In Devour the Land, the Harvard Art Museums assemble a deliberately unsettled account of American landscape photography after 1970. Edited by Makeda Best, the museum’s curator of photography, the volume starts from a plain observation with wide consequences: most modern combat happens abroad, yet the environmental damage that persists at home often traces back to the military and the industries that sustain it. Across 137 images, works by dozens of photographers—Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Dorothy Marder, Alex Webb and Terry Evans among them—are placed in a sequence that tests the distance between scenic convention and evidence of contamination, testing grounds, and militarized terrain.

The catalogue is intentionally polyvocal. Photographs appear alongside interviews with artists including Sheila Pree Bright, Terry Evans, David T. Hanson, Richard Misrach, and Oscar Palacio, as well as poems by Ed Roberson. Essays by Best, Steven Hoelscher, Abrahm Lustgarten, Courtney J. Martin, Katherine Mintie, and Will Wilson set the images within environmental activism, politics, and the history of landscape representation, rather than treating pictures as mere illustration. The design reinforces this documentary instinct: the softcover, wire-o binding evokes a field book, nodding to ephemera made by earlier artists and activists.

The book accompanies an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, and its 2022 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award as Photography Catalogue of the Year confirmed its standing as both a reference and a model of what an exhibition catalogue can do. For collectors, its interest lies less in scarcity than in method: a sustained, carefully edited inquiry into how photographers have registered the domestic footprint of war, and how the landscape genre itself can be reworked to carry that burden.