The first career-spanning catalog of the work of Gianfranco Gorgoni, whose iconic photographs established Land Art as one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. For the past forty years, photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni (1941-2019) built his reputation as the premier documentarian of Land Art in the US and beyond. After leaving his native Italy, Gorgoni started making portraits of the major players of the New York art scene, including Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Carl Andre, and Richard Serra. It was not long before he was traveling with Heizer, Smithson, and De Maria to the American West in the late 1960s to plot the works that would famously break art practice out of the confines of the gallery world. In Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, these artists embarked on major Land Art installations that would redefine contemporary art practice of the era. In many cases, Gorgoni was the only photographer on the ground to document their projects, and his images often serve as the definitive photographic record of the planning and creation of these groundbreaking works.
Published to coincide with the first major exhibition of Gorgoni's photographic works, featuring over fifty of Gorgoni's large-scale Land Art photographs, Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs includes an essay by the late, great art historian and critic Germano Celant, whose contribution here is among the last he wrote before his death in 2020, and William L. Fox, founding director of the Center for Art + Environment. A landmark collection of photographs of legendary and lesser-known works by Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Ugo Rondinone, and Charles Ross, Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs is a major assessment of one of the world's great art movements.