Web Links

Images from the fabled gold rush country of early of California, by George and Jo Ann Aiello, a devoted husband and wife team that have spent many years catching the elusive moods and vanishing landscapes of the Mother Lode. George and Jo Ann are also the brains behind ArtistPresentations.com, which is responsible for the elegance and accessibility of this website.

“I have wanted to photograph the everyday, the discarded, the taken-for-granted. Those things, photographed in a non-dramatic manner, can prompt an inner event belonging to each viewer alone. I didn’t begin this as a style intentionally; it is simply the way I see. I believe in beauty. It’s what makes art irresistible. Sometimes the result is the irony of the commonplace made beautiful.” 

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel are two of America's foremost landscape photographers, interpreting culture and environment for over 25 years. They met in 1979 and began collaborating in 1991. They have a unique style of pairing b&w prints by Cook with color images by Jenshel.

The photographic master of eccentric Americana, Graham captures the colorful, sometimes surreal, and often bizarre, in the thoroughly American landscape. Graham seeks out subjects which celebrate our singular freedom of expression in colorful roadside attractions and general oddities in people and things. Dave brings relevance to the creativity and dreams of the common man.

"Our current and ancestral relationships with the land leave artifacts that interest me. This is indeed a curious relationship since it has evolved and changed with time. I find it engaging to find and isolate these remnants, record them in current context and present these images, occasionally sad, sometimes contemplative, and often humorous, for viewing."

   "I started photographing… about fifteen years ago. A recovering poet, I had had enough of wandering about inside myself, of trying to put myself into words. So I bought a camera and went out to look at the world. I soon discovered that the basic impulse that caused me to trip the shutter was to praise. 
   A couple of years later, I put together my first darkroom. In the process of learning to convey what I saw and felt, I discovered a deep satisfaction in printmaking. Thus the twin motives of my photographic work: to make and to praise."

"Photographing the California landscape is a rich tradition…. This dominating legacy has offered little to reconcile the landscape with its history of human intervention. In between the majestic and the mundane is where photographer Daniel Kasser stakes his territory. His recent series, Technosites, surveys the regional landscape, but takes aim at our comfort with scenery by making the methods of man’s imprint on the land tangible."

                                                   —Diana Daniels, Associate Curator, Crocker Museum

"I am a fine art photographer who specializes in the hand-made photograph. With a background in music and geology, I strive to combine a contemporary eye with 19th century processes to produce work that is uniquely my own. I often use diffused focus lenses to explore obscure, little-known places and make images that can be at once calm and unsettling. I often photograph in fog or very low light, giving many of my images the ethereal quality that I am after."

Ken Light is one of the most important social documentary photographers of our time. His work has appeared in books, magazines and exhibitions. His most recent book Coal Hollow (University of California Press) was published in 2005. He teaches at U.C. Berkeley and serves as the curator of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism.

"I work with many different film formats, particularly those that are panoramic or cinematic in nature. These formats pose unique challenges; yet provide dramatic results. My photographic work gravitates towards places and sites where the light is almost literally spilling over or across the subject matter. I strive to deliver images that provide a sense of serenity and calm."

Henry Paine is like the Eugene Atget of Stockton, California, for his artful documentation of the city where he lives and repairs cameras. He is also a master printer and his works, in addition to architecture, include landscapes, plants, abstracts, and industrial sites.

   "What I attempt to do… is focus attention on some aspect of a much larger visual environment, to have the viewer see the scene as of for the first time and to see the beauty often inherent in the ordinary.
   For the last two years, I have concentrated on the importance of light as a separate component of a completed image. …the quality of light in the image is what separates a competent print from a special print."

Inspired by a mystical experience while viewing a photograph at age 11, Phel Steinmetz decided to become a photographer. The arid landscape of Southern California and its rapid development gradually became the focus for his environmental photography. His artworks question why we create a schism between the natural and the constructed, and often suggest we become more holistically responsible for the changes we produce in our environment.