Photography

Fall 2022: Group Shows in CA and MN

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California

The Coachella Valley, like Santa Fe, is an artists’ mecca. The nine municipalities in the Valley are home to 370,000 permanent residents and this swells by another 100,000-200,000 during the “season,” the winter months that attract snow birds. There are numerous creative arts centers, collections of studios, and galleries across the valley, extending from Palm Springs to Coachella. Art walks, gallery openings, studio tours abound and I was pleased to be able to participate in two exhibitions happening in October and November this year.

The CREATE Center for the Arts in Palm Desert hosted an 8 week community show of mixed media work by its members as well as an invited group of artists to which I belong. These two old favorites of mine were hung.

Saguaro
Sunnylands I

The second show, all photographers, was by invitation from the Old Town Artisan Studios in La Quinta. It was called In Focus and lasted only a couple of weeks in October. Here’s what I submitted.

Bunker Hill

Zabriskie Point Sunset on the left and, on the right, A Proper Perspective.

Minnesota

The Praxis Gallery in Minneapolis has continuously changing international photography exhibitions. These shows are juried and cover a wide range of themes. I seem to do best with my black and white images and was happy to be included in the latest Black and White exhibition. The image juried in is below.

Manly Beacon (Death Valley National Park)

A Note About My Books

On the right panel, at the top, you see a block about books of my photographs that I have published over the years. The image shows three early books published using Blurb software and I have added three more to that collection: Monkey Business: Wildlife Sightings on the Osa Peninsula, Superbloom 2019, and The Big Picture: Panoramas. These are all still available from Blurb but the four other books I’ve published, using Zno software, are no longer available. It seems that Zno has updated their software and no longer is willing to archive books made with the old software.

I chose Zno at the time, 2015, because they were the only one offering the lay flat option, the feature that allows for a image to go across two pages without the distortion of the center fold. Since then, other publishers, including Blurb, offer this option. There may be other advantages to Zno but given my recent experience with them I’ll stick with Blurb for future books. I’m sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused.

Summer 2022: A Couple of Upcoming Shows

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Rocks and Ruins at the Vista Grande Public Library, September, 2022

Reception: Friday, September 9, 3:30 – 5:00 pm

Bisti Wings

In a recent Pasatiempo article Santa Fe photographer Alex Traube says “I couldn’t help photograph that rock…and start doing things with it and become enchanted. I surrender to that enchantment.” I too cannot help photographing rocks and, as it happens, ruins. I am drawn to them: a single pebble on a beach, a fat boulder in a sea of pebbles, a collapsed schoolhouse, an abandoned barn. Some rock formations are so fantastic everyone would want to photograph them. The scant but alluring remains of ancient indigenous settlements (such as Hovenweep, pictured above) have attracted photographers since cameras were invented.

Rocks and ruins are part of the landscape and, in this part of the country, ubiquitous. Hundreds of ghost towns, both ancient and relatively modern, dot New Mexico’s map. The land is rife with long extinct volcanic cones which spewed boulders across its surface. The result in both cases is a compelling geometry of light, lines, textures and shadows.

Sentinels

Rocks and ruins both contrast and complement each other. Rocks are solid, often immovable, randomly placed. They suggest permanence, stasis. Ruins are transitory, fragile looking, placed initially with purpose. Both have stories to tell: rocks of the earth’s history, ruins of human intentions. Both evoke questions: how were these solid things that look like peanut butter created? why were these ruins abandoned? The most ancient, enduring ruins were made of stone.

All of that and alliteration too.

El Gancho

El Gancho is a local (104 Old Las Vegas Hwy in Santa Fe) fitness center with tons of wall space they like to have covered with art. A friend was invited to hang her photographs for the month of August but found the space overwhelming and invited a couple of other photographers, to join her. Here’s a poster I made to introduce us to the patrons.

I plan to hang some old favorites:

and there is some wall space just opposite the child care center that I think will be perfect for those Costa Rica monkey pictures for which I promised to make a new gallery (and that may still happen..):

The El Gancho show will be up from August 1 through August 30, 2022.

