Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb

A preeminent artist of her generation, Mimi Plumb has photographed the human-altered landscape for five decades to conjure the enduring issues of our day. Blazing Light, the artist’s first museum exhibition, brings together her three most important bodies of work that collectively contemplate the anxieties of contemporary American culture: the combined effects of climate change, unbridled capitalism, and ceaseless military conflict. As a teenager in the 1970s, Plumb began photographing during a time of rapid land development coupled with global political and economic instability. Her early artistic life was defined by a burgeoning awareness of global warming and the looming threats posed by the Cold War. This atmosphere attuned her to the evidence of such forces in the land, the built environment, and the ways people carry themselves and relate to one another—concerns that continue to abide in her work.

Working in and around San Francisco, Plumb photographs the grand yet fragile beauty of the American West and the peculiarities of urban life with a distinctively raw visual approach. She skillfully renders California’s notoriously intense sunlight in gritty black-and-white images to amplify the psychological tension and imaginative possibilities that define turbulent times. The White Sky (1972–78) captures the final glimmers of innocence and optimism during the years following World War II, as cracks in the façade of the American Dream began to widen. Landfall and The Golden City (1984–2020) present a society descending into chaos as an ambiguous disaster looms. The Reservoir (2021–25) conveys a stark and desolate world seemingly in the aftermath of a powerful, undefined apocalypse. Across these bodies of work, Plumb mournfully charts how persistent unease continues to manifest from the dark realms of imagination into pressing realities.

Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb was organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. At the Johnson Museum, its presentation was organized by Molly Kalkstein, the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography, and supported by Adelson Family Exhibition Fund and the Jan Abrams Exhibition Endowment.

About the Artist

Based in Berkeley, California, Mimi Plumb (American, born 1953) has photographed the human-altered landscape of California and the Western United States with an eye toward the effects of climate change, unbridled capitalism, and looming military conflict since the 1970s. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, Stanford University, and San Jose State University. Plumb has published six widely acclaimed monographs: Landfall (TBW, 2018); The White Sky (Stanley/Barker, 2020); The Golden City (Stanley/Barker, 2021); Megalith-Still (Stanley/Barker, 2023); Lookout on Highway 74 (Nazraeli, 2025); and The Reservoir (Nazraeli, 2025). She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, and a 1989/1990 California Arts Council Individual Artists Fellow. Plumb’s photographs have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Light Work in Syracuse; the Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose, and Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. Her work is held in numerous public collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Collection Deutsche Börse, MFA Boston, Yale University Art Gallery, and the High Museum of Art.