Retrospective
PAINTED LADIES, 22 SEXIST BILLBOARDS 1973-1990
In 1973 I was living in Ft Lauderdale Florida before attending graduate school at RISD. Each day, on the way to work, I passed a number of Coppertone billboards. I became fascinated by the variety and stylistic differences of these hand painted billboards. It also caused me to think about large scale reproduction, photomechanical versus the hand painted examples and ultimately large format printing. The motif of the partially clothed female form objectified as a sales gimmick attracted my attention and I began photographing examples selling everything from liquor, cigarettes and vacations to live bait. This sales technique termed out during the 90\'s, after a lot of activism, and you rarely see advertising using this motif anymore in this country.

DOTS 1 1974 & DOTS 2 1974
As soon as I began making photographs I discovered the limitations of wet-chemical, projection photo printing. The Florida Coppertone billboards caused me to investigate all the means of making big pictures. I was still painting in1973 when I arrived at RISD. By that time my painting style had evolved to a kind of pointillism. These two prints are photographs of two, oil on canvas, Dots Box paintings, 36\"x36\" in size, now in private collections. They represent my transition from traditional art media to electronic media. As explained in my artist\'s statement, the common denominator between my painting, photography, print and video, and later computer graphics, is the dot. I produced a series of paintings of this subject, first in oil on canvas then in these other media. Roy Lichtenstein emphasized the Ben Day dot of offset lithography in his Pop Art paintings which probably cued me to investigate the dot. Andy Warhol\'s use of photomechanical printing in his serial paintings was also an influence.
WATER LILIES, Washington DC 1999
During my investigation of color theory during my DOTS phase, I learned a lot about the optical mixing of color from the Impressionists and Post Impressionists, particularly Seurat and Monet. Monet\'s attraction to water lilies as a motif became fascinating to me as did his serial imagery of haystacks and the facade of Rouen Cathedral, painting the same subject in different lighting conditions over time. The motif of discs floating on an ever changing ground of varying shape and color has always intrigued me. I\'ve photographed water lilies in Europe, Asia and the Americas and have a huge collection.
HAYSTACKS INFRARED LIGHT 1973
Kodak Ektachrome Infrared was a film created for aerial surveillance incorporating an infra red band replacing the blue one. This assigned the three color dye layers to arbitrary colors selected by using filters in front of the lens. It created a false color rendition of the scene and was helpful for identifying inorganic things disguised as foliage, like tanks and gun placements. It could also produce bizarre color landscape imagery which I found interesting. I would photograph the same subject, in series, using different filter combinations to see how it looked in infrared light. Monet did much the same thing with his painting series of Haystacks and the facade of Rouen Cathedral in different seasonal lighting conditions.
CUBE 3 (cubed) 1986
In 1975 I received the first graduate degree in Experimental Video awarded by the Rhode Island School of Design. Once I relocated to San Francisco I collaborated with others working in analog computer graphics and established a workspace with a Paik Abe video synthesizer as well as a Sandin Image Processor and a Templeton Quantizer/colorizer. I had both a color darkroom and these video synthesizing setups in my studio at that time and produced many hybrid art works using those two mediums. This is an example of some of my cross-media video works. It is a print of a window matted work, now in private collection, with photographs captured from my synthesized video work and mounted inside the window mat. Access my YouTube channel to see some of my vintage video work as well as more recent video projects. (youtube.com/@grantjohnson77)
66 LANDSCAPES 2006
Because of their complexity, I\'ve always felt that landscape images looked better printed large. Photographing hand painted billboards caused me to investigate large format printing which, in the early 70\'s, was accomplished by offset printing the gridded picture in sheets and pasting them together on a billboard. My first large format inkjet print was produced on Robert Rauschenberg\'s IRIS printer in the mid 90\'s. I began making my own large format prints in the late 1990\'s. I bought my first large format printer around 2000 and did all of my own printing until 2018. Once the technology became ubiquitous and there were competent printers producing fine art prints I began working with service bureaus to free up more time to devote to doing environmental work. This is a proof sheet I printed for work I was showing in 2006.
OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK 1986
Commercial production work caused me to travel extensively, and to some unusual places. In 1986 I visited the Philippines shortly after the revolution that ousted Dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The Palace docents, who had previously been the Marcos\'s servants, were eager to show off Imelda\'s closet and the corrupt opulence of the Marcos\' lifestyle. The Marcos family were provided political asylum in Hawaii, guests of the United States. My interest in electronic imaging provided a link between art and defense, especially DARPA\'s support of computer imaging and remote sensing. I attended, as press, a number of defense industry trade shows including the Paris Air Show and Air Space \'88 in San Diego pictured here. In 1995, while camping on Cedar Mesa (now The Bears Ears National Monument) Utah, I was surprised to see this B-52 Stratofortress winging its way down the San Juan River canyon heading towards Lake Powell.
