Artist's Statement

photos available as archival pigment or silver prints

 

The Site

I will be adding photos and changing this site and organization very actively. If you check back weekly I'll promise there's a good chance of at least a new photo; I try images out on my Photo of the Week page before they're officially here or for sale.

email me if you're interested in a an image in another size, if you want to talk about paper surface and toning, or anything else I can do for you.

I'm only offering and displaying images that I've printed at high quality and in sizes and on paper surfaces that work to my very picky eye. All prints are guaranteed – absolutely.

Prints are available framed as well.

These days some of my best prints are pigment prints, but for some images the velvety blacks of some matte surface prints works well. In some cases the colors and surface of a digital type C print works very well. email me for more information. I'm willing to experiment with various output technologies and sizes, as long as the quality is up to my standards. Let me know if you have requests for murals or any other kind of output.

This site is changing and expanding often, so check back if you like my work. Here are some of the most popular images from my 4x5 sheet film years in the 80s, through medium format film work, to DSLR images from last week.

This site is primarily focused on my photography, because it's the most interesting thing I have to share. However, I still do web design and photoshop work. I'm also working on iOS app development.

More on my approach is on the Meditation page.

Equipment, Print and Image Quality

I've always had very high standards. Pain in the neck. A good chunk of this work was done with large format film with a Sinar View camera, and a Pentax 6x7 or other 120 format film cameras for the medium format. This film has been scanned at 4800 dpi, and I work on the files at 16 bits per channel. These are huge files with a lot of detail and subtle tonal range.

I started shooting digital in the late 90s; but that was just fooling around. It took a while for cameras to get good, and now they are. There are certain things I miss about film (the way highlights block up slowly and gracefully) but overall, digital is actually better, now.

For output I'm using an Epson R3880 printer, a professional level state of the art printer which uses an extended range of pigment based inks, with multiple tones of grays and blacks. The Epson Pigment inks I use are considered archival, and I find the visual subtlety, detail, and tonal range to be on par with almost any photographic process, and in many cases superior to photographic processes in terms of archival stability and also visual quality. For sizes larger than 17 inches wide (or tall), I hire out the printing using the same Pigment inks on fine art paper. The hired-out prints have to match my own prints and satisfy my picky eye.

The Type C prints are done on a Chromira machine. These are very good!

My old silver prints were printed by me on fiber based paper in the 80s and 90s and processed archivally. These are very limited in addition, as I don't plan on returning to darkroom printing. In most cases the newer prints are actually better looking than the darkroom prints.

Prints are available to license for book covers, cd art, etc.

My resume is here.

Bio

During my undergraduate years at Dartmouth College in the late 70s, I began pursuing photography very seriously. There were good darkroom facilities, which I was able to use until I built my own darkroom in about '82. During that time I made the transition to large format film, which I used exclusively for a number of years. I chose Dartmouth college because I loved the area: New Hampshire and Vermont. This relationship grew through photography — loved it enough to stay put here.

Inspired by some of the great large format photographers -- Ansel Adams, Minor White, Paul Caponigro and others — I set out in my youth to master both the technical skills required to make a fine silver print, as well as the emotional resonance with the world required to actually make something into art. I've stayed put on this path as well.

I've always been drawn to Chinese and Japanese Zen paintings, Tibetan thankas, and also western abstract expressionist paintings -- at least by some artists: Klee, Kandinsky, Motherwell, and many more. I think the common element of these is that the image conveys a state of mind, an aspect I was drawn to even in my late teens, and which is ever more profound and important as I move through life. I'm compelled to create an image representing a state of mind, in which a sense of awareness permeates a space filled by forms that might resonate with or stimulate thought, emotion, and energy.

It's been a long and ever changing path, over 30 years, and changing very much in terms of the technical and spiritual aspects of the path. I studied with John Sexton (Ansel Adams' assistant at the time) in workshops to learn the silver-based methods very technically, but most of my later technical path was shaped while working with digital Dye Transfer printer Jim Browning, as we worked on moving that venerable old printing technique into the modern age, in the early 90s. I learned Photoshop early, and I understood the possibilities of good digital to analog output even before there were good ink jet printers, common scanners, or digital cameras. We were doing it with esoteric equipment and mixing that with large film. In the last decade, though I've kept up with technical aspects, the emotional/mental/spiritual/artistic side has become far more important than my work as a technician, which is still of course important. I've taken a life-long meditation practice to a much more serious level, and it's an understatement to say that my work is informed by the practice and study of Burmese and Tibetan meditation lineages.

Early on my photography was influenced by some kind of clinging: attempting to grab, or capture, or freeze a moment. Now it's very different. Rather than trying to "capture" external reality, I'm just transforming it into a new form that's more internal. I've deepened the understanding that I'm creating a two-dimensional space that resonates with our humanity, rather than strictly representing reality. Of course, all of my pictures are entirely representations of what was in front of the camera. Even if I use my infrared-modified camera or compose based on some natural abstraction, the picture is a reflection of the real world. I don't make these up.

I'm working this process to help me wake up, and hopefully I'm helping you too. Images are made with full awareness that the light, the frost, snow, trees, leaves, style, fashion, and buildings are ephemeral. The world is like a fireworks display, each moment we freeze an image of the world into something solid in our minds, while the world moves on, flashes, dissolves. Each of my images represents a self-existing moment of light and form that passed, quickly or slowly. That moment is long gone, but it's a new moment when we look at a print, which is its own thing.

-John