Photographer Gary Metz’s (1947-2010) matter-of-fact approach to landscape photography springs from the New Topographics movement of the mid-1970s. Typified by society’s intrusion into nature, the movement is the flipside of Ansel Adams’ landscape romanticism. Metz’s frank depiction of the Aspen, Colo., landscape, reframes the area’s regional beauty with its suburban reality.
The work will be on view at the Ildiko Butler Gallery from Jan. 20 through March 20. Co-curated by artist-in-residence Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and photography professor Joseph Lawton, both Metz protégés, the show will be the University’s first traveling exhibition—eventually moving on to the Rhode Island School of Design, Syracuse University, Spéos International Photography School in Paris, and the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona, Fla.
“Metz loved theory and ideas and yet he was a man of the real world,” said Lawton. “He’d get excited about a stop sign; he always appreciated the vernacular, the everyday.”
