From February 12 - March 15, 1997, the Equitable Gallery will present Viewing Olmsted: Photographs by Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander, and Geoffrey James, an exhibition of over 100 photographs resulting from an extraordinary seven-year commission undertaken by the Canadian Centre for Architecture/Centre Canadien d'Architecture (CCA), Montréal. The exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to reflect upon the achievement of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), North America's most important landscape architect, by looking at his city parks, private estates, cemeteries, and subdivisions through the eyes of three contemporary artists.

Frederick Law Olmsted is familiar to the New York public as the designer, with Calvert Vaux, of Central Park. This first commission, begun in 1857, was followed by a forty-year career of projects in landscape design which included Brooklyn's Prospect Park; the Emerald Necklace park system in Boston; the Stanford University campus in California; Montréal's Mont-Royal; as well as parks in Louisville, Milwaukee, Rochester, and Chicago; the Vanderbilt estate “Biltmore” in Asheville, North Carolina, and numerous other projects. Olmsted was also a pioneer in wilderness preservation and an advocate of land management and accessible public space.

The exhibition was organized and commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal. Funding for the exhibition was provided by the Museums Assistance Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage and Daniel Langlois. The exhibition catalogue was supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and Furthermore... the publication program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. The Equitable Gallery is sponsored by the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States.

“The enormous physical and social changes in North American cities over the course of this century have been encompassed in Viewing Olmsted,” according to Phyllis Lambert, Director of the CCA, “not overtly, but in the way the photographers have experienced Olmsted's landscapes. We invited these artists to work over time on all the sites so they might become intimately familiar with the language of Olmsted and allow the parks to speak to them.”

The artists had the opportunity to visit the sites many times, returning to photograph them in different seasons, or sometimes in the same season several years later. Olmsted scholar Cynthia Zaitzevsky selected 74 representative sites for the project and provided documentation to the photographers about each. Out of the resulting work, the CCA chose 940 photographs to become part of a permanent archive. Viewing Olmsted represents the public's first opportunity to see a wide-ranging selection of these images.

“The photographers whose work is gathered here have given us different places than those that Olmsted made,” writes John Szarkowski, Director Emeritus of the Department of Photography of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; “but their aim was in a sense perhaps similar to his; both he and they have given us places that we complete by entering into them - in the first case physically, and in the second, imaginatively.... One might say that Robert Burley sees the parks as artifacts, and that Geoffrey James sees them as ancient farms in decline, and that Lee Friedlander sees them as jungles dreaming of civilization.”

The photographers brought sharply different approaches to the commission. Lee Friedlander (U.S.A., born 1934), working in black and white, used a Leica at first, but changed to a 2¼” square Hasselblad, and a panoramic camera. Geoffrey James (U.K., born 1942) also worked in black and white, using a panoramic camera and later an 8” x 10” view camera. Robert Burley (Canada, born 1957) created chromogenic color prints, using a 4” x 5” view camera. The photographers' personal visions and their ideas about Olmsted were equally distinct, evolving over the course of the commission.

In its size and complexity, CCA's Olmsted commission belongs to a tradition that includes such great photographic projects as the 1851 Mission héliographique, which documented architecture throughout France. “The American photographers of Olmsted's time did not have the government as a patron or Chartres cathedral as a subject,” Phyllis Lambert notes. “Instead, they had the sponsorship of the railroads and the dramatic vistas of the West. Our commission harks back in a way to those 19th-century images of the American landscape, but with an important difference. Olmsted's landscapes are made ones and are for the most part urban. They bring a quintessentially American conception of nature into the heart of the city.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by the CCA and distributed by MIT Press, featuring a prologue by Phyllis Lambert; essays by Paolo Costantini, Curator of the CCA Photographs Collection, and John Szarkowski; and 64 photographs from the exhibition. The book also includes interviews with the three photographers and an appendix listing the sites that were photographed.

Established in 1979 in Montréal, the Canadian Centre for Architecture is the only institution of its kind in North America: an independent study center and museum dedicated to furthering the understanding of architecture and to helping establish architecture as a public concern. The CCA organizes exhibitions and public programs; maintains an extensive research collection of drawings, prints, books, photographs, and archival material; publishes books and catalogues; and provides a setting for advanced study in architecture and architectural history. With Viewing Olmsted, the CCA continues its series “The American Century,” a multi-year program of exhibitions casting a fresh eye on critical aspects of modern America's architectural culture - its promises and disappointments, its roots and offshoots, its unparalleled impact.

The Equitable Gallery presents works from all fields of the visual arts, including exhibitions originating outside of New York that would not otherwise have a presence in the city, as well as works from New York collections that would benefit from preservation and public presentation.