JOHN PFAHL
American
The title of John Pfahl’s 1997 exhibition at the
Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery at Syra-
cuse University, New York—Permutations on the
Picturesque—offers a viable summation of his over-
all project. In the decades since finishing his under-
graduate and graduate work at Syracuse, exploring
photography first in a fine arts program and subse-
quently as a newly organized facet of the university’s
School of Communication, Pfahl has sought various
approaches to understanding and conveying his
observations about what constitutes a picture,
what makes a scene worth seeing and transporting
into a photograph. His answers, posited in nearly a
dozen distinct series, offer engaging conceptual stra-
tegies carried out in classically beautiful, formal
print statements. As Estelle Jussim writes in the
catalogue accompanying his 1990 Albright-Knox
retrospective exhibition, ‘‘Pfahl’s style is an idea.
So is his content. In the broadest sense, John Pfahl
is a conceptual artist to whom the ‘idea’ is a tension
between the observable and the implicit.’’ His weav-
ing of intellect and aesthetic creates images that
function as elegant diagrams, self-referential tools
for critiquing and appreciating photographic truth.
In the early 1960s, when materials became avail-
able to produce color photographs outside of a
commercial lab, Pfahl set up a darkroom to print
his own images. With only a few exceptions he has
made color coupler prints from large-format color
negatives throughout his career, though in a 2004
interview with Robert Hirsch published in The
Photo ReviewPfahl states thatExtreme Horticulture
(work from the series was published in a 2003 mono-
graph with that title) may be ‘‘the last project I do
where the end result is a chemical print,’’ implying
that he will utilize inkjet printing to produce his
subsequent work. Pfahl is notable as being, in
1978, the first photographer invited to use the mam-
moth Polaroid camera, which produced 2024-
inch ‘‘instant’’ prints (with the help of an assistant).
He completed his first sustained body of work
during a 1965 trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. This fol-
lowed two years in the Army, his marriage to Bon-
nie Gordon, a fellow Syracuse undergraduate, and
preceded his entry into the first year of a new
graduate program in photography at Syracuse’s
School of Communications founded by Fred De-
marest, who had been one of Pfahl’s undergraduate
professors in the School of Fine Arts. The courses
Pfahl took in this program are considered to be the
first curriculum dedicated to color photography at
the graduate level. Pfahl has been a long-term
member of the Society for Photographic Education
and a dedicated instructor of photography in the
academic setting.
Altered Landscapes wasPfahl’sfirstseriesto
achieve significant notice, and it continues to be a
set of photographs that challenge basic assumptions
and experience of photography. Pfahl made rough
drawings on his camera’s ground glass view finder,
then with the help of assistants, inserted materials
including tape, string, tin foil, and other objects into
the scene to match the flat graphics on the picture’s
vertical plane. The appearance, in what we know to
be a landscape of significant depth, of a two-dimen-
sional geometric figure, underscores both the ma-
nipulation intrinsic to photographic seeing and the
unique nature of the vision; the only place this illu-
sion of flatness within three dimensions is complete is
where the film records the lens-projected image (i.e.,
in the camera, on the ground glass).Altered Land-
scapesincluded images that were puns on places that
captured the popular imagination, such asTriangle,
Bermuda(1975) showing string on a beach marking
out a triangle to a rock in the ocean, as well as several
images created as respectful parodies of well-known
photographs by Ansel Adams, includingMoonrise
over Pie Pan(1977) after Ansel’s iconicMoonrise,
Hernandezin which a tin pie pan placed in the land-
scape mimicks the moon in the sky, andWave, Lave,
Lace(1978), which shows lace laid across beachfront
vegetation, mimicking the frothy waves as they break
on the shore. The entire series shares visual and
conceptual strategies parallel to work done contem-
poraneously by photographers Kenneth Josephson
and Robert Cumming.
Pfahl’s interest in the formal, aesthetic concept of
landscape, the scene within what is seen, continues
throughout all of his series. As time progressed he
moved from direct intervention in the landscape to
deeper consideration of the picturesque phenom-
enon within the finished image itself. Many of hisPFAHL, JOHN