About Chris Carr and His Photography
The interplay of texture and light. Transitions and the dissolving of form. These are the subtleties of forests, clouds, and water that catch my attention and bring peace to my soul when I walk in nature. The framing and mind-focusing effects of seeing through a camera deepen my experience, as does processing an image later to accentuate its textures, light, and transitions. My photographs are, in a very real sense, the byproduct of my attempts to connect and commune with nature rather than my goal. They are about relationship more so than about subject. At the same time, they do provide me a way to share with my fellow humans what I see and feel.
The way I see nature and photograph her follows mainly from my prior training in watercolor painting and pastel drawing, and in other painting and drawing media. I chose to work in watercolors and pastels specifically because they are well suited to capturing transitions through washes, bleeding, smudging, and blending. Also, after exploring the interactions of texture and light in simply black and white with graphite pencils, adding in color with pastels was a natural next step.
In all, from my childhood through my twenties, I had twenty-one years of art training at the John H. Vanderpoel School of Art in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Art Worlds in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I began seriously developing my photographic and photo-editing skills some thirty years later, but with the same artistic eye, principles, and passions for natural appearances that I had had as a painter and drawer. I present here some of my watercolors and drawings, that you might compare them with my photographs and see how I have photographically rendered texture, light, and transitions in manners that often evoke the feelings of watercolors or pastels.
Painting and drawing with photography as I do, my works generally do not follow mainstream American photography’s emphasis on bold, sharp-edged, color-saturated forms and forthright presence. My photographs commonly ask for study rather than aim for immediate impact. They explore the in-between of transitions expressed in many ways: as the half-hidden and half-revealed, distinctness emerging from indistinctness or dissipating into it, the interplay or ambiguity of foreground and background, nearness retreating into distance or springing from it, light breaking through darkness or being engulfed by it, and fading light and the lengthening of shadows. My photographs give favor to soft light and dapples over intense contrast, and the warm dissolving light of late afternoon rather than the cool crispening light of morning. You are invited to play with these changes, and what they define and obscure, in my photographs.
The movement implicit in static spatial patterns of hues and darkness-lightness and of curving spaces that the eye follows over the photographic canvas also defines some of my work. To emphasize such static patterns in nature, I use telephoto lenses that flatten three-dimensional scenes. I also work with diffuse even lighting that mutes the three-dimensionality and texture of the subject, and I desaturate colors and reduce contrast that would otherwise create dimensionality and distract from spatial patterns. I look for abstract arrangements of forms and light in nature.
I have been fascinated with trees all my life: Their connection of the earth and sky that radiate into them. Their structure when bare or its alluring elusiveness when autumn-half leafed. Their lacy dissipation into the sky when budding. Their colorful aura of nascent-emerging leaves at their branch tips in springtime. The dapples of soft defocused leaf-filtered light that melt into the discolorations of aging aspen bark so that light and color are hard to distinguish. “Tree portraits” is the name I give to my photographs of individual trees that amplify these qualities. At a landscape scale, it’s the texture that bare trees in angled light give to landforms and the feathery softness with which trees in full apparel can render a terrain that moves my spirit. Closer up, tree canopies overhead offer stained-glass windows of black branching lines and colored leaf-glass.
Clouds in sunset-colored skies and water frothing over cascades give yet different substance to ephemerality, transition, dissolution, and coming into form. It is as if the same Master Painter fashioned air, water, and earth into their subliminal subtleties and wonders.
The mixed hardwoods and cascades of the southern Appalachians in North Carolina and the aspen stands in northern Arizona and Colorado have been very generous to me in their open revealing of their visual, energetic, and spiritual gifts. To them, and my art and photography instructors, I am deeply indebted and offer my respectful thanks. I invite you to share in what they have taught me.
Chris Carr
Web design by Russell Houpt and Christopher Carr