Victoria Sambunaris creates large-scale photographs that document the intersection of the natural and the manmade within the American landscape. Each year, Sambunaris embarks upon a lengthy journey on the road, using a large format, five-by-seven wooden field camera to document what she encounters. She aims to capture the way in which humans inhabit the landscape, and to highlight the need to consider the long-term impact of the continual cultivation and development of the land.
Combining in-depth planning and research with a laborious mode of shooting and developing, sometimes waiting days for the right conditions, Sambunaris’s photographs communicate a deeply layered sense of place.

Part of her ongoing, twenty-year series ‘Taxonomy of a Landscape’, Transformation of a Landscape encompasses the past decade of work, including collected ephemera that form the essential and incidental elements of her practice as a photographer and researcher. Also featured are archival documentation of experiences and observations on the road, such as snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens, and artifacts.

“Transformation of the Landscape comes after my first book from 10 years ago and part of a larger project called Taxonomy of a Landscape which began after graduating with an MFA from Yale in 1999. Both books are made up of several bodies of work- the equivalent of individual chapters. Each chapter documents specific aspects of the American regional landscape that I’ve photographed while driving across the United States the last 25 years. When I first began making these journeys across the country, the landscape was unfamiliar, an anomaly, leading me to dig deeper into the histories and politics of place. With each body of work, there were images that seemed to respond to my larger search about the mythic ideals of opportunity, prosperity and success that I have been examining since my days in grad school, Manifest Destiny and such. As time went on, the questions which grew out of my research became more and more focused, as I scoured the landscape for concrete traces of the historical legacy of these foundational myths that have to do with the natural and the manmade and our imprint on the land from geological formations that evolved millions of years ago to how we treat landscape today.” - Victoria Sambunaris