The Italian photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni has died, aged 77. The photographer, born in Rome in 1941, is best known for having captured some of the most ubiquitous images of Land Art from the 1970s onward, including remarkable aerial views of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in Utah that he shot from a helicopter.

Gorgoni came to the US in 1968 to produce a photographic essay. His stay was intended to last just a few months, but, after a chance encounter with Robert Rauschenberg in 1969, Gorgoni spent the better part of the next 50 years in the United States floating in circles that included Richard Serra, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, Walter de Maria, Bruce Nauman and other artists.