Reception Cancelled for Panorama Exhibit

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Owing to a snafu with the original reception date and given the current surges of COVID cases, new and breakthrough, I decided to cancel the reception for this exhibit. No sense in exposing myself and others unnecessarily. Do stop by the library if you are in the area in September. I just hung the show today and it looks quite nice. You’ll find a number of the hanging images here and below are a some that are newer.

  • Bella Toscana, Italy
  • Rainy Day in Yellowstone, WY
  • San Juan Mountains, CO
  • St. Augustine, FL
  • Sukhothai, Thailand
  • Ubehebe Crater, Death Valley
Font’s Point, Anza Borrego Desert State Park

A Non Virtual Show 🤞

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Our local library has resumed on site art exhibitions and I will be the featured artist for this September (provided the delta variant doesn’t close us down again).. Here’s one of the posters I’ve created to publicize the show. Do stop by if you’re in the area: Vista Grange Public Library, 14 Avenida Torreon, Santa Fe, NM 87505. Reception Saturday, Sept. 4, 1-3 pm.

Praxis Does it Again!

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Praxis Gallery in Minneapolis recently accepted one of my images for their up coming show, the invitation for which is below.

The show runs through July 3, 2021 and will be accessible online after June 19th. Here’s the image picked by the juror for inclusion.

Ocotillo Moon

There are a large number of splendid monochrome photos in the exhibition that can be enjoyed online. I will send the link when it becomes available but in the meantime you may want to check out their other recent exhibitions.

Don’t Blink or You’ll Miss It!

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Praxis Gallery in Minneapolis, MN is mounting a show called “Animal Beings.” I liked the theme and submitted a whopping seven images (I usually never submit more than five) to the juror. The Iguana Portrait above was one and here are the other six.

One got chosen for exhibition. Which one would you choose? The juror picked this one.

The show runs from March 20 through April 3, by appointment only at the gallery. It should be available for viewing online at the Praxis site. If not, I will post the link when I get it.

You can view the gallery online here: https://www.praxisphotocenter.org/praxis-gallery

You can view the Video & Photo Documentation here:  https://www.praxisphotocenter.org/post/animal-beings

You can view the Exhibit Book here:  https://www.praxisphotocenter.org/catalogs

Squares and Blurs: Introduction

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Squares

A few years ago I saw an exhibition of small, square format black and white images of Michael Kenna. They were powerful in their elegance and simplicity; I was surprised such small landscapes “worked.” I determined to try my hand at square format. I found myself looking at images with an entirely different eye, finding my impression of the landscape rather than the landscape itself and directing viewers to that intent.

The challenge is to simplify the composition, to distill the essence that makes the scene special. It is a very satisfying exercise and one that is by no means finished as I continue to search for the right balance between shape and texture, the optimum placement of elements within the square and the effective use of negative space. An example may help illustrate these ideas.

This is the original lake trees image. The final image follows.

Lake Trees

Here I wanted to reduce the image to what essentially attracted me: those dead trees trunks sticking up from the water. Converting to black and white emphasizes form and texture without the distraction of color.

In the slideshow which is the next post, the black and white square format images are my earliest; the color images more recent.

Blurs

I use “blurs” to summarize a variety of manipulations that can be used to render a straightforward photograph more aesthetically pleasing, more faithful, perhaps, to an original impression, evoking an ethereal or mysterious atmosphere. The intent might be to create a gentler feel or emphasize a more graphic or abstract quality.

Photographers have been doing this from the inception of the medium, sometimes because they had no choice, then purposefully by the Pictorialist School in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to emulate the look of “art.” More often it is done to follow the urges of a personal aesthetic sense. Here is an example.

This is the original at the shore image. The final image follows.

At the Shore

This is all about abstraction, presenting the shapes and colors without the distracting detail of the sand pebbles and the small lines of waves. It fits how I see, feel the scene when I am lying in the sun on a beach squinting at the ocean. That little bit of magenta in the mid ground which is easy to ignore or miss in the original becomes more prominent.

There are myriad darkroom techniques to achieve these effects. I have used what amounts to a digital darkroom to transform certain images into something more than an accurate record of a scene, something that allows me to use my imagination and, I hope, engage yours.

What a Year!

