Landscape
Photograph
Landscape
1981–1982
Gelatin silver print with caulking, staples and spray paint
Image: 74.6 x 53.2 cm (29 3/8 x 20 15/16 in.)
Purchase with funds from the Charina Foundation
1989.1120.0001
Inscriptions recto-(stenciled) "Landscape"
verso-(in ink) "Landscape/1981-82/" (signed) "Thomas F. Barrow"
mount verso-(in pencil) "25-34 Galley(?) #3"
verso-(in ink) "Landscape/1981-82/" (signed) "Thomas F. Barrow"
mount verso-(in pencil) "25-34 Galley(?) #3"
TextThomas Barrow’s series Cancellations takes its name from the X that dominates the images. Professional photographers in the pre-digital era scratched that mark into the emulsion of negatives they did not want editors to use. Barrow, on the other hand, applied the X to the negatives he intended to print. The resulting photographs started out as ordinary, even banal, landscapes, but with the X, they become assertions of the objecthood of photographic prints and the negatives that produced them—a show of resistance to late twentieth-century society’s tendency to conflate photographic images with reality.
