one of the
co-founders of Radius Books. As well as the photographs, it also
incorporates elements of the ephemera installation from
Sambunaris's show at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. 'The
inspiration came from geology books that contain a pocket in the
back to hold maps and drawings,' she explains, 'the back pocket of
the book includes a booklet of the ephemera, a pull out grid of
photographs and a little gem - a brilliant short story called The
Mappist by Barry Lopez.'
*Wallpaper**
In her new book, "Victoria Sambunaris: Taxonomy of a Landscape,"
the celebrated photographer take us on her journey... Exploring the
country and making these photographs is almost a philosophical or
etical need to penetrate a grander question about landscape and our
place within it.
*Cultured*
In a quest to satisfy her 'unrelenting curiosity to understand the
American landscape and our place in it,' Samnubaris' first
monograph is an expansive photographic study of geography and
history.
*TIME LightBox*
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