They were sitting on expansive white risers and looking out at vast white gallery walls across the spacious room, freshly hung with six Koudelka photographs of industrialized landscapes. The frames were so broad, and the images of mines, walls, oil fields, quarries, and factories had such vivid depth, that looking at them seemed akin to gazing through windows at distant lands.
Koudelka had made these pictures between 1997 and 2010, using a medium-format panoramic camera in and around Leipzig, Turin, Baku, Messinghausen, Alabama, and the West Bank. His ostensible subject was the human altering and distorting of natural settings. But Koudelka had looked intently enough at pitted earth, scarred concrete, and polluted water to find lines, shapes, shades, and shadows in gorgeous combinations. Koudelka, one feels, could locate beauty anywhere. The show is titled “Industry,” and the word defines not just the subject matter but the artis