Barbara Norfleet: Landscapes of War July 27, 2010

In the 1970s, Barbara Norfleet, then a professor of sociology and social psychology at Harvard University, established a vernacular image archive of everyday Americana to compliment the photography collection housed at Harvard University's Carpenter Center. Norfleet's interest in the vernacular and material and visual culture is at the center of her recent body of work, 'The Landscape of War' series. For this new work, Norfleet juxtaposes found hand-painted photographs of botanical specimens with cropped test prints of her poignant black and white images taken in the 1980s of high-security, Cold War military sites. The resultant horizontal triptychs are studies in form, but more importantly, they speak to the life of images as objects.