Landscape appeals to us, as music does to those who have no sense for musical form.

—George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty1

Shut your eyes and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.

—Plotinus, The Enneads2

Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970 was a groundbreaking, sweeping, and haunting achievement. If the title implies a relatively constrained historiographic focus, that’s because all but eight of the photographs on view were created between 1970 and the present day. And yet, the looming legacy of war (and, more broadly, what President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed the “military-industrial complex”) upon the terrain and collective psyche of America, frames the photographs within a historical arc reaching back to the country’s founding. Included among the eight black-and-white images in the exhibition that pre-date 1970 were the following: four post–Civil War battlefield landscapes, captured...

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