Ithaca College

The Photography Department at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently acquired four photographs from Professor Ron Jude's Other Nature project.

The Photography Department at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently acquired four photographs from CPMA Professor Ron Jude's Other Nature landscape project. In addition to entering SFMOMA's prestigious collection, the photographs will be exhibited in a survey of contemporary landscape photography in 2012-13.

Other Nature adds an intimate, diaristic strain to Ron Jude's line of existential photographic inquiry, combining two separate sets of large format color photographs (made between 2001 and 2008) to create a subtle and uncanny investigation of the "slippery threshold of narrative" in still images. Drawing on the concerns of the New Topographics photographers, Jude's accounts of anonymous motel rooms and the stranger regions of the American landscape could, on first glance, be mistaken for an ecological critique. But as the exterior and interior details of these environments (floral patterns, wood grain, sunlight) begin to activate, interrupt and inform each other, the book shifts into a more abstract, subjective register, provoking reflections on photography, the visible world and things hovering just outside our physical perception.

Other Nature was published in book form by The Ice Plant in 2008. 

Professor Jude was interviewed about Other Nature in Ahorn Magazine in late 2009.