Simon Norfolk's landscape photographs combine historic attributes of view photography and landscape art with a highly charged political view that takes no prisoners. At first glance, his photograph, King Amanullah's Victory Arch, Paghman, Afghanistan, appears to be a pastoral landscape inspired by those done by Claude Lorraine in the 1650s. It's steeply raked golden light shines on the monument, ravaged by war, while the threatening sky above inspires feelings of awe.

Norfolk was, in fact, inspired by Claude Lorraine and has said that to achieve the quality of light without a painter's palette, he shot this image at 4 am, using a 19^th century wooden view camera. A prolific writer, he says that he left photojournalism because the stories he wanted to tell were complicated and required a more considered approach. The images currently up at the Bonnie Benrubi Gallery are from his exploration of the ways in which war has shaped civilization.

Left to right: King Amanullah's Victory Arch, Paghman, Afghanistan, 2003; A Slight Disturbance of the Sea, Hebrides Islands, Scotland, 2007; Storage Depot for Power Station Jiyeh, from Sand's Rock Resort, Lebanon, 2006; all by Simon Norfolk, courtesy of Bonnie Benrubi Gallery.

In his essay, Et in Arcadia Ego, Norfolk writes, "These photographs form chapters in a larger project attempting to understand how war, and the need to fight war, has formed our world: how so many of the spaces we occupy; the technologies we use; and the ways we understand ourselves, are created by military conflict." He also says "anybody interested in the effects of war quickly becomes an expert in ruins."

The extended captions he often provides have a subversive effect, offering cold facts in sharp contrast to the apparent beauty of the scene. In the case of the ceremonial arch, he tells us it was built to celebrate Afghanistan's 1919 independence from the British. The detail in Norfolk's photograph, once read, offers a study of the multi-layered effects a quarter-century of war has had on the country.

Among the six landscapes on view, one titled A Slight Disturbance of the Sea, Hebrides Islands, depicts a place of stunning beauty off the coast of Scotland. Here, the water is so deep that the UK, US and NATO operate secretive missile-testing and submarine training missions. Norfolk likens this region to "a kind of tartan Nevada, with its lack of population." He discovered that the military history of the area dates back to the suppression by the English of the Highland clans during the 18^th century, and the brutal clearance of the population from the land.

Also included are a suite of images of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Norfolk writes that this "is the largest experiment in the history of mankind, larger even than the Apollo moon missions [involving] thousands of scientists." He continues, "Indeed, the work at CERN is focused on what physicists call the Theory of Everything. There is a circular kind of meta-narrative here, where science becomes so pure and reductionist that it almost pops out of the far end and becomes theological again; recycled."

Simon Norfolk: I Met a Traveller From an Antique Land
Bonnie Benrubi Gallery, 41 East 57^th Street, 13^th Floor
September 20 - November 24, 2007
Opening reception: Thursday, September 20, 6:00 - 8:00 pm