Victoria Sambunaris

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Through straight-on focus, detail, and uniform lighting, Victoria Sambunaris reduces her subject matter of everyday landscapes and common industrial parks to crisp clear images of forms in neutral space. Shot during two road trips through Texas, Wyoming, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa, on five by seven-inch negatives, Sambunaris’s images capture at once the vastness of the American landscape and the subtle, sometimes overwhelming, cues to its underlying capitalist mentality. As she explains, “It is the anomalies of an ordinary landscape that have become the focus of my work: massive warehousing, infinite distribution facilities, and systematized shipping terminals. These numerous paradigmatic structures, I sense, portend the future of landscape and our relationship to it.”

BIOGRAPHY
Crossing the American landscape in her car for up to five months each year, Victoria Sambunaris structures her life around projectbased photographic journeys. Working with a 5x7 view camera to produce large-scale color photographs, her subject matter revolves around the vast transformation of the landscape through the intersection of geophysical occurrences and human manipulation. Sambunaris received her M.F.A. in photography from Yale University in 1999. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Culver City, California; the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York. She was a lecturer at the Yale University School of Architecture and instructor at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery.