NEW YORK, NY.- The 41 works in the exhibition The Poetics of Place: Contemporary Photographs from The Met Collection surveys the diverse ways in which contemporary artists have photographed landscape and the built world over the last half century. It is on view December 12, 2016, through June 25, 2017, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition opens with works from the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists working in America and Europe, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Dan Graham, and Donald Judd, who brought the lessons of Minimal and Conceptual art to bear on views of nature, both raw and acculturated. Also included are a series of unique Polaroid prints from the mid-1970s made by Walker Evans in and around Hale County, Alabama, nearly 40 years following his classic images of sharecroppers during the Great Depression.

Images from the 1980s and 1990s attest to a swing away from the de-skilling associated with radical '60s art-making and toward a new interest in technically assured large-scale prints that nevertheless incorporated earlier lessons from Land Art, Conceptualism, and other postwar avant-garde movements. This section features works by Lothar Baumgarten, Sally Mann, An-My Lê,Toshio Shibata, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.

The exhibition concludes with recently made works by artists including Matthew Brandt, Roe Ethridge, Sarah Anne Johnson, and Wolfgang Staehle—whose mesmerizing piece Eastpoint (September 15, 2004) (2004-6) projects a 24-hour cycle of over 8,000 still images synchronized to real time of the same Hudson River that inspired such American painters as Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church.

The Poetics of Place: Contemporary Photographs from The Met Collection is organized by Doug Eklund, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.