Scott Edwards

Please welcome our first guest Scott Edwards, a 53-years old art photographer from Wisconsin, USA.

Scott: My education is in fine art printmaking. In the mid 1970s I attended the University of Wisconsin on an art scholarship and dropped out when the money dried up.

9 years ago I took up black and white photography when I discovered Edward Weston’s work and how it moved me.

I make my living exhibiting photography in art galleries and museums, selling photographs, lecturing and teaching photography workshops.

Scott: In college my work has been entered into competitions on my behalf and I have been the recipient of awards as a sideline to exhibits that I’ve been in. I have  been recognized with regional and national awards, most recently at a national exhibition at the Hubbard Museum of the American West (a Smithsonian museum) in New Mexico. I’ve had 7 museum exhibitions so far (including solo), many gallery shows (see my website Scottedwards.us for a list of the most recent) and in January, 2010 I’m being exhibited with master Western painters in Texas.  My work has been published in magazines, newspapers and a book concerning my 2,000 mile walk to the Grand Canyon. I was also awarded 2 residencies and have been a juror at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin.

Willow: This image illustrates the intriguing effects one can get from selective focus. I angled the image in the viewfinder to exaggerate the motion of the leaves in the wind and to get more of the subject into the frame. Once again, the light is what attracted me to this image in the first place. Notice how it gives the leaves a waxy appearance.

Scott: I only shoot black and white film in large and medium format. Silver prints just rock my world.

Scott: My large format cameras include 3 Calumet monorails and a Busch Pressman field camera. My medium format cameras are twin lens Mamiyas, twin lens Zeiss, and a Kodak Tourist. The calumet cameras are bulky but the range of movements on a monorail camera are second to none. It is important to have this feature when shooting close up work for maximum sharpness, or to exaggerate out of focus areas. In my darkroom I have a Kaiser VPM enlarger for medium format work and a Beseler 45MXT for large format.

Scott: My work takes me all over the United States. This past summer I traveled to Texas, New Mexico, Alabama, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Next year I plan to travel to the Oregon Coast (again) and to Eastern Europe. National parks in the United States offer the most unspoiled landscape opportunities, but one needs to wander off the beaten path to do some serious uninterrupted photography study. The Oregon Coast remains my favorite place. There are many miles of rocky beaches protected by the Oregon State Park Service. When the fog burns off in the mornings, the landscape takes on an angelic quality with moist rocks and soft light. A virtual smorgasbord of textures.

Bright Angel Trail: This is an image I took when I arrived on foot from Wisconsin to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. I wanted to view the canyon looking down without skyline because I have never seen it photographed this way. I waited for the late afternoon light to cast interesting shadows and a softer light to capture the textures in the shadow areas, and gave it a lyrical composition to help the eye travel the entire frame. I don’t incorporate vignetting in any way because I want the viewer to feel as though the image travels off the frame infinitely.

Scott: In black and white photography, I feel that light quality is the most important; if you don’t have the right light – there is no image. It is also important to remember in any image that, the subject is part of the image…not the total image. One must consider also the frame of reference, negative space (shadows) and any shapes in the image that comprise the composition. Composition is what draws viewers from a distance. As they get closer, more layers in the image present themselves and at close inspection the most minute textures and sharpness should become evident. I try to keep my compositions simple and clean and think like a painter. In my compositions, one will seldom find human beings, because I want to make the image intimate to the viewer. To accomplish this effect, I compose foreground elements that give the viewer a sense of being included  in the image as sort of a first hand account. My compositions almost always start at my feet and end up at the horizon near the top of the frame.

Black and white photography to me is all about contrasts: Contrasting values, textures, subject matter, sharpness and even balance. I’m a big fan of selective focus, because it tends to make the sharp areas of an image sharper, while showing off the bokeh of a particularly excellent lens. People still pay up to $1000 for lenses that are over a century old because of this bokeh quality. I like to juxtapose my focus also, in other words, sharply focus soft textures and render sharp textures as soft. For instance, in an abstraction I did of a cactus, the fine hairs of the cactus are sharply focused, while the spikes are soft. It makes the viewing experience more interesting I think.

Shelter From The Storm: In this image, I am inside a tunnel underneath the highway, that I slept in the previous night to escape a severe thunderstorm. From inside, I wanted to capture the cool cement walls in the immediate foreground to give a sense of place to the viewer, and included the railroad trestle in the background in warm light which juxtaposes the various temperatures together. The distant horizon lends a vastness to the western Kansas landscape.

Scott: Books: “Through Another Lens” by Charis Wilson, on the subject of her life with Edward Weston, and “Helmut Newton: Autobiography”.

Edward Weston and Paul Strand are my biggest influences in photography. Currently I enjoy and am inspired by Mona Kuhn, Sally Mann, Sebastian Stachowski, and Ralph Gibson.

Tidepool: This image was captured on the Oregon Coast. The light was low, so I opted to capture the motion of the wave as it crested over the rocks in the foreground. Overexposing by 1 stop gave the image more base fog and gravity, while allowing me to shoot this at 3 second exposure with Efke 25 film set to EI12.

Scott: Shoot what pleases you. Don’t be concerned with what other people want (unless you do commercial work). Your photographs should be fulfilling to you first and foremost.

Photography has the stigma of being associated with journalism and commercial advertising – but it can be art as much as a painting or drawing – its just a different tool. Also, one thinks to “take a picture of this thing or that thing”. I like to collect elements in a photographic composition in such a way as to make them more beautiful than that which can be seen without a camera. The way I compose makes the image mine and nobody else’s. So make your own tripod holes and put your personal signature on everything you shoot.

You will find more works by Scott Edwards on his web site: Scottedwards.us