Boulder, CO 80304
720-917-9340
A Few Things I Could Say About My Photography (email: steveobryan@msn.com):
Boulder, Colorado—-a place in which natural beauty is easy to find every day, every season, from every direction. To walk in this natural beauty is an easy path.
My Photography follows from this beauty: Light filtering through my mind’s eye from the 360-degree multi-sensory surround. I’m interested in blending my contact with the elements of nature into the human estimate of color and form.
But photography is an expansive medium. I can also step into what the landscape painter, Kathryn Mapes Turner, calls the “metaphorical fog”, that is, create pictures that move beyond the literal into the mythic. The openness and variety of the western landscape evokes all that we consider mythic—emotional psychological potency, thin places, the spirits, sparks of brilliant light, the seen and unseen, the silence, the open emptiness that’s filled to the brim—those places where we are left on our own to “contact” a wildness beyond our control. This contact can cut off the ordinary world, become muse-like, pulling at me to see where it leads.
Photography comes from within, skirting the edges of self-portraiture, quite literally from the inside out. Familiar images, perhaps, but ones that carry the recognition of personal meaning. As the American photographer, Sally Mann, writes re: her own photographic process, photographs can break us open to the pulsing depth of life, both the literal and the metaphorical.
Framing a photograph provides me the best break from the regular world—out somewhere things slow down a bit, the clock stops ticking, senses heighten and more sharply focus. If there’s art, this is where it begins.
e: steveobryan@msn.com
