Exhibition Review: Pained Vistas at the Photographic Center Northwest
Wendel White, Marshalltown School, Mannington, New Jersey, 2008 courtesy of Photographic Center Northwest
Written by Katie Grierson
Copy Edited by Parker Renick
Each horrible act, every bloodied battlefield, and every place of trauma has one similarity: watching from above is a beautiful sky. Newly blossomed flowers bring color to the side of the road and turn the otherwise dreary scene into a photogenic location. In Pained Vistas, the artists showcase landscape photography in which the photos carry trauma that can’t always be seen. The land we walk on has a memory, and the eleven artists bear witness to both the heaviness and aesthetic beauty of the environments they enter, whether these locations bear the traumatic weight of the Holocaust, of systemic racism and segregation in schools, of suicides, of climate change, or of war. In Pained Vistas, landscape photography acts both as a celebration of beauty and as a reminder of tragedies and opens the door for conversations about the artistic approach: how do you capture a place strife with horror?
Marc Wilson, Terezin 113 courtesy of Photographic Center Northwest
Donna Wan’s approach is personal. Struggling with suicidal ideation and postpartum depression, she often thought about driving to the California coast to admire the view of the ocean before she took her own life. After recovering, Wan learned about “suicide destinations,” a term that reflects her own experience of desiring to travel before ending her life. Her series, Death Wooed Us, is featured in the exhibition and follows Wan as she explores the paths of people who had died by suicide in the beauty of California’s Bay Area. Wan states: “There are some who may think that my photographs romanticize these places of death. I can understand that point of view, although that is not my intention. Death is not beautiful… Yet the sublimity of these places continues to lure people to them. I do not intend for my work to glorify the allure of these places. Instead, I hope that it may offer a glimpse into the minds of those who may have thought that dying in these beautiful places was a peaceful way to end their suffering.” Wan violently faces the reality of suicide and suffering in her photographs and grapples with making beautiful the places where people died.
Donna J. Wan, Dumbarton Bridge courtesy of Photographic Center Northwest
Kiliii Yuyan captures both climate change and wildlife. “As an indigenous person and a person from Asia,” he says, “it’s pretty hard to take pictures, do anything on the land, without really going in deep because relationship to land is pretty much everything we are.” Yuyan portrays climate change as complex: in one of his photos, as volcanic ash flows between fenceposts in Iceland, he balances the history of the Icelandic people that brought forward this moment in time with their current actions to undo the harm they caused the environment. Photography is confined to one moment, and Yuyan’s approach is not meant to reaffirm our anger in a destroyed environment but to offer hope that they can change for the better, illustrating that harmony can be restored.
Kelsey Sucena, Golden Gate, San Francisco, 2019 courtesy of Photographic Center Northwest
In these photographs, and through the exhibition at the Photographic Center Northwest, the artists grapple with capturing places of tragedy as picturesque. As one artist, Marc Wilson, stated in the artist and curator talk, “What I try to do…is create a beautiful image of a terrible place so that people will fall into it, and they’ll look.”
Irina Rozovsky, One to Nothing courtesy of Photographic Center Northwest
Pained Vistas, curated by Jon Feinstein and Roula Seikaly, was on view at Photographic Center Northwest from January 13 to March 17, 2022. It featured work from Kris Graves, Selena Kearney, Yazan Khalili, Dionne Lee, Irina Rozovsky, Griselda San Martin, Kelsey Sucena, Donna J. Wan, Wendel White, Marc Wilson, and Kiliii Yuyan.
Kiliii Yuyan, Bering Sea Basketball Court, 2018 courtesy of Photographic Center Northwest
Photo Editor: Miller Lyle
