Courtesy Taubman Museum of Art

Sarah Pickering, "Landmine, 2005"

Courtesy Taubman Museum of Art

Andrew Moore, "Red House-White Sea"

An exploding land mine. A graffiti artist on a New York City rooftop. A patch of dirty wall -- with thumbtacks. Piles of discarded cellphones and cigarette butts.

The landscape has come a very long way since artists set up their easels in the Hudson River Valley or the Rocky Mountains to paint beautiful pictures of nature more than a century ago.

But then, America has changed as well. For that, we have ourselves partly to blame.

As the catalog to "Rethinking Landscape: Photography from the Collection of Allen Thomas, Jr." points out: "Our collective impact on the landscape has increasingly become more destructive than regenerative. We, in essence, have modeled landscape in our own image."

Drawn from the extensive photography collection of Thomas, a Wilson, N.C., collector, "Rethinking Landscape" was curated by David Brown, deputy director of art at the Taubman Museum of Art, and Dennis Weller. Weller, the curator of Northern European Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, wrote the catalog essay quoted above.

The 20-plus images in the exhibit show a restless planet. Vast cities span the horizon like an out-of-control fungus; things blow up; smoke billows from dozens of smokestacks.

One poignant image by Sze Tsung Leong just shows a California cul-de-sac, recently carved out of the earth and waiting for its cookie-cutter homes. You can see the houses in the background, in their identical rows.

There are hopeful images, too, and uncrowded scenes, and glimpses of unsullied nature. Taj Forer's 2006 "Young Farmer, Fair Oaks, California" shows a shirtless, bearded young man with a hoe, who could have been plucked from a communal farm of the 1960s or '70s, if his pants were 6 inches higher. Sarah Anne Johnson's "Tree Planting" of 2002 to 2005 blends documentary and fantasy to show us scenes of regeneration instead of conspicuous consumption.

Sally Mann's two untitled prints from 1998, made with an old-style camera and glass plate negatives, are steeped in Southern history. And Bill Henson's Australian sunset is simply beautiful, in a nearly spiritual way that many a 19th century landscape painter would have understood.

Environmentalism is a recurring theme in the exhibit -- many of these artists are telling us something -- but making a statement about the environment was not the curators' intent, Brown said.

Instead, "Rethinking Landscape" reveals new ways of looking at our world.

"They're rediscovering things that are right in front of our nose," Brown said of the 24 artists in the exhibit.

"Rethinking Landscape: Photography from the Collection of Allen G. Thomas Jr." is on exhibit through March 1 at the Taubman Museum of Art. (540) 342-5760; www.taubmanmuseum.org.