Travels in the American West
March 2 – April 1, 1989
This project (and accompanying book), “Travels in the American West” (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) explore the two great American obsessions with landscape – the romance of the wild frontier and the need to conquer and control that very same wilderness. This cultural and geographical depiction examines the effects of the automobile, tourism, and development on the landscape, and how it all gets punctuated by the great myth of the American West.
I have explored the surreal quality and haunting strangeness of these places by car and foot, uncovering human artifacts and tire tracks like an archaeologist. In the spirit of the first surveyors who traveled by mule train to bring back the photographs that established the first National Parks, this project celebrates all who have passed through before – by stagecoach, family camper, and the automobile.
When we arrive at a new place and find it formidable, foreign, frightening – we often reach for the familiar and the comfortable. Cars, for example, are what we sometimes feel most at home with in wide open spaces, rather than the splendor and uniqueness of the land. In the nineteenth century, when Mark Twain observed the harsh desert southwest for the first time – through the comfort of the train’s club car window – he remarked, “nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.”
We rely on technology and metaphor to get a handle on what is most eccentric and unfathomable. And the machine – whether train, plane, automobile, or camera – happens to be one way in which we enter into that landscape. Perhaps – even more important – it is our ticket out.
Len Jenshel is one of America’s foremost landscape photographers, exploring beauty, boundary and the control of nature for nearly 50 years.
He has received numerous fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, and grants from the Graham Foundation, two grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Design Trust for Public Space, and two grants from the National Geographic Society.
He has published numerous monographs, including Travels in the American West (Smithsonian, 1992), and with his wife, Diane Cook, HOT SPOTS: America’s Volcanic Landscape (Bulfinch Press, 1996), Aquarium (Aperture, 2003), and, Wise Trees (Abrams, 2017).
His photographs have been exhibited internationally in one-person shows at the Yokohama Museum in Japan, the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Center of Photography in New York City, to name a few. His work is represented in over one hundred museums and major collections worldwide.
Len & Diane’s work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; ICP, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco, among many others.
Len resides in New York City, with his wife (and collaborator) Diane Cook.