While it was easy to mistakenly see last fall’s Instagram posts of unique culinary adventures in Paris and Tokyo by Nancy Kathryn Burns, the Worcester Art Museum’s Stoddard Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, as a part of a bucket list vacation tour, the truth was much better — she was in search of unique works that would complete her upcoming “New Terrain: 21st- Century Landscape Photography” exhibition, the third show she’s curated from the museum’s own collection.
“These photographs are acquisitions that I’ve made over the last seven or eight years,” Burns explained during a press tour of the exhibition prior to its opening. “Different curators have different ways on acquisition. Mine is to tell stories and to fill gaps in the museum’s collection. I found there was a landscape and still-life gap in the collection.” Part of the aforementioned “vacation” overseas was to fill those gaps, and the end result is a show that couldn’t be timelier.
“When most people think of fine art photography, they think of images of places like Yosemite and large range landscape shots,” Burns said. “My goal with this exhibition was to go beyond that.”
The re-examination of what a photograph can be starts with the first photograph Burns acquired for the museum. Meghann Riepenhoff’s, “Littoral Drift #3 (Rodeo Beach, CA), June 13, 2013, cyanotype diptych on wove paper, is the only one that has been displayed at WAM previously. She hopes that the image, and its placement near the start of the exhibition, will encourage visitors to think about landscape photography – and reconsider what makes it a landscape photograph.