Irrigation South of Laveen, Looking West 1990

Editor: We’re looking at Allen Dutton’s “Irrigation South of Laveen, Looking West,” a gelatin silver print from 1990. The stark black and white gives it a timeless feel, almost like a document. There’s this intense repetition of lines from the irrigated furrows receding to the distant mountains… it's visually striking but also makes me a bit uneasy. What jumps out at you? Curator: Uneasy, you say? That’s interesting. I think that feeling comes from the tension between the natural and the imposed. We have those craggy mountains on the horizon, a testament to geological time, then this landscape forcefully shaped by human intervention laid out before them. The repeating furrows are so geometric, almost unnaturally precise. Does it remind you a little of some early modernist landscape photography with that interest in industrial forms? Editor: I see what you mean! There's that feeling of being in the machine age and that pursuit of objectivity that reminds me a bit of Sheeler’s photos of factories. Do you think that it makes this a document about landscape or something more complex? Curator: It's more than just a straightforward landscape. Dutton presents us with a question: what does it mean to cultivate, to control nature? The very act of irrigation is a transformation. Then there is that tonal range in the print, how the moisture changes from reflective highlights to these shadowed cuts in the terrain. They remind me, and it may sound silly, of etchings by Piranesi in a sci-fi dystopia, perhaps? It gives a kind of grand, operatic, even faintly sinister undertone to it. Editor: That’s such a great way of thinking about it. It is far from an untouched landscape. Those are artificial canals that mirror the mountain ridges beyond in this really amazing image. Thank you. Curator: And thank you for pointing out the unease. I'll be thinking about the nuances of intervention the next time I'm confronted with a manicured landscape.