John Pfahl, Found Pfahls @Janet Borden

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 color photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against white walls in the divided single room gallery space. 20 of the works are pigment prints on Platine paper, made between 1966 and 1981 and printed recently. Each print is sized 17×22 and is available in an edition of 25. The other 4 works are vintage Ektacolor Plus prints, made between 1974 and 1976. These prints are each sized 16×20 and are available in editions of 15. (Installation shots below.)

Comments/Context: Photographic trends come and go, but even after nearly four decades, the sheer brilliance of John Pfahl’s Altered Landscapes remains undiluted. Created in the 1970s at the confluence of three photographic rivers (the traditions of the landscape genre, the brainy wittiness of conceptual photography, and the growing acceptance of color photography, with a dash of land art thrown in for good measure), these pictures were (and still are) elegant perception twisters, where carefully plotted interventions in the landscape playfully manipulate the two dimensional representation captured by the camera.

While Pfahl was crafting the images in the Altered Landscapes series, he was traveling all over the United States to various potential picture locations. Along the way, he made a selection of photographs of found scenes that mimicked the central visual ideas of his ongoing project, albeit without any intervention by the artist. As the title of the show suggests, they were “found Pfahls”, a parade of offbeat perceptual paradoxes discovered right before his eyes.

Meticulous, mathematical alignment was the hallmark of Altered Landscapes, and many of Pfahl’s found arrangements have been laid out with similar precision. A red tinged beachscape turns out to be a stucco roof set perfectly above the incoming waves (with small roof vents that are easily mistaken for seabirds). Football goalposts make a squared-off geometric frame for billowing Colorado clouds. And bright logging ribbons tied on the trunks of trees to be cut down create horizontal dashed lines through the forest.

Painted murals were also a rich source of visual trickery. A scene of the eroded mesas of Monument Valley seems altogether real (or surreal) given its reflection in a hotel pool. Snow capped mountains on the side of a garage plausibly include the nearby tree and its leafy branches. And graceful cherry blossoms convincingly emerge from the ceiling to create a faux natural canopy above a battered group of painted chairs.

Other photographs play with visual parody, turning everyday strangeness into puzzling jokes. A pair of blindingly white vertical oil pipes are set amidst a stand of aspens with similarly white bark, while the pink sedimentary rock of Canyon de Chelly is matched by a pink tinted women’s outhouse.

Even though these photographs may not have been Pfahl’s primary goal at the time, they are certainly evidence of a mind constantly playing with the limits of visual perception. While the illusions and transformations found in this exhibit weren’t set up by Pfahl, they consistently retain the edge of conceptual sharpness that inhabits his best work.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The recent pigment prints are $3000 each, while the vintage Ektacolor Plus prints range between $4000 and $6000. The secondary market history for Pfahl’s work is intermittent at best, so gallery retail remains the most likely option for those collectors interested in following up.

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JTF (just the facts): Published in 2023 by Fw:Books (here). Softcover, 240 x 280 mm, 128 pages, with 133 black-and-white reproductions. Includes an essay by the artist. (Cover and spread ... Read on.

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