ATLANTA, GA.- Over the last 50 years, photographer Mimi Plumb has expertly and poignantly captured the evolution of the Western U.S. landscape and the lives of those within it. In her first solo museum exhibition, “Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb” (Feb. 6-May 10, 2026), the High Museum of Art presents three of her major bodies of work, featuring more than 100 photographs, including 26 recent acquisitions, captured in and around San Francisco and across the American West. Collectively, they contemplate how changes in geopolitics, the economy and the environment have shaped the anxieties of American life from the 1970s to today. After it debuts at the High, the exhibition will travel to three more venues: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, Florida) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

Plumb began photographing as a teenager in the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek in the 1970s, a time marked by rapid land development, coupled with worldwide political and economic instability. Her early artistic life was defined by a burgeoning awareness of global warming, the AIDS epidemic, violent international conflicts and the looming threat of nuclear war. This atmosphere attuned Plumb to the evidence of such forces around her, including the built environment and the ways people carried themselves and related to one another — concerns that are evident in her early work and continue to abide in her photographs today. Foregrounding the presence of people, her images convey a great degree of pathos and even notes of humorous absurdity.

“Plumb’s photos capture a place in time – often, one fraught with personal, cultural and environmental upheaval. At a time when many see and feel similar changes occurring around them, her work resonates strongly,” said the High’s Director Rand Suffolk. “As a consequence, her photographs offer many entry points for today’s visitors, and we look forward to sharing them with Atlanta and other audiences around the country through the exhibition’s tour.”

In Plumb’s first major body of work, “The White Sky” (1972-1978), she explores the youthful ennui common to American suburbs. She made the photographs in Walnut Creek and other communities around San Francisco in her late teens and early twenties. Because she was just a few years older than her subjects, her photographs of teenagers running wild through the uniform suburban architecture show an empathy for their angst and boredom. She skillfully renders the intense, unyielding California light to amplify the psychological tension and imaginative possibility to be found by rambling through an abandoned construction site or junkyard at the edge of town.

In “Landfall” and “The Golden City” (1980s-1990s), the sense of boredom and mischief of Plumb’s earlier work gives way to unease and skepticism. She explores these sensibilities in gritty photographs of the fraying natural world and the ceaselessly expanding built environment, what she describes as “images of natural cataclysms, fires, manmade scars and refuse.” Weaponry and staged military exercises are recurring subjects, reflecting the ever-present influence of the Cold War in popular culture at the time. More than in any of her other work, people are a key focus of Plumb’s images from this period: She regularly photographed strangers and friends in “odd and disquieting poses,” to reflect, as she put it, “the discomfort I saw in myself and in my community.” Her many photographs capturing people from behind invite the viewer to place themselves in the pictures.

The urgency of Plumb’s pictures from the 1970s and 1980s continues to resonate decades later in “The Reservoir,” her current body of work. Since 2020, she has been photographing around Folsom Lake, a reservoir near Sacramento that was experiencing a 23-year mega drought with extremely low water level and proximity to numerous forest fires. Weaving together images of the dry lake bed and people seeking recreational respite from the heat, these new photographs are an ongoing exploration of how droughts, climate change and persistent anxiety collectively affect life in the Western United States. In what she describes as the “relentless aridity” of the lake bed, Plumb finds a corollary for the human psyche as it grapples with chronic precarity.

“Mimi Plumb is a singular artist who has endeavored to give shape to the layered and disorienting experience of contemporary life through her evocatively charged photographs,” said the High’s Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography Gregory Harris. “While she has been a mainstay of the Bay Area photography community since the 1970s, her astonishing work has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves, and I hope this exhibition will underscore the originality of her photographs and her important contributions to the history of photography.”

“Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb” is presented in the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Gallery for Photography on the Lower Level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion.