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Their work shows that far from an unpeopled wilderness, the Northwest Pacific Coast was a managed and stewarded place for thousands of years.

Accounts of popular “vanlifers,” as they are known, are an infinite reservoir of gorgeous, unpeopled scenery previously encountered only in desktop backgrounds: sunrise canyons, sunset oceans, high-noon highways that stretch on, carless, forever.

Shadowy cabins, abandoned pools, tree houses, lonely suburban homes and vacant parked cars with doors ajar: Michael Raedecker’s unpeopled landscapes glow in eerie monochromes in his current exhibition, “Now.”

What these dark, unpeopled photographs visualize, art historian Steven Nelson writes in the catalogue, is “the removal of the black body from the white gaze.”

At high noon, it took my eyes a minute to adjust to how unpeopled the market was, by pre-pandemic standards.