Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970

Climate change and social justice have finally become a hot topic in contemporary art. Right now, the most incisive exhibitions combine both, highlighting the inescapable continuity between the two. This is nature in the Anthropocene. No longer a remote place of unaltered beauty, but a precarious all-encompassing condition we have singlehandedly created and in which we are always wholly implicated.  

Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970, on show at the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums is an impressive example of how art can help us grasp a critical situation we have ignored far too long. The exhibition features approximately 160 photographs grouped around 6 themes— Silent Spring, Arming America, Slow Violence, Regeneration, Other Battlefields, and Resistance—which illustrate the often otherwise invisible ways the US military has impacted, at times irreversibly, the land.