Route 127 near Death Valley National Monument, California

The landscape of the American West has been a favorite subject of photographers since the invention of the medium. Len Jenshel fell under the spell of the western landscape's great expanse, having first discovered the region as a young child. He returned as an adult to document - with irony and a sense of humor - the impact of tourism and the automobile on the country's national parks. He had long admired the hallucinatory detail and unpeopled views of his nineteenth-century predecessors, but his large-scale color photographs also include signs of man's encroachment on even our most protected wilderness spaces. Here, for example, Jenshel captures a wry panoramic view of Death Valley complete with a topsy-turvy reflection of his lunch in his car's windshield.