The Yale Center for British Art's exhibition, "Sightlines: British Landscape Photography, 1840 to Now," explores the multifaceted role of photography in shaping our understanding of the natural world. Running from July 23, 2026, to January 24, 2027, the exhibition features over one hundred items, not exclusively photographs, but also lithographs, postcards, screen prints, drawings, a watercolor, and photo albums, demonstrating the expansive nature of the genre.
Curated by Jackson Davidow, the exhibition is arranged thematically, with sections such as "Places of Belonging," "Between Art and Science," and "Bearing Witness." It aims to make museumgoers rethink landscape photography by construing the genre broadly. The collection includes pioneering botanical studies by early innovators like William Henry Fox Talbot and Bessie Rayner Parkes, alongside charged images of industrial landscapes by Bruce Davidson and Rachel Whiteread.
"Sightlines" highlights how landscape photography serves not only to document the world but also to actively construct and influence our perceptions of beauty, nature, history, science, and society. The exhibition features works from well-known photographers like William Henry Fox Talbot and Roger Fenton, whose Crimean War images are included. It also showcases a significant number of works by Michael Kenna (ten items, including a series on Britain's last coal-fired power station) and Jem Southam (eight items from a series on a sylvan pool), illustrating the exhibition's breadth.
The inclusion of Rachel Whiteread's screen prints depicting the demolition of a high-rise housing development and Alvin Langdon Coburn's 1909 London cityscapes with horses further challenges traditional views, showing the interaction of humans with open space and the urban environment as a form of landscape. The exhibition emphasizes photography's complex cultural role as a tool for knowledge, an artistic medium, and a vehicle for examining social and environmental conditions.
The exhibition is a testament to the dynamic and evolving field of British landscape photography, inviting viewers to contemplate anew what a landscape is and can be. It draws on the YCBA’s deep holdings in British landscape art, offering a distinctive vantage point on how photographs capture and reveal the ways the land is experienced, inhabited, and profoundly shaped by human action, from romanticized views to exposures of modern life's social and environmental impacts.
