The following two shows in San Francisco's Union Square district, The Source at the Robert Koch Gallery and Beryl Landau's solo show at the Newmark Gallery entitled The Changing City, take a glance at how a number of artists have handled landscape in all its forms--cityscapes, landscapes, cloudscapes and waterscapes.

At the Robert Koch Gallery, artists ranging from Eadweard Muybridge and Eugene Atget to their own gallery artists, Tom Baril and Debra Bloomfield, are included in the exhibit entitled The Source. Each artist's contribution addresses the motif of water in relationship to human and natural existence. The photographs seem to allude to water as the silent, passive aggressor, with a focus on how bodies of water, and intriguingly water in its different states (snow, ice, vapor etc.), have been complements to eroticize, romanticize and magnify the brilliance and aesthetics of a scene. Further, although not intentionally shown chronologically, the show presents these ideas throughout history. This is evinced by incredible photographs of Grecian and Roman busts and victory statues juxtaposed with lapping waves on the shore, and the Pont de Gard now dry and redundant, but the tiny river still silently flowing underneath it. In another way, the techniques of the artists have brilliantly focused attention to the once disinterested element of the picture: it is not only a photograph of the might of nature in Siren XXVII, but the unobtrusive lake that stalwartly supports the large islet, and the cold white sheet of snow that blankets the scene in Bisson Freres' Schweiz, Kanton Wallis, Rhonegletscher from around 1860.

Even in the photographs where water is not visually apparent, like the photographs by Robert Burtynsky of the building of the Yangtze dam in China, water makes as bold a statement of its own supremacy and power as in the obvious photographs of the Native Americans' solemn reverence for it.

In many ways, the photographs in the show skillfully re-present the photograph in a new way which brings the water's significance to the fore. The show emphasizes the element of water in the photographs instead of the necessarily intended subject. Muybridge's study of Yosemite Valley's Three Brothers mountain terrain on the same gallery wall as Carleton E. Watkins' photograph of the same subject, both once entitled to focus attention to the rock face, now are focused by the exhibit's intentions towards the different ways the artists employed the lake below it. Seen in this context, the picture has the opportunity to take on myriad meanings and significances: how the body of water and its majesty complements and strengthens the photograph of the mountains, and the brilliance in how this unobtrusive foreground element is able to deftly achieve this.

--Monique T. Willms

(*Images, from top to bottom: The Source, February 7 - March 29, 2008; Robert Koch Gallery, Carlton E. Watkins, Vernal Falls, 300 ft., Yosemite Valley, 1859, mammoth-plate albumen print from wet collodion negative, 14 3/16 x 20 7/8", courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.  The Source, February 7 - March 29, 2008; Robert Koch Gallery, David Parker, Siren XXVII, 2005, toned gelatin silver print, 25 9/32 x 53 1/2" on 39 9/16 x 67 5/8" paper, courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.  The Source, February 7 - March 29, 2008; Robert Koch Gallery, Edward Burtynsky, Three Gorges Dam Project, Dam #4, Yangtze River, China, 2002, chromogenic print, 40 x 50" image on 48 x 58" mount, courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.  The Source, February 7 - March 29, 2008; Robert Koch Gallery, Eadweard Muybridge, View in the Yosemite Valley, Pompompasos, Three Brothers, and Reflections. 4200 ft., Yosemite Valley, 1872, mammoth-plate albumen print from wet collodion negative, 21 1/8 x 16 3/4", courtesy Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.)