The View From Here includes work by artists internationally synonymous with the landscape genre, like Laura Gilpin and Lilian De Cocke Morgan, as well as regionally significant figures like Stephanie Dinkins and Suzanne Camp Crosby. For Marion Post Wolcott and Berenice Abbott, better known for their documentation of the built environment, the photographs included here demonstrate their versatility with the camera. Imogen Cunningham and Ellen Land-Weber push the generic boundaries of a “landscape” by incorporating pictorialist techniques and surrealist themes, while contemporary artists Dionne Lee and Sally Mann use the landscape to explore ideas of identity and history by including themselves and their family members in the photograph.

2025 is the fortieth anniversary of artist and theorist Deborah Bright’s influential essay “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry in the Cultural Meanings of Photography.” Bright argues for an appreciation of photography that takes the historical and cultural contexts of a photograph’s production into account, and celebrates the still-underappreciated importance of women photographers to the landscape genre. The works in this gallery, some of which have been in NOMA’s collection now for fifty years, are presented in that spirit, encouraging visitors to closely consider the variety of ways we might portray the landscapes we call home, and the many reasons why.

The View From Here: Women Photographers of the American Landscape is organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and is supported by the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Mann Pailet Endowment.