Clifford Ross: Hurricane LXVIII
In 2016, photographer Clifford Ross came to the Portland Museum of Art to deliver the Photo Fund lecture, on the occasion of our purchase of his Hurricane LXVIII, a large-scale photograph that depicts, in elegant form and astonishing detail, a hurricane-driven wave breaking off the coast of Long Island.
Ross made the image in 2009 as part of a series of images of such dramatic waves in that location, and this photograph appealed to me both because of its precision (if you get up close you’ll swear you can see individual droplets hovering midair before the curtain of water formed by the breaking wave) and of its resonance with other images of waves in the PMA collection, including paintings by artists as disparate as Gustave Courbet, Winslow Homer, and Alex Katz.
Clifford Ross (United States, born 1952), Hurricane LXVIII, 2009, inkjet print, 48 x 82 inches. Museum purchase with support from the Irving B. Ellis Fund, the Photography Fund, the Contemporary Art Fund, and the Harold P. and Mildred A. Nelson Art Purchase Endowment Fund, 2016.9
As we sat in that darkened auditorium for Ross’ lecture and learned first-hand about the extraordinary lengths Ross went to in order to make these mesmerizing photographs, we were invited to recall, and even experience afresh, the profound power and beauty of the natural world. At this moment of tremendous uncertainty about how best to care for the world around us—and particularly for the oceans, which are much more fragile in the face of widespread environmental destruction than they seem—Ross’s work can reconnect us with experiences of awestruck wonder at this landscape we hold most dear. It was immediately clear to me in 2016, and even more so now, that Ross’s work could help us focus our attention on essential questions of art-making and the nature of representation, but it could also be a powerful goad to understanding the stakes of climate change.
Shortly after that 2016 lecture, we approached Ross and his studio about working with our team the PMA on an exhibition that would allow us to share our rich experience of his work in an exhibition, which we had planned to open this October. (Now, as a result of another powerful force, the coronavirus pandemic, we have delayed Ross’ exhibition to 2021.) I was particularly keen to share several key themes that have helped me understand his work and its place in the story of American photography in the 21st century. The first theme expresses the twin poles of wonder and fidelity—powerful concepts long intertwined with the history and medium of photography. The second is the extraordinary art history that Ross’ work draws on—including, of course, Homer and Courbet. The third is the keen insight that Ross’ relentless and iterative artistic vision offers into human creativity in general. His art is characterized by steady inventiveness and constant iteration; neither a documentarian nor a portraitist, Ross has a strong drive to explore the expressive possibilities of his chosen motifs through printing in existing or newly created media and working at different scales. The resulting exhibition, Clifford Ross: Sightlines, will bring, I hope, these themes together through his technically and conceptually complex work, not only in photography, but also in film and computer-generated imagery.
Hovering over and around all of these other themes is the recurrent image of the ocean churning: it is spectacularly beautiful, powerful, and in distress as climate change wreaks havoc on the weather systems of this planet. As we in southern and midcoast Maine experienced the howling winds this week as Tropical Storm Isaís churned up the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, Ross emailed to tell me that his own home was under tornado watch, a rarity in the New York area. I’ve heard the voices of weather forecasters all week predicting a rough season for hurricanes in 2020 (of course, what hasn’t been rough this year?), and my mind has returned again to the urgency of the image of the wave. Far from being an image of timeless beauty—as the clichés might have it—the hurricane waves are instead reminders that we live in a world in which sometimes the terrible beauty of a photograph is our most accessible sign of the blunt power we humans exercise over our precious planet.
- Jessica May, former Deputy Director and Robert and Elizabeth Nanovic Chief Curator