View, Cedar City, Utah 1977

Joe Deal made this photograph, called "View, Cedar City, Utah," sometime in his career, using what I imagine was a pretty straightforward camera. It's a landscape, but more like an anti-landscape; it is a view of the vernacular, almost generic buildings and dry scrubby land. The way Deal has framed the image makes me think about painting. He's organized the composition into stacked horizontal bands, foreground, middle ground and background. The tones move from dark to light, creating a flattened effect that almost cancels out the recession into space you might expect in a photograph. The repetition of the shapes of the buildings, each one casting a shadow, creates a subtle rhythm and a feeling of flatness, like a minimalist grid. It reminds me of some of the New Topographics photographers, like Lewis Baltz, who were interested in depicting banal, everyday scenes in a deadpan way. Like them, Deal is showing us a reality that is both familiar and alienating, a landscape shaped by human intervention, but strangely devoid of human presence. It's a view, but not necessarily a beautiful one, maybe more of a question about what a view can even be.