Artist Peter de Lory has been photographing the American landscape for over 50 years, in works both poetic and austere, constructing metaphors that reflect meaning drawn from the lands around us back to the viewer. Often this work takes place in locations populated by humans, but not of them; wilderness in that sense. Sometimes it happens in lands shaped by our hands directly, frequently softened by time and past events. If wilderness implies the land existing without humans, landscape certainly implies the presence of the human, in fact the very act of viewing objectifies the wild world and appropriates it for our use and pleasure or consideration making it conform to our expectations.
Published in a time of social isolation, this body of work is a haunting aside to his normal process - suddenly the urgency of the concrete human presence comes forth from the archives of his travels. As a photographer, de Lory wanders alone, yet often finds himself standing in the presence of others, some looking the same way as he (although one does not always know what they see), others glimpsed caught up in more personal actions or thoughts as they experience the world around them.
Over years of photographing de Lory has randomly turned his camera from his formal subjects to the fellow walkers or hikers beside him, catching random glimpses of people interacting with the same landscape as himself. In this collection of images, he turns from the subject of our effects on the land towards a noting of the land’s effects on us. A pointing towards others encountering the same place in which he stands with his camera if you will, emphasizing the connection and meaning drawn from sharing others’ points of view, unifying experience seen transformed into singular expression.