Consuming the American Landscape presents John Ganis’s color photographs of the effects of development and extraction industries across every region of the United States, made over a period of seventeen years. The subjects are, in the publisher’s words, flagrantly clear and just as flagrantly disturbing: abandoned wrecks, desolate strip mines, clear-cut forests, industrial parks, landfill sites, and terrain flattened for housing developments. The book is described as a thesaurus of civilized incursions into the wildness of nature, a charting of debris-strewn topographies, and a report on the abdication of reverence towards the land.

Robert Sobieszek, of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, contributes an introductory essay giving an overview of historical responses to the American landscape and contextualizing Ganis’s work. Sobieszek observes that the photographs are striking in their unexpected combination of critical satire and romantic longing. Elements of both the picturesque and the rustic, he suggests, mediate between the idyllic and the apocalyptic. Ganis’s work, the publisher notes, is really about the edge: the margin separating the uncultivated from the over-farmed, the pastoral garden from the bleak wasteland, the natural from the cultured, the past from the present.

A further dimension comes from a collaboration between Ganis and the late anthropologist and poet Stanley Diamond, whose poems in this book resulted from that exchange. George Thompson, Director of The Center for American Places, provides an afterword. Together these contributions frame a sequence of eighty-six color plates.

John Ganis was born in Chicago in 1951. After university he moved to New York and studied with Larry Fink and Lisette Model, and he received his M.F.A. in photography from the University of Arizona, where he studied with Harold Jones, Todd Walker, and W. Eugene Smith. His photographs of land use in America have been exhibited widely and are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Center for Creative Photography, The Detroit Institute of Arts, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The book was published by Dewi Lewis in 2003 as a 144-page hardback, 320mm by 245mm.