John Pfahl, born 1939, is an American photographer known primarily for his creative landscape works. The most famous of these, Pfahl’s Altered Landscapes series, draws from his background in mathematics and his interest in cartography to inject artificial geometry onto human and natural vistas. He constructs his geometry using materials like paint, tape, and string, placing them in an existing scene so that - misleadingly - they appear to be “flat" or floating. The resulting image is photographed from the correct perspective.
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| Shed with Blue Dotted Lines, Penland, North Carolina (1975) |
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| Blue Right Angle, Buffalo, New York (1978) |
I’m fascinated by how Pfahl’s Altered Landscapes are an inverted version of traditional trompe l’oeil: here, the landscapes are real and the structure is artifice (see also San Antonio artist Charlie Kitchen and others). Pfahl says his intention is to get viewers “to think about the landscape as an intellectual construct.”
For me, the images hold up on a formal and conceptual level regardless, but I do get increased satisfaction out of knowing the fabrication was analog and captured on film. Further, Pfahl in his choice of materials mostly allows the viewer to “see” both his trompe l’oeil image and (through careful examination) the substance of his ruse.
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| Blue Grid, Pembroke, New York (1977) |
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