Geyer on the ParkeHarrisons

Nancy Geyer has a piece today on "The Architects Brother" in the local paper. She finds the photographs compelling, but cumulatively overwhelming in their mythic character. Fair enough, but surely this comes with the territory. And the ParkeHarrisons' sophistication and irony obviously places their work miles above the kind of hippie nature-worship kitsch for which Ithaca is regretably renowned (and that even creeps into art museums once in a while). All of this goes without saying if you're familiar with the work. She also finds the wall texts distracting, probably because she reads them more dutifully than I do.

Geyer also sketches an interesting comparison between the ParkeHarrisons and the work of Robert Misrach, up at Pace/MacGill in NYC through this Saturday. She writes:

I felt a keener sense of sorrow while under the aesthetic power of Richard Misrach's photos of the American West desert... Behind their beauty (Misrach, like the ParkeHarrisons, doesn't skimp on beauty when portraying disaster) lurks the misuse of that landscape by government and industry. Misrach's methods are nothing like those employed by the ParkeHarrisons (he doesn't create the environments he photographs, for one thing), but they share a refusal to ignore the violence that humans inflict on the earth, to which so many landscape artists still turn a blind eye.

More about the ParkeHarrisons coming. Just don't hold your breath or anything.