I’d never seen Randlett’s work before reading this and it taught me totally off-guard. through her use of black and white (and a bunch of other photographic techniques that I’m too uneducated to recognize) she takes busy or deep spaces and reduces them to a single plane. the effect differs depending on the subject matter: water and sky and shore blend together into heavenly abstraction, the snowflakes in a blizzard becomes dashes of a pencil sketch made by an expert artist, light lays on top of water and sand like a pigment, black waves become the metal-rich sand of a distant and vulcan planet. water (in the forms of fog, rain, lakes, oceans, waterfalls, snow) and light are her most common materials, but several standouts in this collection, like one of sheep walking through the tall grass in the sun, demonstrate that Randlett was a master at working with different natural mediums and tones.

her work reminds me, positively, of sumi-e, which is a style that I deeply love but know very little about. but instead of blacks on a white background, Randlett’s work often seems to be construed in a few sprays of white on a black and gray space. it evokes minimalism, but it is not quite minimalist. there’s something very dense and american about it, which is surprisingly not a bad thing.

I skimmed the words in the book and they were boring. after a few photographs Randlett quickly took the place of my favorite landscape photographer. excellent collection.