SANTA BARBERA, CALIFORNIA.-Beginning on May 3, 2004 the Ansel Adams Gallery will be presenting the exhibition “Robert Turner: Photographer”. Robert Turner has been working professionally with a camera for more than twenty years. Before specializing in natural landscapes he worked in film. As president of Spectrum Films, Inc. he shot on locations from the high Andes of Peru to the streets of Manhattan. He and his partners wrote and directed more than sixty non-fiction films. Their productions were honored with forty-six national and international film festival awards and have been seen by some thirty million people around the English speaking world.
Bob now devotes all of his artistic and business efforts to large format, fine art wild lands photography, logging over 40,000 miles a year in pursuit of the light on the land. His landscape work hangs in numerous private and corporate collections, including those of Sprint, PCS, AG Edwards, Goldman Sachs, and Deloitte & Touche. His pictures are recognized for their strong composition and rich use of color.
Bob grew up steeped in the natural history of the forests of northern New Jersey and the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. A lifelong member of the Audubon Society, he is an avid birder and conservationist. Bob studied anthropology and fine art at the University of Colorado. After college he lived and worked in highland Peru for several years. When not traveling the back roads of the West he lives with his wife near San Diego, California.
"In my photography I strive to create works of enduring beauty---images that will inform the soul and convey my deep belief in the value of wild places.
In the doing, the struggle is to distill the everywhere-you-look splendor of a place like the Utah canyon lands, or Yosemite Valley, or the North Coast redwoods into an essence which fits within the confines of a rectangle. When it works, it is often because I’ve managed to capture a fleeting moment of light, color, motion, or stillness that gives the image a sense of heightened reality. I’m left feeling that I have witnessed something that has transcended the realm of ordinary experience. When it is the sun shafting through a storm ten miles out over a canyon, then the moment can be grand, the mood one of awe. When the camera isolates a quiet coming together of nearby shapes and textures then the feeling may be one of profound serenity.
As I travel, I seek out forms and contours in nature which will give graphic structure to my pictures. In the broad views there is often a palpable foreground that yields to lines curving back---rivers, coastlines, canyons---to pull in the distant landscape. In the closer views it is more likely to be a matter of layers, or diagonals, or elements which work across the plane. I am happy when the result creates depth and dimensionality.
In the search for images I am also drawn inexorably to color, especially when it rides on the wings of atmosphere---mist, rain, storm clouds, the afterglow of sunset. They work together, like the interplay of harmony and melody in music, to create moods.
Ultimately, I am satisfied that my work is successful when the viewer is struck by a sense of place. It may be a very specific connection to the landscape. But it may also be a sudden wave of nostalgia, or a longing to get back out on the land. It is successful when it serves as a tangible reminder in the everyday urban world of the intangible meaning to be found in the natural world outside our own creation." ~Robert
