Altered Landscapes Photo Exhibit By CU-Boulder Prof Opens At NCAR

A photography exhibit by a University of Colorado at Boulder professor featuring landscapes altered by human construction in the West will be on public display through the month of April at Boulder's National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Titled "The House, the Road, and the Valley," the exhibit was created to show how modern culture has changed the landscape in both harmonious and discordant ways, said Tad Pfeffer, associate director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. The show contains 21 photos of the changing West, many of them on Colorado's Front Range.

"As humans, we have great power to change the landscape around us," said Pfeffer, a CU-Boulder glaciologist who conducts research in Canada and Alaska. "The intent of the exhibit is to show people how the environment we build around us reflects how we view ourselves in relationship to the natural environment, and the ways in which we interact and change it."

The show is part of the 2005 CU Special Year of Art and Mathematics, which aims to enhance the understanding of the relationship between art and math. Funded by an $18,000 Colorado Council on the Arts grant, the project will include a number of traveling visual arts exhibits, dance and music concerts in Colorado.

Pfeffer, also an associate professor in CU-Boulder's civil, environmental and architectural engineering department, said the landscape exhibit is the first step in a larger project to photograph communities and their human-altered environments in the circumpolar Arctic.

For more information on Pfeffer's exhibit, visit the Web site at: http://tintin.colorado.edu/Landscapes.