NEW YORK, NY.- With great sadness, Janet Borden, Inc. announces the death of photographer John Pfahl on April 15 in Buffalo, New York. A great artist and educator, whose Altered Landscape photographs were profoundly influential, he will be missed as our longstanding artist and good friend. We send our condolences to his wife Bonnie Gordon, and to his extended family and students and friends.

In John Pfahl’s first major body of work, the renowned series Altered Landscapes, the artist used everyday materials such as string and tape to create three-dimensional disruptions in the landscape that looked two-dimensional in the photograph. By inserting patently false lines, and incursions into sometimes banal, often picturesque landscapes, Pfahl pointed out and played up the photographer’s authority over the scene. His point has been that the photograph is a creation, whether altered or not. The importance of this self-consciousness in the mid-1970s is hard to overemphasize.

In later series, Pfahl presented images that were not altered but were no less compelling, such as views from picture windows, waterfalls, and the everchanging landscape of the great Niagara Falls. His lyrical photographs of power stations, nuclear and otherwise, were prescient. He photographed smoke emanating from industrial smokestacks, that again seduced with their beauty while offering a caution as to their content.

Four decades after Altered Landscapes, Pfahl's work continued to elucidate the intricacy of photographic practices. He was a master of the photographic landscape’s complexity and wit.

John Pfahl was born in New York on 17 February 1939. He was raised in Wanaque, New Jersey.

He received both his BFA and his MA from Syracuse University. An acclaimed professor of photography, Pfahl was a full Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and has for many years been a Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Pfahl's major retrospective, A Distanced Land: The Photographs of John Pfahl was organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1990 and toured to Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Niagara University that same year. His work is included in all major collections of photography, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, and more. Pfahl was an early adapter of new digital photographic procedures both in printing and for digitizing his negatives.