MOONBOW LOWER YOSEMITE FALLS 1985
John Muir was the first person to write about the moonbow phenomenon at the base of Lower Yosemite Falls in his book The Yosemite, c1912. I had never seen a photograph of it. I decided to make one and as far as I know this is the first photograph of that moonbow, as verified by a team of astronomers from Texas State University in San Marcos. I was the only photographer there and It was shot on film. I photographed it the next year and went back in 2006 where I had trouble fitting into the scrum of photographers waiting for it to happen that year. Read the article, Los Angeles Times article called “Beauty in the misty moonlight” by Eric Bailey, March 22, 2007 (latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-may-22-me-moonbow22-story.html)
HAVASUPAI FALLS 1980
My 1980 photograph of Havasupai Falls showing the original travertine pools that existed before the 1990 flood destroyed them. \"In September 1990, the largest flood in Havasu Creek since 1935, and possibly 1910, was generated by intense thunderstorms that lasted several days. The 1990 flood peaked at 575 m3/s, caused severe damage to Supai, killed hundreds of ash trees (Fraxinus sp.), and altered travertine deposits in lower Havasu Canyon. Smaller floods in July 1992 and February 1993 also damaged Supai, eroded waterfalls, destroyed riparian vegetation, filled pools with gravel, and deposited coarse debris in the Colorado River.\" Credit: U.S. Geological survey This area just flooded again, catastrophically, on August 24, 2024 requiring helicopter rescue of more than 100 individuals.
FIRE ON THE SOUTH RIM 1993
A very strong storm passed over our Point Sublime campsite. As soon as it was safe I set up to photograph lightning on the south rim. The sun was setting and it quickly became dark because of the storm clouds but strong sunset light penetrated underneath the cloud ceiling briefly. I left the shutter open for about 20 minutes as the storm produced picket fence lightning on the south rim, starting a grass fire. Emergency personnel and vehicles responded which accounts for the red emergency lights seen on the south rim.
SUPER BLOOM, CARRIZO PLAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT 1991-2013
From 1991 until around 2010 I was an assignment photographer for The Nature Conservancy working throughout California and Hawaii. I photographed the Carrizo Plain for many seasons and in 2001 it was designated a National Monument. I\'m especially pleased that my work contributed to the protection of these fabulous natural areas and to the designation of the Carrizo Plain National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument along with the Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve.
CHEMICAL DEPENDENCY - HEADING for the LAST ROUNDUP
I live in the California wine growing region. Every spring I see the vineyards treated with Roundup weed killer. For years the workers applying it wore no protective gear. A check with the Napa county Agriculture Extension office reveals around two million pounds of herbicides and pesticides are applied to the grape crop every year. Read the latest information about the Bayer/Roundup litigation from the Washington Post. (wapo.st/4ghGSca)
WELCOME TO THE FUTURE 2007
Welcome to the Future was created in 2008 during the \"Great Recession\" when fuel prices were increasing to a level we had never seen before in this country. The Bush administration used that as an excuse to turn over our environment to corporate America for safekeeping, especially the timber and fossil fuel industry. It seemed to me like a sell-out. In frustration I produced this work. Not much has changed and it\'s as relevant today as when I made it 16 years ago in 2008. Climate change is real and every year is hotter than the last. Despite our best efforts the level of carbon in the atmosphere increases year over year and now catastrophic storms, wildfires and floods dominate the news. Insurance companies are pulling out of areas hit by climate change disasters. They know climate change is real and yet there is still denial that there is anything abnormal going on. Certain politicians would like us to believe it\'s all a \"Chinese hoax\"...that\'s as you\'re struggling to keep cool while your home is burning, floating and/or blowing away. Scientists tell us that since the last ice age 10,000 years ago, the climate has been in an unusual state of equilibrium but that\'s changing. The rate of change is accelerating and the extent of that change is more extreme. This is a print of the original 48\"x72\" pigment print on canvas.
WINE COUNTRY FIRE STORM 2017
In early October 2017 the Tubbs Fire created what was called at the time the \"Wine Country Firestorm.\" The fire burned through the exclusive Fountain Grove development of Santa Rosa then down the Mayacamas Mountains all the way to the town of Sonoma where I live. It was terrifying and the resulting damage was overwhelming. It was a harbinger of what was to come for the next six years in California and elsewhere as we endured what scientists say is the worst drought in the past 1200 years. Many neighborhoods were destroyed, lives lost and whole towns obliterated.
AFTERMATH and RECOVERY, LAKE SUTTONFIELD 2017-2018
Lake Suttonfield is near my home in Sonoma and a place I visit frequently. I photographed it after the devastating Tubbs Fire burnt through the area and into the nearby town of Glen Ellen. This series shows the lake immediately after the fire in October 2017 and during the recovery in April 2008, six months later. Reading across then down in an \"S\" fashion shows the same location for comparison. This area was not heavily forested which helped the fire burn at reduced intensity and kept it mostly below the Oak canopy.
SPIRAL JETTY BY MOONLIGHT 2005
Spiral Jetty was surrounded by water briefly in 2005, perhaps for the last time ever. I noticed an article about it in Sunset magazine while waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket. I wanted to photograph Spiral Jetty as it had been envisioned by Robert Smithson. I planned the trip to coincide with a full moon and was rewarded with perfect conditions. I spent the night photographing it from every conceivable angle and had it all to myself.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT 2010-2020
Water in the west is the crux of everything we do, or don\'t do. These are just a few examples of derelict development projects that were tied directly to changes in the availability of water. This is part of my LANDSCAPES OF THE FUTURE series.
LAKE POWELL 1988-2020
Lake Powell has loomed large in my consciousness ever since I saw it for the first time as a location in the original 1968 Planet of the Apes movie. It seemed beautiful but in a surreally incongruous way. It definitely appeared otherworldly and science fiction. As I learned more about it by reading Ed Abby and David Brower, I realized that the decision to flood Glen Canyon was probably the worst environmental choice ever made by the United States Government. The consequences of that decision are driving the point home right now as the lake level flirts with deadpool and expensive plumbing problems have been discovered rendering the Glen Canyon Dam obsolete.
LAKE SHASTA 2015
\"Study finds Western megadrought is the worst in 1200 years\" according to the journal Nature Climate Change. This photograph from 2015, shows Lake Shasta at its lowest level in 44 years.
SCENES FROM THE OFFICE 1980-2017
My work has often necessitated camping because many of the locations of interest were remote and required hiking, sometimes for days, to get in and out. More often than not I/we would drive as far as possible and then backpack from there. Many of the trips were with like minded colleagues and we almost always had a fabulous time in the wilderness. I would, on occasion, use a penlight to caption the location by writing it backwards in front of the camera. I got better at it as time went on. Since this is what I did and where I did it, I thought of it as my office...and an exceptionally wonderful office it was.
VOLKSWAGEN EMISSIONS CHEATING RECALL STORAGE LOT 2017
I wonder what happened to all these recalled and repurchased vehicles. They are no longer on this lot in Victorville California. My guess is they were resold in countries having fewer environmental regulations. (caranddriver.com/news/a15339250/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-vw-diesel-emissions-scandal)
HEAVEN and EARTH
I visited the Duomo Cathedral in Florence and made the climb into Brunelleschi\'s famous dome. As with many gothic cathedrals, the dome was painted in a scene reflecting the prevailing idea of the afterlife, of both heaven and hell. I photographed the lower realm in series and assembled them as a panorama. I made a panoramic photo of a sports bar in California\'s central valley with my iphone and when I saw the result the two just seemed to work together.
DRURY-CHENEY GROVE HUMBOLDT REDWOODS STATE PARK 2019
Late succession forests and the old growth ecosystem they support are irreplaceable. Once they are liquidated, the climate changes due to lack of forest evapotranspiration and the fact that there is nothing to slow down the wind which further exacerbates the drying. The fossil fuel industry takes most of the heat for causing climate change but the timber industry plays an equal or greater role. Logging irreparably destroys the ecosystem, habitat and environment of a place and it takes millennia to rebuild itself. What results is very different from what was previously there. \"Reforestation\" creates a mono-culture of even-aged thickets of closely spaced saplings called \"dog hair\" that burns catastrophically. Just ask the previous residents of Paradise, California, downwind of a previously \"reforested\" clear-cut when the Camp Fire broke out. I try to bring attention to these realities through my work and to bear witness to the change taking place.
BULL CREEK FLAT HUMBOLDT REDWOODS STATE PARK 2023
The redwood forests of northern California were being liquidated at a furious pace at the turn of the century. Redwood logs were being shipped around the world to be used in public works projects for \"redwood stave piping\" because of the wood\'s durability and resistance to rot. The general population of California had no idea what was going on up north until the first road was built in 1917. As soon as people began to travel this road and saw the astounding size of these trees there was a public outcry to halt the logging. Companies established during the previous century were hard at work logging the forest and transporting the wood by ship. Slowing this commerce down was not easy and didn\'t really happen until 97% of the only redwood forest on earth, had been liquidated. Powerful companies with political connections kept conservationists at bay until nearly every tree was taken. Various organizations were formed to try and slow down this disaster and a few groves were saved along with approximately a dozen state parks and, finally, in 1968 Redwood National Park. Logging company resistance was so fierce that as soon as the boundaries of Redwood National Park were set they logged right up to and in some cases into the park boundaries. Bull Creek Flat was purchased with money donated by John D Rockefeller in the late 1920\'s to the Save the Redwoods League ensuring that Pacific Lumber company got full price for that stand of redwoods, then they put highways through it. In 1985 Maxxam corporation took over Pacific Lumber in a junk bond leveraged buyout. Charles Hurwitz, Maxxam\'s CEO, held the last remaining redwoods for ransom and threatened to log until major activism caused senator Diane Feinstein to broker a deal to pay him, full price, not to liquidate the planet\'s last remaining grove of redwoods in private hands, the Headwaters Forest. The whole story is told in Greg King\'s book THE GHOST FOREST.
