Press Kit

Downstream: Colorado River Photographs of Karen Halverson

May 30–Sept. 28, 2009
Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, Susan and Stephen Chandler Wing

An accomplished landscape photographer who has spent more than 20 years exploring the American West, Karen Halverson (b. 1941) awoke one morning in 1994 with the conviction that she needed to photograph the Colorado River. Her epiphany led to a two-year encounter with the vast and often breathtaking terrain along the river’s serpentine route. Twenty-four works from Halverson’s Downstream series will be presented along with select historic images from The Huntington’s extensive collection of photographs. Halverson’s large-format color work references a 19th-century era of exploration when photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan, John K. Hillers, William H. Bell, and others fanned across the West making large-format pictures for scientific and commercial purposes. Beyond the debt Halverson’s work owes to these photographic pioneers, her images comment on present-day worries bearing down on an ancient watershed altered by population growth, drought, and other environmental concerns. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with an introduction by Halverson and a foreword by William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (University of California Press, 2008).

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