Pourciau Photography: Intimate Landscapes

In December of 2015, after many years away, I reconnected with one of my first loves — landscape photography — focusing not on grand vistas, but on the more inward and intimate artworks of nature. The term “intimate landscapes” derives from the title of an exhibit of Eliot Porter prints in 1979, the first one-person exhibition of color photographs ever held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Porter's first book, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, published in 1962, interlaces his images with passages written by Henry David Thoreau. One passage in particular (taken from a journal entry) captures my state of mind when I'm out in the field:

Alone in distant woods or field . . . I once more feel myself grandly related.  . . .I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow all about me. I enter some glade in the woods . . . and it is as if I had come to an open window.  . . .This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort or boneset to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible companion, and walked with him.

In this stillness and solitude, I become an antenna tuned to Nature’s artistry, receiving, in a riotous jumble of signals, every frequency of her “shapes . . . colours, lights, and shades.” Cézanne offers a painterly version of this feeling as well as that moment when vision finally distills a design out of Mother Nature’s “iridescent chaos” and we put brush to canvas (or eye to camera):

Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel colored by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos . . . nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms. We live in a rainbow of chaos. Time and reflection . . . modify, little by little, our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.

Sources of inspiration: Eliot Porter, of course, Minor White, Brett Weston, Harry Callahan, Ernst Haas, Shinzo Maeda, and John Chang McCurdy. White, known for his writing as well as his images, sought to capture the essence of a creative photograph:

Not equal to             equivalent to
Not metaphor          equivalence
Not standing for      but being also
Not sign                    but direct connection to invisible Resonance

Like any art, landscape photography has evolved, and this evolution, dramatically altered and accelerated by computers, has set some of the profession down on a Martian plain. For in today's digital darkroom, dragging sliders to extremes, so simple and so seductive, has left many landscape photographs glowing with otherworldly contrast and colors. If my own evolution had not been cut short by my years away from the field, I too might be reveling in the unfettered creativity and artistry of such contemporary work. But as it is, still rooted in a more restrained tradition, my “intimate landscapes” remain tightly tethered to the Earth, even as I photograph (compose, capture, and process) to create images that vibrate with Minor White’s “invisible Resonance.” The photographs displayed here reflect this artistic balance — finding that Earth-bound Resonance — the few exceptions being certain abstract images meant to vibrate with my vague “impression” of a scene, where, in the interest of full disclosure, I will admit to being seduced by sliders myself.

My thanks to Charles Cramer, master landscape photographer and printer, for graciously answering my pestering questions, as I labored up the steep trail from film to digital. And a heartfelt thank you to my son Seth for running his splendid eye for graphic design over this site and then offering the suggestions of an artist.

It is my sincere wish that you will enjoy viewing these images as much as I have enjoyed making them.

About the galleries: Within each season, the images appear chronologically, oldest at the top and newest at the bottom.

Bruce Pourciau, 
landscape photographer and recently retired professor of mathematics at Lawrence University, resides in Appleton, Wisconsin, with his wife, Nancy. They have three children and six grandchildren.

Because "the last shall be first," let me here, at the end, thank Nancy, for supporting  my return to landscape photography with unconditional warmth and enthusiasm. (I am quite aware, of course, that some of that enthusiasm surely springs from wanting me to have something to do, now that I’m retired, other than wander aimlessly around the house.)