Storms blow up on distant horizons, sheep wander on a mountainside, and RVs sit in a parking lot with a Pizza Hut across the highway in the landscape photographs of Lawrence McFarland in “From Dodge City to Shiprock.â€
There are a few striking Western vistas of plains and mountains in the Workplace Gallery exhibition, including the beautiful color “Sunset, Camp Robinson, Near Where Crazy Horse Was Shot,†taken in 2001 of the bluffs near Fort Robinson, the only Nebraska image among the 20 photographs.
But the majority of the images include human elements or animals, capturing what the Western landscape has looked like as McFarland has driven through it over the course of more than four decades.
Now professor emeritus at Texas, where he taught from 1985 to 2013, McFarland received his master's degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1976, about the time that he began his photographic journeys.
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“The history of the Western States is the driving force behind my forty plus years of photographing the West,†McFarland writes in his artist’s statement. “My images become a record of my journey, my encounters, my integrity, and my curiosities. They show the joy and the sorrow of the open road, the horizon line that you can never meet, and the pursuit of the spaces that I seek.
“My images show, and I consider this to be the core of my work, the optimism of the journey, the wonder of discovery, and the revealing of events that happen if you pay attention. The amount of time and energy that I have expended over my lifetime in pursuit of my images depict an epic journey of my commitment and my passion for life and photography. They are an impressive poem of my quest to find the mythical landscape that exists out there someplace inside my mind.â€
The Workspace exhibition is something of a retrospective of the last 20 years of McFarland’s journeys, selected by the artist and smartly hung, label free, in the narrow hallway gallery in the Haymarket’s Sawmill Building.
The images come from New Mexico, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, California, Arizona as well as Nebraska. They were shot between 1982 and 2005 and are a mix of color and black-and-white, all exquisitely printed.
Whether intentional or not, there is some linkage that can be made between many of the images. “Coyote, No Hunt, Near the Dull Knife Fight, Kaycee, Wyoming†from 2005 and 1984’s “Guardian of Kinishba Ruins, Fort Apache Indian Reservation, Whiteriver, Arizona,†for example, each contain animal carcasses.
The former finds a coyote carcass draped over an old tire inscribed with “No Hunting†next to a cattle gate. In the latter, a canine head (I’m not sure if it’s a dog, a wolf or a coyote) is mounted on a pole in front of a crumbling building. Are they warnings, or ironically placed? Who knows, but McFarland’s photographs raise the questions.
A dog turns up in “David’s Van, Kodak Searching Out Garbage, Mojave Desert, California,†one of the earliest pictures in the show -- Kodak being a dog that’s found in the center of the panoramic landscape taken from above. And two more hounds are seen behind a fence in “Barking Dogs, Three Rivers, Montana†from 2003.
There are images of an ATV dirt track from New Mexico, with tires on poles marking the turns; five round “Grain Storage Tanks†(aka bins) on Colorado horizon; a dilapidated movie screen standing in the middle of a scrub-covered Wyoming field in “Drive-In Theatre†and the aforementioned RV park in Cody, Wyoming.
Those views of the human alterations on the landscape and the changes in lifestyle, like the demise of the drive-in and the rise of ATVs, are subtly instructive and thought-provoking as well, raising questions about land use and recovery and leisure activity.
That’s far more than can be found in a standard landscape photo and it’s why McFarland’s photographs resonate so strongly as a personal documentation of the real West.
McFarland, one of the UNL’s most distinguished art alumni, will return to Lincoln on April 20 to deliver the Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist Lecture at Richards Halls. Appropriately, “From Dodge City to Shiprock†will still be on view at Workspace when he presents the lecture.