Publications: Arquitectura Viva 2001

Alex S. MacLean: The Measures of Landscape

By Kevin Moore

Excerpts from the article:

Landscape photography is an established genre of artistic representation. Photographers from Gustave Le Gray to Carleton Watkins to Ansel Adams have approached landscape in their own way, reflecting the cultural sympathies of their age, yet acknowledging, by repeating or rejecting, the pictorial conventions of the image makers who came before.

The making of a photograph of landscape requires an even broader knowledge, and a deep level of commitment. Alex S. MacLean's devotion to landscape, photography, and aviation, has produced a vast body of work, an archive of land use in America that is formally beautiful and politically committed. MacLean draws from expertise in both landscape and photography, forming a ring in which pictorial means are pressed into the service of environmental causes. More to the point, photography, a notoriously political medium, often called into the service of social causes, is conscripted to represent landscape, a notoriously political subject. Or is it the other way around? Could it be that landscape is the physical medium through which MacLean tests boundaries of a deft photographic sensability? Or does he do it all for the flying?

Aerial photography, a sub-genre within the domain of landscape photography, has its own heros, issues, and pictorial conventions. It has a history characterized by visual revolution, a history of "discoveries" driven as often by the perspicacity of artists as by the advances in technology...Looking at MacLean's images from an aerial photography perspective offers, like the view from above, both a sharp vision of the landscape below, a fresh understanding of this style of photography.