The headline out of Scarlet and Black is simple: photographer Johnnie Chatman examines American landscapes. That single line carries more weight than it lets on. Landscape photography in the United States arrives carrying baggage — a canon built largely by white male photographers working westward, framing wilderness as empty, unpeopled, and there for the taking. When a contemporary photographer steps into that tradition, the first question isn't technical. It's positional. Where does he stand, and what does that change for the genre?

Chatman's subject, as reported, is the American landscape itself. Not a region, not a single park, but the broad national terrain that photographers have been redefining since the 19th century. That choice puts him in direct conversation with the field's institutional history. Think of the lineage every photography student learns: survey photographers documenting territory for the government, then the modernists who turned that documentation into monumental art. An African American photographer working this ground does not simply extend the lineage. He interrupts it.

Why does the interruption matter? Because the classic American landscape image has always contained a silence. Who lived there. Who was removed. Whose labor built what stands in the frame. A photographer who examines the landscape — rather than merely celebrates it — invites those questions back into the picture.

What does an 'examination' of landscape look like?

The source doesn't describe individual images, so we won't invent them. But the word choice matters. Chatman examines. He doesn't capture, doesn't showcase, doesn't survey. Examination implies scrutiny, a critical stance toward what the land contains and what it conceals. In current photographic practice, that stance usually means several things:

• Frames that include evidence of human presence rather than erasing it
• Attention to places history has marked — through settlement, extraction, or displacement
• A self-aware position behind the camera, acknowledging that who photographs shapes what gets seen

Any or all of these may be at work. The reporting confirms the territory, not the method. Still, the framing follows a recognizable path in contemporary photography, where artists of color have spent the past decade and more reclaiming landscape as a subject of inquiry rather than reverence.

That path has institutional backing. Museums and journals — Aperture among them — have published and exhibited a generation of photographers interrogating land, race, and memory together. The American West, the rural South, the suburban fringe: all have been re-photographed with questions the earlier canon never asked. Chatman's project sits inside that conversation, whether as continuation or as challenge.

Why the campus paper audience matters

Scarlet and Black is a student outlet, and that's telling. Campus coverage often breaks emerging-artist stories before the national press notices. A student paper profiling a photographer examining American landscapes signals a project with enough presence — an exhibition, a talk, a body of work — to warrant coverage in its community. That's how these stories usually start. The wider circuit, from regional galleries to the photography press, tends to follow.

What does this change for the viewer?

Practically, it's a prompt. If you know the landscape canon — the survey images, the wilderness epics — look at any new American landscape work and ask what it does differently. Who's in the frame. What's built on the land. Whether the picture accepts the scenery or interrogates it. Those questions turn passive looking into reading, and photographers like Chatman, whose stated project is examination, are counting on readers who ask them.

The craft follows the questions. Every photographer working this terrain decides what to include at the edges, how much sky, how much ruin, how much grass. Those aren't aesthetic preferences. They're arguments.

Where this goes next

The source gives a headline, and headlines are beginnings. If Chatman's examination of American landscapes reaches exhibition or publication, expect the photography press to pick up the thread — and expect the work to be measured against the canon it critiques. Watch for venue announcements and series titles in the coming months. That's the honest signal of where a project this ambitious lands.