Peter Vanderwarker

Although he’s known primarily as a photographer of architecture, Vanderwarker is equally at home photographing the natural world. In Sublimation, his 2017 solo show at Gallery NAGA, Vanderwarker explored the continuous transformation of water from solid to liquid to gas in a series of stunning color photographs he captured while visiting Yellowstone National Park.

Peter Vanderwarker both searches for and captures a sense of unsteadiness within the distinctly different worlds of built environments and the natural landscape. Interventions, Vanderwarker’s 2014 solo show at Gallery NAGA, contained a series of black and white photographs of “Lost Boston”; a term he has given to the spaces and structures that no longer exist. He explains, "All cities grow and change - beautiful things are lost all the time. The essential paradox is that by freezing a place in time, you risk killing it."

Vanderwarker’s color photographs are a study of incongruity, the familiar becoming surprising. A mirage-like city scapes shimmers in the windows of a towering skyscraper in Hancock #4288. Abstract and textured, a thicket of trees create remarkable depth within their 2D rendering in Twisp, WA.

Peter Vanderwarker was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University in 1997 and earned a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of California Berkeley. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation and is the author of three books about architecture in Boston. His photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Addison Gallery of American Art. In 2009 the Boston Athenaeum presented Vanderwarker's Pantheon: Minds and Matter in Boston, an exhibition of portraits of iconic buildings and pivotal people.

“When the image of a landscape is translated into a photograph, something unique happens. A realm of possible meaning emerges; meanings that can transcend the image of the landscape itself. The act of decoding what we see can be a profound learning experience and a creative act itself.”
- Peter Vanderwarker