#Landscape

“It was along a Kentucky Highway that I was prompted to stop and consider making a photograph of a stand of trees gracing the hillside that more than intrigued me. An inner feeling like “deja vu” convinced me to stop along the road to ponder what was before me and might soon be focused on my camera’s ground glass.

Having one’s attention sharply taken by a simple scene can give a state of inner quiet that helps in understanding more deeply the nature of such an encounter. I had the realization that I had seen, in exact detail this very landscape in one of my dreams prior to physically arriving at this seemingly predetermined place. Time and space had been patiently awaiting my arrival to create a photograph of the world in between. A nebulous and elusive dream space had found it’s way into the solid light of day”

 

~ Paul Caponigro

“I believe that we all have the simple, (and sometimes incredibly complicated), responsibility to live to our highest potential. I bring this belief to my photography, (as well as everything else I do), and it has ensured that there is rarely a moment where I do not feel inspired and passionate.”

 

~ Michael Kenna

“When I go out to photograph, I am wandering with a purpose. I am particularly captivated to the quietness and quality of light in the very early morning hours. I can control where I am and when I’m there- beyond that I am perfectly comfortable, with senses responsive, letting events unfold on their own terms. ”

 

~ Jeffrey Conley

“The basis for my artistic work is concrete observation. I am interested in the photographs as a physical object and all the prints are made by myself."

~ Kristoffer Albrecht

“In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.”

~ Sebastião Salgado

“The mountains are calling, and I must go.”

~ John Muir

"I was trying to give an honest picture of a city.
But San Francisco was so beautiful visually."

~ Max Yavno

"The key is to not let the camera, which depicts nature in so much detail, reveal just what the eye picks up, but what the heart picks up as well."

~ Paul Caponigro

“Lightning Strikes” was a combination of patience and luck. I had seen the shack and the bar sign and knew I wanted to return and find a photo. There were often lightning storms in late afternoon that summer and I frequently found myself at the location waiting for the lightning to no avail. One day, not only did I get the lightning, but it was pure luck that a single bolt appeared to be striking the bar”.

 

~ Roger Deakins

“Perfection - you are striving towards the perfect print. In the darkroom, you can almost hear the applause, the accolade of this perfect print. If I know that I’ll be printing the next day I go to bed at night worrying and sometimes I'll actually scan the negative in my imagination whilst I’m lying in bed”

~ Don McCullin

"I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail."~ Michael Kenna

“Photography’s a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest and all the Nikons that makes them a photographer. But it doesn’t. It’s not just seeing. It’s feeling”

 

~ Don McCullin

"I have always loved light... Its manifestations serve as symbols of the greatest secrets of the unknown. Creativity has enabled me to probe and reveal step by step the unknown. Even though I know I can only travel a short distance, every step in that direction is a transcendental experience."

 

~ Wynn Bullock

"I find the natural world to be endlessly wondrous in its range of character and texture, from moments of delicate intimacy and subtlety to the massively expansive and powerful."

~ Jeffrey Conley

“What I want is to suggest rather than really show; I like my images to be little seeds sown in people's heads and for them to blossom in everyone's head.”

~ Patrick Taberna

"Photography is never objective.”

 

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin

"I try not to make conscious decisions about what I am looking for. I don't make elaborate preparations before I go to a location. Essentially I walk, explore, discover and photograph."

~ Michael Kenna

" I feel like I received the photograph, I didn't take it. If you're in the right place at the right time, then all you have to do is push a button. Being a photographer doesn't come into it. Everything I've photographed exists regardless of me, my role is only to be receptive."

 

~ Pentti Sammallahti

“I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite”

~ Ansel Adams
(1902-1984)

“I can still recall the excitement of seeing the visualization “come true” when I removed the plate from the fixing bath for examination. The desired values were all there in their beautiful negative interpretation. This was one of the most exciting moments of my photographic career.”

