Shifting Views and Changing Places: The Photographs of Rick Dingus

Since the 1970s Rick Dingus has photographed “landscapes”: remote wilderness and rural settings, vernacular traces, urban environments, and ancient pathways that invite viewers to look closer, to think about how to interpret what they are seeing. Perception unfolds in many ways in this volume, whose photographs document Dingus’s lifelong exploration of the intersections of time, place, culture, and nature.

Dingus discusses his creative process in practical and philosophical terms through brief opening passages and an in-depth interview with art curator Peter S. Briggs. An introductory essay by curator Toby Jurovics considers Dingus’s oeuvre within the evolution of landscape photography from the nineteenth century to the present day—offering a view of the photographer’s art as “resilient enough to contain both empirical and metaphorical truth; the descriptive and the personal; the past and the present.” An essay by Shelley Armitage offers a more personal reflection on the experience of viewing the photographs. And art critic Lucy R. Lippard provides a chronology and sustained interpretation of Dingus’s work, with its emphasis on transformation and on “translating information across visual borders.”

Landscape is always with us, deceptively simple, yet capable of providing something much more. By examining the rich variety of Dingus’s work and reflecting on the evolution of ideas that lie behind it, Shifting Views and Changing Places invites readers to critically examine the pursuit of seeing.

Toby Jurovics is Chief Curator at Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska.

Shelley Armitage is Professor Emerita of English and American Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her numerous publications include Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church and John Held, Jr.: Illustrator of the Jazz Age.

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, sometime curator, and author of twenty-four books on contemporary art and cultural criticism, including Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West (2014), Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250–1782 (2010), Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (1990), and The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (1997). Recipient of nine honorary degrees, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Lannan grant, among other awards, she lives off the grid in rural New Mexico, where she edits the monthly community newsletter El Puente de Galisteo.