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artist's statement |
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Ordinary Nature Through these photographs, I invite the viewer to journey with me into the world of Ordinary Nature. I was delighted when a
critic said I’d “overcome the masculine impulse to make nature heroic.” I’ve deliberately sidestepped the paths that lead to Spectacular and Monumental Nature. I’ve also avoided
the New Topographers’ landscape of environmental degradation. Ordinary Nature is in between: nearer than the wilderness, but still protected from suburbs and worse (oil fields,
atomic sites, and so forth).
I’ve been gathering images in the accessible sphere that lies near to home in the parks, paths, and nature sanctuaries of the San Francisco Bay Area. Almost always marked by
human modifications, this realm contains a mixture of nature and artifice: earth, air, light, and water; but also paths, benches, roads, and telephone poles. This environment
probably suffers human contacts more than it enjoys them, but it is never quite despoiled. Its small beauties and excitements tend to be gentle and contemplative, rather than
overtly striking.
On walks in this area with a small camera, I’ve asked if any visual surprises, any qualified beauty or mild visual excitement, might appear on the path ahead.
If the photographer and viewer can follow this path together, then the individual images might come together as a continuous series of glimpses along the way. If the viewer
will follow this path with me, the images might merge into a continuous series of glimpses along the way. |
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Separate paths
In the broader context of my photography, these images -
romantic, pictorial, and idealized - are half of a
whole. I’m not only, or even primarily, a landscape
photographer. I’ve also been making images of an Inner
City, an urban world of debris, security fences, and
gridlock, all in a state of decay that mirrors our
larger political, economic, and environmental condition.
Together these two bodies of work comprise a worldview.
But here I ask the viewer to follow only one of these
forking paths, into a quiet, murmuring world that
embraces us, at least intermittently, in harmony and
regeneration. |

contact kirk thompson
kirk thompson's web site
Also check out more work at:
www.dryreading.com/kirkthompson
www.red-green-blue.com |
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Miniature 'watercolors'
Though most of these prints are available in larger
sizes, here I’ve printed them consistently as a set of
pastel miniatures on large sheets of archival watercolor
paper. I found this particularly satisfying. Only after
coming to think of them as ‘my watercolors’ did I
remember that watercolors were my first experience of
art. An uncle, stationed in England during World War II,
was able to send home some small watercolor landscapes,
so gentle that a censor apparently thought they were
imaginary, or at least did not reveal a specific
location. (In the same sense, I don’t think of my
photographs as representing particular places.) Before I
saw these watercolors, I’d accepted pictures without
reflection: the illustrations in, for example, my Babar
book were Babar and Celeste, not the creations of an
artist. Only on seeing watercolors by a familiar uncle
did I grasp the ideas of an artist and his art.
Four larger images
For
variety, I’ve also included in this show four larger and
more recent images belonging to neither of the two
portfolios mentioned above. They may be pointing
in a new direction.
Kirk Thompson
October 2003 |
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