~ Ansel Adams
(1902-1984)

”As I continued to photograph I became quite joyous. I knew that I could express the things I wanted to say by giving them form through my eyes”

~ Inge Morath
(1923 - 2002)

“It is difficult to conceive of a substance more impressively brilliant than the spurting plumes of white waters in sunlight against a deep blue sky”

~ Ansel Adams
1902-1984

"Great images do not need a commentary or a context to elucidate them. As a matter of fact, it is the greatness of the images themselves that gives a meaning to the context."

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin

JEFFREY CONLEY

"AN ODE TO NATURE"

Musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre

Opening June 09, 2023
June 10, 2023 - September 24, 2023

“Someday you will know that a father is much happier in his children’s happiness than in his own. I cannot explain it to you: it is a feeling in your body that spreads gladness through you.”

~ Honore de Balzac
(Le Père Goriot, 1835)

“If you look the right way, you can see the whole world is a garden"

~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
(1849-1924)

"Nobody has ever accused me of being an intellectual. So perhaps the most significant asset I bring to my efforts is an innocent eye. Endless curiosity propels me. Then the discipline of years and respect for the affairs of craftsmanship allow the vision to develop mysteriously into a surprise. Gratitude for arduous, mundane, or occasionally painful experiences is rare, but the many types of photography in my background have allowed some visual synthesis to emerge from my monkey mind. Restless and impatient, with no time to dwell on such things, I lurch onward. No subject is sacred or safe from my attack. Beware. Being inherently nosy, I poke into every odd corner. Since photography is a process of discovery for me, I periodically produce an image that delights or amuses me. Then I'm anxious to see what it evokes in others."

 

~ Fred Lyon
(1924-2022)

"Manzanar, the site of one of the World War II relocation camps, is about fifteen miles north of Lone Pine. While I was photographing in and around the camp in 1943 and 1944 I made some of my best images. I knew the region well; it is roughly 150 miles from Yosemite over the Tioga Pass – or 400 road miles southward when the Tioga is closed by snow. While at Manzanar for a fortnight in the winter of 1944, Virginia and I arose very early in the mornings and drove to Lone Pine with hopes of a sunrise photograph of the Sierra. After four days of frustration when the mountains were blanketed with heavy cloud, I finally encountered a bright, glistening sunrise with light clouds streaming from the southeast and casting swift moving shadows on the meadow and the dark rolling hills. I set up my camera on my car platform at what I felt was the best location, overlooking a pasture. It was very cold – perhaps near zero – and I waited, shivering, for a shaft of sunlight to flow over the distant trees. A horse grazing in the frosty pasture stood facing away from me with exasperating, stolid persistence. I made several exposures of moments of light and shadow, but the horse was uncooperative, resembling a distant stump. I observed the final shaft of light approaching. At the last moment, the horse turned to show its profile, and I made the exposure. Within a minute the entire area was flooded with sunlight and the natural chiaroscuro was gone. The negative of Winter Sunrise is rather complex to print. It is a problem of agreeable balance between the brilliant snow on the peaks and the dark shadowed hills. I have often thought what a privilege it would be to live and work in this environment, perhaps best before the turn of the century when the efforts of man brought more beauty to the land than now, with our pavements, wires, contrails, and desolation. This photograph suggests a more agreeable past and may remind us that, with a revived dignity and reverence for the earth, more of the world might look like this again."

~ Ansel Adams

"In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen."

~ Sebastião Salgado

"I think of being out in the landscape as a time to harvest observations - then in the darkroom is the time where the observation finds its voice, its landing space in its physical manifestation as a platinum/ palladium print."

 

~ Jeffrey Conley

“A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos”

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

"A picture can express a universal humanism, or simply reveal a delicate and poignant truth by exposing a slice of life that might otherwise pass unnoticed."

~ Steve McCurry

“My camera is like the arrow. Do I reach the target or does the target reach me or is it the same thing? It’s all very emotional.”

~ Bernard Plossu

"It's surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth."

~ Sir David Attenborough

"I can’t stress enough how important observation is as the foundational component of being a photographer. It is all about noticing things; light, texture, form, the confluence of these elements within infinite combinations. Essentially my passion for landscape photography came through being a person who is a certain type of observant as well as someone who has always felt at peace and tremendously as ease out in nature."

