LS/S

Borrowing from the landscape painters of the seventeenth century, Beate Gütschow creates photo montages from as many as 100 distinct images, crafting carefully composed nature shots with all the usual Romantic conventions: a clearly defined foreground that beckons the viewer to "enter here," a path or winding brook in the middle, and a horizon line neatly anchored in the background. But look closely at her images and you may spot cleanly shorn tree stumps, trash strewn near happy picnickers, urban debris near a wooded path. Gütschow captures raw material wherever she finds it, from postindustrial urban lots to untrammeled wilderness, to create these idealized pastoral scenes for the modern age. At first pass, her landscapes simply evoke an emotional attachment to a beautiful place, but deconstructed they toy with us: paintings may be imagined, but we expect photographs to be real. What to make of an imagined photograph of nature? The latter half of Gütschow's monograph LS/S comprises a collection of black-and-white cityscapes, apocalyptic imaginings that heighten this brooding sense of unease.