It's a small show, consisting of just 34 photos (29, if you count Hope Sandrow's five-panel image of Komodo National Park, in Indonesia, as a single unit). The small show has some very big names, though: William Wegman, Annie Leibovitz, Lee Friedlander, Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark.
There's a somewhat perverse pleasure in seeing a Leibovitz photo that doesn't have someone famous in it -- or anyone at all, actually. Her two pictures, from the Shawangunk Mountains, north of New York City, show trees (a stand of birches and pines) and cliffs. Equally uncharacteristic are Mann's two offerings: a pair of touristy images from the Yucatan.
If Leibovitz and Mann use their Last Great Places to liberate their work, most of the others use theirs for reiteration. The aesthetic dislocation that defines Leibovitz's pictures and Mann's finds itself oddly mirrored in a very different sort of dislocation in many of the others.
All photography begins with a place, quite literally: the place found between lens and eye. And for most of the artists here that place predominates over the one in front of the lens. This is the commission's conceptual flaw -- and artistic strength.
Photography can be a means or an end, but rarely both. That snapshot you took of Aunt Nora is a splendid likeness of her; it's not art, though. There's a very considerable difference between photography that explicitly celebrates a beautiful location (photography most commonly available as posters and postcards) and photography that celebrates the photographer's vision of that same beautiful location.
That distinction might sound quite academic. Take one look at the Weimaraners in Wegman's four images of Cobscook Bay and see that distinction in unmistakable action: Maine here is means, not end.
