Retrospective

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

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