Spaulding provides a full biography and a critical analysis of the work of the man who introduced the general public to photography as art.

In The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes, the vistas and majesty of the Lewis & Clark Trail have been brought to life in a magnificent set of 248 color photographs. Richard spent two years visiting key locations along the Lewis & Clark Trail ¿ by plane, auto, and on foot ¿ shooting specific locations at the same time of year as was originally experienced some 200 years ago. The result is an extraordinary set of images capturing the incredible diversity of the American landscape. The Lewis & Clark Expedition ¿ also known as the Corps of Discovery ¿ is regarded as one of the epic stories in American history. The trail stretches across the American landscape starting in St. Louis and followed the Missouri River through the woodlands of the Midwest, onto the Great Plains across Montana, entered the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho, and glided down the Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean. The pioneering exploits of the Corps of Discovery have been thoroughly chronicled in thousands of pages of narrative by historians as well as in the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. These words, detailing the sense of discovery and the wonder of viewing untouched landscapes, essentially were the only ¿pictures¿ from this expedition. Until now.

Drawing from the vast photography collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, American Geography charts a visual history of land use in the United States From the earliest photographic records of human habitation to the latest aerial and digital pictures, from almost uninhabited desert and isolated mountainous territories to suburban sprawl and densely populated cities, this compilation offers an increasingly nuanced perspective on the American landscape. Divided by region, these photographs address ways in which different histories and traditions of land use have given rise to different cultural transitions: from the Midwestern prairies and agricultural traditions of the South, to the riverine systems in the Northeast, and the environmental challenges and riches of the far West. American Geography also looks at the evidence of older habitation from the adobe dwellings and ancient cultures of the Southwest to the Midwestern mounds, many of them prehistoric. SFMOMA's last photography exhibition to consider land use, Crossing the Frontier (1996), examined only the American West. At the time, this focus offered a different way to think about landscape, and a useful way to reconsider pictures of the region. American Geography expands upon the groundwork laid by Crossing the Frontier, providing a complex, thought-provoking survey. Photographers include: Carleton E. Watkins, Barbara Bosworth, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Mitch Epstein, An-My Lê, William Eggleston, Alec Soth, Mishka Henner, Trevor Paglen, Victoria Sambunaris, Emmet Gowin, Robert Adams, Terry Evans, Dorothea Lange and Mark Ruwedel, among others.

Photographs and essays express "the way the American landscape has been forged by various cultures in the past and what the possibilities are for its future design."--Jacket.

American landscapes are some of the best-known images in the world: we recognize Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Manhattan skyline, and the streets of San Francisco in a thousand advertisements and TV shows. But how have these places come to be as they are, and why are some places familiar while others are quite unknown? The American Landscape introduces the reader to the changing face of the American environment, tracing the way in which the present array of forests and farms, parks and superhighways, cities and suburbs have come about, and how these changes have been thought about, painted, turned into movie sets, etc.

George Alexander Grant is an unknown elder in the field of American landscape photography. Just as they did the work of his contemporaries Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, and others, millions of people viewed Grant’s photographs; unlike those contemporaries, few even knew Grant’s name. Landscapes for the People shares his story through his remarkable images and a compelling biography profiling patience, perseverance, dedication, and an unsurpassed love of the natural and historic places that Americans chose to preserve. A Pennsylvania native, Grant was introduced to the parks during the summer of 1922 and resolved to make parks work and photography his life. Seven years later, he received his dream job and spent the next quarter century visiting the four corners of the country to produce images in more than one hundred national parks, monuments, historic sites, battlefields, and other locations. He was there to visually document the dramatic expansion of the National Park Service during the New Deal, including the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Grant’s images are the work of a master craftsman. His practiced eye for composition and exposure and his patience to capture subjects in their finest light are comparable to those of his more widely known contemporaries. Nearly fifty years after his death, and in concert with the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service, it is fitting that George Grant’s photography be introduced to a new generation of Americans.

The words and photographs from Frank Lee Ruggles, National Parks Eminent Photographer.

Tracing the impacts of militarism on the American landscape, through the lens of art, environmental studies, and politics Devour the Land considers how contemporary photographers have responded to the US military's impact on the domestic environment since the 1970s, a dynamic period for environmental activism as well as for photography. This catalogue presents a lively range of voices at the intersection of art, environmentalism, militarism, photography, and politics. Alongside interviews with prominent contemporary artists working in the landscape photography tradition, the images speak to photographers' varied motivations, personal experiences, and artistic approaches. The result is a surprising picture of the ways violence and warfare surround us. Although most modern combat has taken place abroad, the US domestic landscape bears the footprint of armed conflict--much of the environmental damage we live with today was caused by our own military and the expansive network of industries supporting its work. Designed to evoke a field book and to nod toward ephemera produced by earlier artists and activists, the catalogue features works by dozens of photographers, including Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Dorothy Marder, Alex Webb, Terry Evans, and many more.