July | August 2009
Mulholland's View: Looking Down on the City of Angels
Photographs by Karen Halverson, Text by William L. Fox
... Mulholland became known as the premiere scenic drive of Los Angeles, one of the few places where you could easily drive up high enough to see where you lived — in one of the largest horizontal cities in the world. Karen Halverson, precisely because she is an artist, focuses her camera and our attention on what we mostly miss while cruising the skyline. Almost every one of her pictures has the view in the background somewhere, but in each instance it’s the details in the foreground that frame and make the picture, that remind us the aerial view is not detached from the ground, but part of it. Her gaze is not that of Apollo, but that of a person anchored in the world, and one who sees both the intimate and the grand as an integrated whole. ...
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March 7, 2003
Trees Tenderly Photographed
Karen Halverson's photographs of California trees at Rose Gallery combine the dignity of aristocratic portraiture with the intimacy of the lover's snapshot. Halverson, who teaches at USC, works large, in color, with taxonomical care, labeling each image according to the tree's type and location.
But she's no member of the Bernd and Hilla Becher school of coolly dispassionate formalists. There's a soul at work here, a radiant tenderness. In these pictures, Halverson revels in a beauty that she claims no credit for but embraces as fundamental.
The photographs (all mounted on aluminum and printed, effectively, edge to edge) fall loosely into two categories: majestic portraits of single trees, focused on form, color, gesture and texture; and images of trees in the context of human habitation.
In the latter, Halverson exercises a light hand, gracefully avoiding easy visual quips. Incongruities between the natural and the artificial play themselves out, sometimes with quiet humor, but not with blanket condemnation of the human-made.
Often odd and interesting formal relationships emerge. An orange post planted next to a pistache tree looks like a color swatch held up to match the tree's confetti of fiery foliage. Bright red mesh wraps like a bandage around the one healthy limb of a Joshua tree, while the other, truncated limb seems more in need of repair.
Rapturous color and light characterize all of the photographs. Halverson shoots in the fleeting warm glow preceding or just following a storm in her picture of a blue oak, the tree a wizened anchor against a sky of slate gray. In the neighboring image, light seems to emanate from the golden flowers of a Palo Verde tree blurring in the breeze.
In a stunning trio of photographs, Halverson presents individual portraits of the midsections of three tree trunks. The madrone, on the left, has bark of a soft rose color. The bluegum eucalyptus in the center is smooth as skin and a putty color, blue-gray in the shadows. At right, a valley oak is encrusted in a flaky shell of ocher. As sublime as painter Barnett Newman's stripes, these trees evoke not just primary colors but a beauty of primary significance.
Leah Ollman
Palo Verde, California
June 17 & 24, 2002
For six years Karen Halverson followed the Colorado River downstream from the Rockies toward the Gulf of California. Her colorful photographs describe the rough country that the water cuts its path through (the river's goosenecks in Canyonlands National Park) and the way that the water has been tamed by man (Lake Powell filled with party boats, Hoover Dam at dusk). Like Joel Sternfeld's work, Halverson's exudes a quirky American romanticism. A picture titled "Near Palo Verde, California" (1995) shows a rogue pool chair floating in the deep-water landscape.
September/October 2002
Karen Halverson is one of America's few women landscape photographers. Her Colorado River series "Downstream" documents the length of the river from its source in the Rockies to the point where it empties into the Gulf of California. Although there are some traditional pristine landscapes in the series, the majority of the works shows "the hand of man" on nature and the river. The river is diverted, channeled, dammed, and even runs through a pipeline! The mighty Colorado River, which carved the Grand Canyon, though still grand in places, can also be no more than a much diminished, "managed" trickle. Karen Halverson has a strong sense of irony and wry wit which is clearly on display in these pictures, yet the scale of the prints underscores the power of the forces in conflict in today's frontier: Nature vs. Engineering, and results of unrestricted development. These pictures are dispatches from the front line of the war for the environment.
July 17, 2001
The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West
Huntington Library and Art Galleries, San Marino, California, June 16 - September 9, 2001
Thermopolis, Wyoming
... For Halverson, the connection with panoramic camera was direct. In 1991, she moved from New York to Los Angeles, from the East to the West.
"I'd been doing photography in the West since the 1980's and used 4" x 5" and 6 cm x 9cm cameras before", she says. "When I moved here, one of the first things that struck me was Mulholland Drive, which I knew about from seeing David Hockney's painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mulholland Drive is really interesting; it runs across the city and bisects it. I wanted to photograph it and thought immediately of the panoramic camera."
First, she rented one, then she bought one. For the next two years, she photographed Mulholland Drive from the Pacific coast to its inland end.
"I fell in love with the format," Halverson says. "First of all, any change in format stirs you up and makes you see creatively in a new way. The first compositional element is frame, so immediately you compose differently.
Today she uses a Fuji 617 camera, which takes 120 millimeter film and can produce a negative 2¼ inches high and 6¾ inches wide. "The format is created by the camera," she explains. "What makes it feel panoramic is the aspect ratio - in this case, 1 to 3.
Halverson prefers color and has three works in the show. "Hoover Dam" is part of her Colorado River series, undertaken in 1994 - 95. Here, she was inspired by the beauty and magnitude of the dam. "It's one of the most wonderful pieces of art deco architecture," she says. "It was the first major American dam to be built, an extraordinary accomplishment of engineering, completed in 1935.
On the other hand, "Thermopolis, Wyoming" holds more irony. Looking down a deserted road bounded by a wooden fence stretching into the horizon, a sign on the left fence stands out: Buffalo are dangerous. "There's not a buffalo in sight -- why not a warning rather than a statement?" ...
May 9, 1996
Karen Halverson :: Mighty Colorado
Flaming Gorge Reservoir, Wyoming/Utah
Karen Halverson's supersaturated color photographs at Paul Kopeikin Gallery update the grand, panoramic pageantry of the American landscape by unsentimentally depicting awesome mountains, valleys and plains spanned by the Colorado River. Cutting a 1700-mile course through six states and two countries, this vital waterway is punctuated by six major dams (including the Hoover), dozens of reservoirs and several gigantic man-made lakes, like Powell and Mead. It's also the site of myriad water sports, parks, promenades, and picnic areas. Halverson's bold 2½ x 3½ foot pictures eschew the simple "nature-is-good, civilization-is-bad" moralism of much documentary photography. For every fertile valley filled with amber waves of grain, the peripatetic photographer captures on film, she includes a bevy of awkwardly bobbing houseboats. Each towering canyon wall is likewise balanced against an endless string of electric towers. Most majestic vistas are juxtaposed with rows of plastic pool furniture, distant oil wells, metal umbrellas or transplanted palm trees.
Lush and realistic, Halverson's best prints do not oppose nature and culture. Instead, they suggest that every individual is simultaneously dwarfed by the natural environment’s unfathomable vastness and by the massive, mind-boggling feats of post-industrial engineering that crosses this terrain.
A sense of humor softens the absurdity evinced by Halverson's photos, especially the one in which a scrappy golf course lies behind a synthetic fence at the edge of a cliff that drops precipitously to a river below. Farther in the background, radio towers, an electricity generating plant, a canyon-spanning bridge and a dam are all set in a dazzling landscape of purple mountains, crystalline rivers, and shimmering lakes.
In this picture, nothing is more natural than anything else. Rejecting the still prevalent 19th century idea that people don't belong in the landscape, Halverson's art shows the world as it is: a terrifying and impersonal vastness in which life as we know it hangs in the balance.