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Victoria SambunarisUntitled (rider), Joshua Tree, CA, 2021Chromogenic print39 x 55 inchesedition of 5$14,000.00 -
Victoria Sambunaris creates large-scale photographs of the American West that examine the intersections of modern civilization and the natural environment. Highly detailed and carefully composed, her images present a visually refined portrait of a vast industrial terrain embedded within the high desert, grassy plains and estuarial corridors of the country. Combining in-depth planning and research with a laborious mode of shooting and developing, sometimes waiting days for the right conditions, through her photographs Sambunaris conveys a deeply layered sense of place and a nuanced view of the complex issues surrounding American land use and management.
Inspired by the intrepid nineteenth century photographers whose work helped to define our understanding of the region, Sambunaris embarks upon an extended, solitary road trip each year, capturing the American landscape with a large format, five-by-seven wooden field camera. From 2009 to 2012, Sambunaris covered the two thousand mile border between the United States and Mexico in an attempt to understand the essence of the border culture and the divided landscape. Subsequently, from 2012 To 2016 she researched and documented the infrastructure and ecological implications of the energy industry in South Texas; and, from 2016 through 2018, Sambunaris focused her attention on the interrelationship of commercial and residential development, industry and geology throughout Utah.For her newest body of work, High and Dry, Sambunaris made three cross-country trips between 2020 and 2021 to Death Valley, the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin Desert, to investigate the relentless human activity found in the arid and supposedly barren California desert. work questions traditional and clichéd notions of landscape, our place within it, and our collective roles and responsibilities in shaping it. There she discovered dune buggies and motorcycles, campers and miners, caravans and freight trains. The resulting photographs question traditional and cliched notions of landscape, our place within it and our collective roles in shaping it. -
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“I’ve been on the road over 22 years, working mostly in the American West and looking at how we inhabit landscape and what we do to landscape; how we manipulate it and change it. I go out on the road for 3 or 4 months at a time. Once I get to the area where I want to work, it’s never really so specific what I’m looking for. I’m in search of something, most of my time is searching and looking and looking and looking and I never quite know what it is, but I know I’ll know it when I see it."
- Victoria Sambunaris
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Victoria SambunarisUntitled (Dune buggy), All American Canal, CA, 2021Chromogenic print55 x 77 inchesedition of 3$20,000.00
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Victoria SambunarisUntitled (Badwater Basin from Dante's View), Death Valley National Park, CA, 2021Chromogenic print55 x 77 inchesedition of 3$20,000.00
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Victoria SambunarisUntitled (The Bowl in Bahia Grande), Brownsville, Texas, 2015Chromogenic Print30 x 84 inchesEdition of 5$15,000.00
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Victoria SambunarisUntitled (Moving container train), Marfa, Texas, 2002Chromogenic Print39 x 55 inchesEdition of 5
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Victoria SambunarisUntitled (Gravel Pit), Near Draper, Utah, 2017Chromogenic Print39 x 55 inchesEdition of 5$14,000.00
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Victoria Sambunaris was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1964, and lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Mount Vernon College in 1986 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1999, where she has since held various teaching positions. She is the receipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant. In 2011, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery presented a mid-career retrospective of her work which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and the Nevada Museum of Art. From October 30, 2020 - May 1, 2021, the Brigham Young University Museum of Art will present Far Out: The West Re-Seen, a major restrospective of Sambunaris' work bringing together over forty works from throughout her career.
Sambunaris' work can be seen in numerous public collections throughout the United States, including those of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her monograph, Taxonomy of a Landscape, published by Radius Books, presents a ten year survey of her work.
Victoria Sambunaris
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