Corona, California 1982

Joe Deal took this photograph, "Corona, California," and well, it’s a photograph, so I guess the medium is light, captured on paper. It’s a landscape, but not really. More like land, interrupted. The stark monochrome flattens everything, emphasizing the textures. The scraggly bushes, the dirt, the distant hills – all feel equally present. Look at the way the light catches the tips of those branches in the foreground. It's not pretty, but it is arresting. You get the sense that Deal wasn't trying to beautify anything, more like he was trying to process what he was seeing. It reminds me a little of the New Topographics photographers, who were turning away from grand landscapes to these kinds of more mundane, human-altered spaces. But there’s something almost painterly about Deal's approach. It’s in the tonal range, and the way the details emerge and recede. It asks us to consider our relationship to the land and the kind of mark we leave behind, not just as observers, but as inhabitants.