Ili RIVER DELTA WETLANDS, Kazakhstan 2015
Hundreds of plant and animal species make a home in the Ili River Delta, including dozens that are threatened or endangered. Millions of birds, including massive Dalmatian pelicans and endangered white-headed ducks, many fish species including Ship sturgeon and Wels Catfish, the world\'s largest, make use of these wetlands and are in steep decline. Once home to the, now extinct, Caspian Tiger, it has been identified as the best location for the establishment of a, critically endangered, Siberian Tiger population. The Ili River\'s headwaters are in China and Kazakhstan is essentially a Russian satellite. It doesn\'t bode well for political stability or the ecosystem. “In 2012, Kazakhstan declared the delta a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention, a treaty that encourages the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands throughout the world. But with significant amounts of the Ili River’s water being diverted for dams and irrigation, some observers say the delta could become vulnerable to the same sort of environmental problems faced by wetlands near the Aral Sea, which has shrunk rapidly in recent decades\". This is a mosaic created from 36 satellite images. Credit: NASA and US Geological Survey
BONE YARD-TRUST BUT VERIFY, Tucson AZ, 2013
Davis Monthan Air Force Base, Tucson AZ, is the long term storage facility for military aircraft. This is a satellite image mosaic constructed from 56 individual satellite images courtesy of NASA and the USGS. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty required the Soviet Union and the United states to equalize their numbers of strategic, nuclear capable weapons. This necessitated the destruction of a certain number of B-52 stratofortress bombers to achieve parity with the Russians. The bombers were chopped into pieces using a crane with a large guillotine type blade and the parts left in the open where they could be photographed by aerial reconnaissance and satellite for verification purposes. The remains of this program are visible in the right- center section of this image where intact and dismantled B-52 bombers are stored.
Retrospective
Strata Gallery, Santa Fe
September 2024
Each print in this show is representative of a much larger body of work. I settle on a subject or location and re-photograph it periodically producing large series of the same or related subjects and locations over extended periods of time.
Although this show is all prints, I work in a few different media. I became interested in electronic imaging towards the end of my undergraduate work at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Working with color photography and printing along with the electronic video image caused a hybridization of these media with the film grain and Ben Day dots of color printing and the delta shadow masked raster of the cathode ray tube which foreshadowed digital pixels. The element they all have in common is the DOT. Light and color is created and expressed by the overlaying of primary color dots or by placing them in close proximity to one another to be optically mixed by the viewer. My interest in large scale reproduction, both manual and photomechanical, led me to large format printing, which I began doing in the late 1990’s with the beginnings of that technology.
I missed the western landscape and moved from Rhode Island to San Francisco in 1978. I began exploring and photographing the Western U.S. I assembled a video studio where
I interfaced video synthesizers with audio synthesizers to produce non-objective works of direct video synthesis. I supported myself with commercial video and photography jobs. A television station job put me in contact with The Nature Conservancy in 1991. The project was all helicopter work on Maui. I spent the next few weeks shooting aerial and terrestrial video and photography of rainforests on the Big Island, Kauai and Maui. It began a twenty year association for me with The Nature Conservancy working mostly in California.
Working with their scientists I learned a lot about conservation and ecology and about the threats to our environment, like habitat loss and climate change, which began to play out in the coming years. As I traveled around the west photographing it, I began to experience weather anomalies that made it clear things were changing. The southwestern monsoon season became more and more unpredictable, sometimes with dire consequences which necessitated aborting backpacking trips in mid journey. Then the drought began and then the wildfires and floods. The focus of my work from the 1990’s forward became our environment and how we are altering it in irreversible ways.
Things change over time but the rate of change now is accelerating, unnaturally. Places
I photographed in 1980, like Havasupai Canyon no longer exist in familiar form. Places devastated by wildfire become a totally new environment completely unrecognizable as the place they once were. My primary focus at present is old growth forests which we are losing at a staggering rate increasing desertification and climate change.
No AI was used in the production of these images and everything produced before 2010 was shot on film. All images are available as individual prints or as composite prints in any size from wallet to billboard, priced accordingly.
Grant Johnson
September 2024