Review: LACMA and Hauser & Wirth double down on problematic photography shows

Large-format landscape and seascape photographs by Thomas Joshua Cooper are luxuriously printed in velvety black and white. Its centerpiece is a selection from his “Atlas,” some 700 photographs that, according to the museum, together “charts the Atlantic basin from its most extreme northern, southern, eastern and western land points.” Over three decades, in other words, Cooper traveled the Western Hemisphere and photographed the Atlantic Ocean’s edges. The work is something of a cross between the critically admired, nearly abstract black-and-white photographs of the world’s oceans that Hiroshi Sugimoto began around 1980 and Ansel Adams’ hugely popular, sometimes grandiose pictures of the American West from the 1940s and after. In an eyebrow-raising addendum, LACMA’s director also commissioned a group of 19 photographs of the California coast and organized a concurrent exhibition of them at Hauser & Wirth gallery, where the work is for sale. They are also major donors to artist James Turrell’s “Roden Crater” project in an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert, where Govan is president of the Skystone Foundation that oversees the project and raises funds for it.