This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

Lake Tahoe experienced rapid growth after World War II. Residential populations at the lake grew steadily, and with the rise of the ski industry and other recreation businesses, the number of visitors to the lake skyrocketed. Growth and development in the region reached a tipping point in the 1950s and 1960s, as plans for high-rise casinos, shoreline freeways, sprawling ski resorts, landfill marinas, and a four-lane concrete bridge across Emerald Bay gained forward momentum.

In 1957, a gathering of concerned conservationists formed what became known as The League to Save Lake Tahoe. They coined the iconic tagline, “Keep Tahoe Blue,” a conservationist slogan that remains popular to this day. The attitude that unchecked growth at the lake was a foregone conclusion precipitated local resistance, and ultimately led to a unique bi-state agreement governing planning and management of the lake and its resources.

Today millions of people visit the Tahoe/Donner region annually and nearly 50,000 people call it their permanent home. In the twenty-first century, one’s experience of Tahoe is sure to be mediated by commercial enterprise, advertising, and limited access to much of the lake’s privately-owned shore. Contemporary artists and architects invite us to look carefully at how this human presence impacts the fragile Lake Tahoe basin.

A Road Through Shore Pine contains 18 photographs made by the photographer in Nehalem Bay State Park, Oregon, in the fall of 2013.  In the exhibition, Adams traces a contemplative journey, first by automobile, then by foot, along an isolated, tree-bordered road to the sea. As presented through Adams’s 11 × 14-inch prints, the passage takes on the quality of metaphor, suggestive of life’s most meaningful journeys, especially its final ones. For this group of photographs, all of which were printed by Adams himself, the artist returned to the use of a medium-format camera, allowing the depiction of an intense amount of detail. Through experience gathered over more than four decades, Adams’s trees, especially the tips of their leaves, are etched with singular sensitivity to the subtleties and meanings of light.

About the artist:

Robert Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937, and moved to Colorado as a teenager. Adams was a professor of English literature for several years before turning his full attention to photography in the mid 1970s. His work is largely concerned with moments of regional transition: the suburbanization of Denver, a changing Los Angeles of the 1970s and 1980s, and the clear-cutting in Oregon in the 1990s. He has published many books well-known to those concerned with the American Landscape.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948, Tokyo, Japan) explores themes of history and temporal existence through the medium of photography. His interest in art began at a young age when he discovered the writings of French Surrealist author and poet André Breton, which led to his subsequent interest in the work of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. Sugimoto’s creative philosophy is informed by his ongoing investigation of time, memory, and metaphysics. This exhibition features selections from three of his most prominent ongoing photographic series: Dioramas (1976–), Theaters (1978–), and Seascapes (1980–).

Sugimoto’s work is in the collections of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The National Gallery, London; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian Institute of Art, Washington, D.C., and Tate, London, among many others. Sugimoto lives and works in New York and Tokyo.

Laurie Brown’s panoramic photographs of Las Vegas, Nevada, reveal lush green grass, artificial waterways, and tropical palm trees set against a stark waterless desert landscape. For Brown, who has documented suburban spaces and the altered landscape for more than forty years, these easily overlooked peripheral areas—where vulnerable wilderness meets encroaching suburban sprawl—reveal the all-too-real paradoxes of life in the desert.

Brown’s engaging photographs ask us to consider how far Las Vegans will go to live in a place not intended for living and whether their desires to do so are, in the end, sustainable.

Stephen Shore’s seminal work Uncommon Places is considered one of the most celebrated and influential collections of photographic work produced in the past 40 years. These images chronicle the artist’s multiple cross-country road trips, exploring the American landscape from 1973-1981. Shore used a wide-format view camera to capture moments that are highly detailed and complex, presenting to the viewer a dense snapshot of the American built environment. Formal concerns such as framing and structure are paramount to his work.

Shore was born in 1947 in New York, and his career began in the mid-1960s, as a frequent visitor and photographic chronicler of the scene at Andy Warhol’s “Factory.” Warhol’s work influenced the young photographer, who began creating his black and white works sequentially and in series, delighting in American culture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York honored Shore with a solo exhibition when he was 23 years old. The same year he began working with color film, attracted to the medium’s ability to record the range and intensity of hues seen in life. Shore, together with William Eggleston, is one of the country’s pioneering color photographers. His works transforms banal scenes of everyday life into fine art.