Victoria Sambunaris

For the past 12 years, photographer Victoria Sambunaris has traveled extensively by car exploring the vast transformation of the American landscape. Throughout the years, her work has led her to industrial, political and geological significant areas of the country including Alaska’s North Slope, the Yellowstone hotspot, the Snake River Plain, and the US-Mexican border. Sambunaris has stated, "My process begins with an unmitigated curiosity inspired by research into industry, culture, history, anthropology, geology and ecology. My motivation to traverse the American landscape is the attempt to reveal the layers of a place. I resist approaching a landscape strictly as an expanse of scenery but view it as an anomaly with an abundance of information to be discovered." 

 Victoria Sambunaris received her MFA from Yale University in 1999.  Each year, she structures her life around a photographic journey crossing the American landscape. Her most recent project has been following the US/Mexican border photographing the intersection of geology, politics and culture along the volatile international boundary. She is a recipient of the 2010 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer's Fellowship and the 2010 Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In 2011, a twelve-year survey of her work was exhibited at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York and will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago in January 2013. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Lannan Foundation. 

Courtesy of Tops Gallery.