Stuart Klipper
Road to Bonneville Raceway, Great Salt Flats, Utah, (from the series The World in a Few States)1990
Type-C print
12 x 38 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Consolidated Natural Gas Company
Spread out like a long, complex sentence on a single line, the glassy surface of Utah’s salt flats defies immediate comprehension. Klipper’s positioning of the highway in the middle of the photograph makes explicit the love affair between the American West and the automobile. Klipper is part of a generation of photographers who grew up admiring the beauty of Ansel Adams’s photographs but skeptical of his vision of a natural world undisturbed by human beings.
