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June 27, 2010
Along with Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, and Lewis Baltz, Deal spent the nineteen-seventies practicing a distinct sort of human altered landscape photography in which they examined the modern American landscape and its degradation at the hands of developers, corporations and suburban colonizers.
After “New Topographics,” Deal, who recently died from bladder cancer, explored the suburban sprawl in California and the uneasy coexistence of human beings and nature along the San Andreas Fault in Southern California.
He produced a portfolio of images, “The Fault Zone,” that juxtaposed the hasty activity of human beings with the inexorable, drawn-out processes of geology:
Joe Deal, Model Home, Phillips Ranch, California, 1984, from Subdividing the Inland Basin
What we have here is a kind of of tabula rasa that is provides Deal with the “beginnings of an altered landscape.”
The Fault Zone & Other Work 1976-1986 exhibition is a series of 19 square black-and-white pictures of suburban homes, rocky hills, dirt roads, construction sites and other nondescript scenes, all taken from 1978 to 1980 along the San Andreas Fault Line in Southern California. Underlying the immediate subject matter is the irony of the population and construction boom in a fragile desert ecosystem with an active fault line:
Joe Deal, Colton, California, 1978, from The Fault Zone
Other works in the exhibition survey suburban backyards in Diamond Bar, California, and coastal communities like Laguna Beach and Malibu.The survey suburban backyards in Diamond Bar were part of the Los Angeles Documentary Project, which was part of the NEA Photography Surveys of the 1970s
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http://www.jenbekman.com/shows/landusesurvey/