Artist Statement

“I came to photography late.  Assisted by my extended family, who loved to hike, fish, swim and ski, I found nature before I found photography. Wandering around outdoors was a habit I inherited.  Photography came later. 

On the East Coast I grew up with amazing natural beauty. I can readily recall the feeling of back light filtering through a grove of maple trees exciting leaves of yellow, orange and deep maroon ... of blue morning twilight creeping down a mountain ridgeline slowly, almost imperceptibly, growing into sun-up purples and pinks over landscapes like those that had been painted well over a century before by the artists of the Hudson River School.

Like all beginning outdoor photographers I imitated those who came before. In time became dissatisfied simply duplicating their work. The challenge was to improving upon it if I could.  During the past 30 years in my pursuit of an understanding and appreciation of the geography and nature of the American West as captured by many of those masters one of my guiding principles came from an artist who never witnessed the West - the surrealist painter and photographer Rene Magritte - who said “To think about an image means to see an image”. I realized that this was clearly a variation on Alfred Stieglitz’s early 20th century series of photographic cloud images he titled ‘Equivalents’.  In these photographs, Stieglitz’s emphasis was on abstraction, adhering to the then modern idea of “equivalence”, I.e. abstract forms, lines, and colors representing the artists inner ideas as well as reactions to and perceptions of ones own experiences. The frequently quoted Ansel Adams, although somewhat less abstract in his imagery, was working towards a similar end with his often repeated mantra of ‘pre-visualization’.  They were each advancing the same idea … that what was vital in the making of all true art was an intimate understanding of yourself, what you wanted to do and your own evaluative thoughts and feelings about the subject that would help you conjure in your own ‘mind’s eye’ the art you hoped to make.

I have since photographed in more than 100 national parks and many more historic sites and state parks. I have worked in almost all of the ‘iconic’ over-photographed locations in the west. Again, within the first few years, I came to see how easy it would be to fall under the spell of a defeatist mantra of “why bother, everything has already been photographed’ now especially true in the digital age. Every “iconic” locale I worked in during those early days had been seen and photographed from every angle possible for too many years. How many purely imitative and mediocre magazine or calendar pages of Half Dome in Yosemite NP or South Window in Arches NP or Schwabacher’s Landing in Grand Teton NP year in and year out, could we look at without diminishing the astonishment one feels when one actually stands there in person? It was demoralizing! As I got to know the west more intimately, I began to seek out unrealized lands and prospects that for me had equal landmark value to the over photographed ‘Icons’.  Maybe, in this way, my efforts might be helpful in communicating the need to ‘view anew’ and preserve these lesser known and under appreciated lands? Along with my advancing technical knowledge I finally had a direction, a purpose and a calling. Success was still along way off.  

AS with many of the most obvious lessons in life I did not realize that my opportunity to display my own style as well as contribute to the same preservationist ethic that photography played in creating and sustaining the National Parks over a hundred years before was literally in my own back yard.   

I was living nearby and had been wandering around in the Santa Monica Mountains for almost ten years before the National Park Service created the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in 1978.  It appeared, even with the many photographers living in Los Angeles, that few had ever taken the mountains seriously as a unique ecosystem, biome or artful landscape.  I soon discovered that the mountains that divide the world famous San Fernando Valley from the Pacific Ocean and at whose base were some of the most singular, famous and pristine beaches in the world as well as being the view-shed for a large portion of the residents of the country’s second most populated city had, almost a hundred years before, been a hotbed of landscape appreciation and painting. George Gardner Symons.  William Wendt, Edgar Payne and others were Southern California’s local versions of the earlier celebrated American landscape painters and photographers - Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, William Henry Jackson, Thomas Bierstadt and Thomas Moran among many others.  What a revelation!

Now I had both a locale whose character I could endeavor to define in my own time and manner and a list of predecessors who once viewed the mountains as I now did. I had my own personal mountain range and art school to learn from. I was in good company.  More than that, I soon became intrigued with the worldwide history of landscape painters and photographers. Not only the California impressionists who painted the scale and beauty of the Santa Monica’s, but through them, I was introduced to the entire wealth of the humanity and science of landscape painting and photography.    

One of the many results has been a commissioned book - a photography art and history book -  of the Santa Monica Mountains (140 images and 45,000 words) entitled “RANGE ON THE EDGE – THE SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS” with acclaimed southwest writer Mathew Jaffe from Angel City Press, now in its second printing and heading to its third.  

In a way it is sad that the Santa Monica’s had not ever been taken in a photographically serious manner before but I am thankful that I had the opportunity to create thoughtful landscape art in a locale that, even today, has yet to be over – photographed.
Photography has always been a gateway to an emotional understanding of the world around me. The process of making art is enjoyable and rewarding regardless of the results!
Years later … Wandering Around Outdoors  …  in what now feels like another life, I stand before a Grand Canyon NP North Rim panorama layered up into the Kaibab plateau wilderness by Ponderosa and Aspen forests painted like zebra bands of half shadow and half highlight.

A few miles and hours later, the same view is transformed. A very different Grand Canyon panorama appears. The sky is now filled with enormous dark purple thunderheads. Dangling from beneath them are deep magenta and orange veils of mist backlit by the setting sun here and there glowing like exploding fireworks.

During yet another visit … the double full-circle rainbow that appeared high above and far below me at nearby Point Royal on the north rim of the Grand Canyon was a William Henry Jackson moment. His biography noted seeing his one and only double full-circle rainbow in Colorado 1871. Photographer Galen Rowell reported that it was the kind of rainbow that could only be seen and photographed from an airplane.

There it was with the Grand Canyon stretching out beneath it. The realization that I had been at the nexus of something as impractical and unrepeatable as a full double-circle rainbow on earth was so stimulating and demoralizing at the same time that I didn’t make another photograph for months thereafter. Nothing else I witnessed was its equal.  Why bother?  
The challenge of creating images of the un-capturable, the un-imaginable, the un-controllable … the brightness, the darkness and the shapes and colors of nature’s extravagance have become my reward. Thank you for Wandering Around Outdoors with me.”   Tom Gamache

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