Landscape Photographs
Bill Burke • Lois Conner
Curators: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock & Joseph Lawton
The Ildiko Butler Gallery Gallery
September 24–November 13, 2019
Reception: Wednesday, September 25, 6–8 pm
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
*The galleries are open from 9 am to 9 pm every day except on university holidays
Fordham University is proud to present a new two-person exhibition of photographs in our Ildiko Butler Gallery by Bill Burke and Lois Conner. Landscape Photographs brings together two photographers that have photographed extensively in both the United States, as well as abroad. Both bodies of work have been made over many years, Burke in Southeast Asia and Conner in China with each utilizing large format cameras to record their subject in extraordinary detail.
Bill Burke: Statement
I began to travel to Asia in 1982. In the years after failing my draft physical in 1968, I began to think I had missed a significant experience that defined my generation. I became curious about the people I would have been ordered to kill or be killed by. Studying the Vietnam War, I became familiar with the names of places and events that took place there. Over the next eighteen years, I visited many parts of the former French colonies of Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. Most of my photographic efforts were toward making portraits, but as the region recovered from “The American War,” I began to see how original architecture was being destroyed and repurposed. I also saw how the architecture could be seen to represent the flow of colonial power that had molded the region during the previous century. I took it on myself to make some small record of buildings that might soon be destroyed or that embodied an aspect of the foreign power that had commissioned them.
Lois Conner: Statement
My subject is landscape as culture. I am not interested in an untouched, untrammeled world. What I am trying to reveal through photography in a deliberate yet subtle way is a sense of history. I want my photographs to describe my relationship to both the tangible and the imagined, to fact and fiction.
Image captions: (top) Bill Burke, Abandoned U.S. Consulate, Danang, 1994. Images courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY; (Bottom) Lois Conner, Military Museum, Beijing, China, 2000. Images courtesy of Gitterman Gallery, NY
Exhibition image Captions:
Bill Burke
Left Wall and Left Rear Wall (left to right) Caption information is written directly on the photographs.
Lois Conner
Rear Wall Right (top to bottom, left to right)
Yuanming Yuan, Beijing, China (2011)
Tiananmen, 50th Anniversary Floats, Beijing, China (1999)
Military Museum, Beijing, China (2000)
The Photographers, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China (1993)
Fengdu, Sichuan, China (1997)
Bank of China, Shanghai, China (1999)
Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China (1985)
Yangshuo, Guangxi, China (1985)
Right Wall (top to bottom, left to right)
Zigui, Hubei, China (1997)
Cultural Palace, Lhasa, Tibet (2002)
Beijing, China (1988)
Yangshuo, Guangxi, China (1991)
The Silk Route, Gansu, China (1991)
Reconstruction, Tiananmen, Beijing (1998)
