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| When considering color landscape photography and its seductive and sensual renditions of our natural world, I always think of the two most impressive color landscape photographers of the southwest, during the mid to late 20th century: Eliot Porter (1901-1990) and David Muench (1936-). |
| Porter's photography of the Colorado Plateau is memorialized in the book, The Place That No One Knew, written by the Sierra Club's David Bower, to persuade the government to spare Glen Canyon from being dammed. The book failed to do so, but the photographs within the pages inspired me, as a young man, and are, in part, responsible for my passionate relationship with photographing the Plateau. |
| David Muench has also made a great impression on my photography. His numerous images published in Arizona Highways Magazine and his coffee table books, have made an indelible mark on the photo art emanating out of the Colorado Plateau. |
| It is incumbent upon the serious contemporary landscape photographer to, in effect, transcend the styles that have dominated color photography of the Colorado Plateau and the southwest. Going beyond the styles of Porter and Muench sometimes means incorporating the human element into our compositions. We are animals in the landscape just as the deer, pronghorn antelope and collard lizards. We are part of the natural environment and our mark is upon everything and is everywhere a factor. From ruined cliff dwellings, to graffiti ravaged pictographs, we discover a range of artistic possibility. All become art and since art is a reflection of our own existence the altered landscape should be artistically pursued. |
| Photographing the Western landscape, in color, is so much more than making pretty pictures. It is a challenge to shoot in an environment of difficult contrast and fickle lighting without resorting to the overused light of dawn and dusk. Sometimes it's necessary, but we might get trapped into shooting the same old postcard imagery so dominant in our contemporary views of the Colorado plateau and southwest in general. Photography is composed in a visual language, written in form, contained in space and defined by light. My color landscapes of the southwest are, at best, a reflection of my deep curiosity to understand why and who I am. It is a part of my vision quests because so many of my photographic expeditions into the canyon country have been journeys of self realization. |
| William Shepley |
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