Fall Line

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Fall Line, an exhibition of new work by Victoria Sambunaris that continues her ongoing examination of the intersection of human civilization and nature in the American West. Featuring seven large-scale photographs taken over several years with a large format, five-by-seven wooden field camera, this exhibition investigates the complex topography of waterflows, their cultural significance and their current precarity, particularly that of the vast Colorado River system. Fall Line builds upon Sambunaris’ 2023 exhibition High and Dry, which explored the California desert from Lake Mead in Nevada to the All-American Canal, a marvel of engineering that delivers water to California’s Imperial Valley. Subsequently, on multiple trips made between 2023-2025, Sambunaris followed the route of the Colorado River, traveling by car from northeast Colorado down to the Mexican border of California and Arizona. Sambunaris made images not only of the river and but also of the monumental terrains shaped by its presence and its absence. Captivated by the primordial landscapes that now serve as sites for agriculture, industry and recreation, and inspired by the intrepid 19th-century photographers whose historic work helped to form an earlier understanding of the region, Sambunaris has embarked on extended, solitary road trips each year since 1999, creating her own unique form of cultural landscape photography, which details the ever-changing ways humans inhabit the landscape. The awesome perspectives in her photographs—each of which she achieves with a restrained and methodical approach, traversing the terrain on foot and waiting sometimes hours for the precise light to appear—are troubled by the subtle traces of powerlines, housing developments, railways and people themselves, often seen in microscopic detail in contrast to the vast landscape. Though nature remains sublime in Sambunaris’ work, it is ever tempered by civilization’s steady march. As water depletion continues to impact the Colorado River and in turn shape the broader region, Sambunaris’ photographs remind us of the urgency of this crisis while also vividly depicting the abiding beauty of the landscape, showing us what can still be lost. Sambunaris’ work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States including National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe. Her work can be seen in numerous collections throughout the United States, including those of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Sambunaris has received numerous awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); Charles Red Fellowship in Western American Studies, Brigham Young University (2015); Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship (2010); and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2010).