~ Jeffrey Conley

"Mother's love, that divine gift which comforts, purifies, and strengthens all who seek it."

~ Louisa May Alcott

"I see these hand treated palm sized prints as a continuation of not only that adoration, but as a collection of moments. Moments that one may overlook but I want to make them feel big and significant. And things, physical or otherwise, do not have to be vast or demonstrative to have great meaning and relevance."

 

-Ernesto Esquer

"I would strongly encourage anybody embarking in photography as a career to embrace and enjoy the whole process. Being a photographer can be a wonderful way to experience the world."

 

~ Michael Kenna

“The mark of a successful individual is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it.”

 

~ Chinese Proverb

“It’s the subject matter that counts. I’m interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can’t always see”

 

~ Harry Callahan

“The Sonoran Desert bloom is a magical time for us in this area. Thanks to the winter rains, brown and arid is replaced with a magnificent array of colors, with flowers popping up seemingly overnight. Cactus flowers in particular are the greatest gift. After hibernating and saving up their energy during the cold months, the mother cactus plant releases a display of hues and tones that one would think come from another world. This hand colored print serves as tribute to all the colors of prickly pear cactus you see around the desert during this blooming period.”

“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”

 

~ Susan Sontag

“There is something instinctive about the moment you choose to “take” a photograph. It’s not the result of thought or reflection.The strength of the composition is always born of the instinct of the decision. It reminds me of archery. There is the tension of the bow and the free flight of the arrow”

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923 - 1999)

“Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling”

~ Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)

"Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind!"

~ from 'The Windmills of your Mind' (1968)
First recorded by Noel Harrison
Lyrics written by Alan & Marilyn Bergman
with music composed by Michel Legrand

“I like to get to know trees intimately. I spend a lot of time walking around them trying to become acquainted with them. In fact, it’s as though I talk to them.”

 

~ Michael Kenna

"I believe that each of us has a unique structure of visual organization. I also believe that whatever structure we have is the result of the visual character of the place in which we spent our earliest years. Each of us sees with our own pattern, but artists and gardeners are the ones to find that pattern and build something that we can see around it."

 

~ Gregory Conniff

“Nature is in constant change and photography is particularly well suited to capture and amplify the swirling fluidity and the wonderfully serendipitous moments born of the ephemeral. Photographing nature is a very specific kind of exercise in mindfulness”

 

~ Jeffrey Conley

“Everything inside the frame is equally important”

~ Pentti Sammallahti

“I am a lucky man. I can do something with almost anything I see. Everything is still interesting to me"

~ André Kertész

“For all of us, the Earth sustains our existence. In an otherwise in hospitable known universe, our little blue planet provides us with absolutely everything. I’ve never understood why our societal and spiritual priorities as a species do not overwhelmingly demonstrate our gratitude by placing our planet at the pinnacle of the reverential order”

 

~ Jeffrey Conley

“I always had a strange feeling about how we order time into the past, present and future, as I never really felt that way."

 

~ Miho Kajioka

“For as long as I can remember I have felt most at peace outdoors. Nature has always been my refuge and sanctuary. I find the natural world to be endlessly wondrous in it’s range of character and texture, from moments of delicate intimacy and subtlety to the massively expansive and powerful”

 

~Jeffrey Conley

"It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about."

 

~ John Szarkowski
(1925-2007)

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in it’s entirety. And the expression of what one feels should be set forth in terms of simple devotion to the medium - a statement of the utmost clarity and perfection possible under the conditions of creation and production”

~Ansel Adams
(1902-1984)

 

“Ansel Adams was one of the great photographers of this century. He was also one of the best loved spokespersons for the obligations we owe to the natural world. It has been easy to confuse the related but distinct achievements that earned him these twin honors. Although he devoted a lifetime to the cause of wilderness preservation, Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save. His great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world”

John Szarkowski
(1925 - 2007)

Wynn Bullock, to my mind, is one the greatest 20th Century photographers. Often eclipsed by his more well known contemporaries, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.  This is a haunting portrait of his mother’s hands taken in his modest house in Carmel in 1956. The beauty of the print just knocks me out and is the definition of the word “primal”.