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This year started out great for photography with acceptance into the  2020 Anza Borrego Desert Photo Contest . This contest was preceded, in the spring of 2019, by a spectacular super bloom in the Coachella Valley and surrounding areas, a super bloom of quality and quantity that had not been seen in decades. And I was there for both of these shows!

Anza Borrego Desert Photo Contest

One of my favorite places is the Anza Borrego Desert State Park in southeastern CA. It covers over 600,000 acres of wilderness and  mountains, much of it inaccessible except on foot. What is accessible are vast areas of badlands, palm oases, slot canyons, 4 wheel drive roads, broad vistas – a landscape photographer’s paradise. Each year a photo contest, limited to images taken within the park boundaries, entices hundreds of photographers to show their work.

Although photographing there for years, it did not occur to me to enter the photo contest until last summer, after having spent many hours pursuing the fabulous wildflowers of the super bloom. I had lots of images to choose from and submitted, digitally,  the 10 allowed. I was surprised and pleased when 8 of those 10 made the first cut, the final couple hundred from which the judges would pick winners in each of the six categories. Submission then required the images to be printed, mounted and delivered to Borrego Springs, a small town that sits in the middle of the Park. Wintering now in the Coachella Valley, it was a pleasure for me to make the delivery. Here are the 8.

The last two images, Palm Oasis and Feast for a Desert Prince,  were awarded Honorable Mention in the Black and White and Animals category, respectively, and were displayed, along with all the winners, during the month of February at the Borrego Art Institute in Borrego Springs.  At the excellent critique session that preceded the opening reception I discovered, to my surprise, that almost all the winners were local, professional photographers. I was in very good company.

Super Bloom 2019

The images above with wildflowers were taken in the spring of 2019 during that amazing super bloom. I was enchanted with the wildflowers, vast fields of which replaced the drab greens, grays and tans of the desert with purple, pink, yellow and white. They appeared not only in the expanses of the neighboring parks but also on every vacant lot, every patch of bare ground in the urban sprawl of the Coachella Valley.

I marveled at the vistas, but also saw stunning arrangements of flower varieties set among rocks, in dry arroyos, up hillsides and, of course, individual flowers. I photographed them all hoping, someday, someway to give others a glimpse of this glory. A book? Sure, but then I was daunted by the task of identifying all those flowers and just set the whole idea aside. The Anza Borrego Photo Contest spurred me to cull these photos for suitable entries, but the real motivator to create a book was the COVID19 pandemic with its mandated stay at home regimen.

The book, Super Bloom 2019, was just published by Blurb, You can see a preview of the whole book here. What follows are some of the images not in the book.

Costa Rica

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I went on my first ever photography workshop, to Costa Rica, in early
June 2018. It was just the beginning of the rainy season and although
there was rain most days it did not last long and did not interfere with
our expeditions. Indeed, some of the macro images of plants and
flowers benefited from the left over water droplets. The heat and
humidity were impressive to this desert dweller.CR book jpegs-68
The Osa Peninsula, where we spent the entire trip, is at the southwestern corner of Costa Rica. Although this small country has 5 million
inhabitants,  3 1/2 million of them live in the capital, San Jose. The rest of the country is sparsely populated and the Osa Peninsula is largely rain forest. Within this small peninsula live an astonishing variety of wildlife, including all four species of monkey found in the country.
Lush tropical plants, flowers, bugs and birds abound.

The pace of this workshop was exhausting but the company was good and the food and accommodations superb. I came home with about 1500 images (and that was minimal; one man took 10,000 pictures!) and was totally overwhelmed with the prospect of culling then editing them. I set them aside for a few months, occasionally checking to see if anything looked worth pursuing but not being tempted until I came upon the image above. It made me smile and inspired me to seek out others that had that quality. Invariably these were of monkeys and so the theme Monkey Business emerged. I created a book and had a show at the local library with that title. Once started I found choosing and editing with a purpose the enjoyable activity I’ve always experienced. The book and the show were rounded out with images of other creatures and colorful flora. Here are some of the images shown.

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BTW, I donated  sales from the library show to the library’s Children’s Programs, ~$250;  very satisfying.

I plan to add a gallery page with these and more images from Costa Rica in a format that will allow you to pick and choose and linger if you like. Watch this space!