[EV +/-] Exposure Compensation

© Michael Lundgren

“The art of landscape is fundamentally a way to contemplate the origin.” Daniel Challe

Few months ago I had the opportunity to attend a lecture and a workshop by Phoenix-located photographer Michael Lundgren. Both were a wonderful experience.

Michael has the skill to elevate the significance of his work by speaking about his art with beautiful prose, so that he provides an artistic context to his images, a sense of purpose. It is the combination of extraordinary photography embraced with history, stories and vision. Michael is a master printer that carefully produces his images in the darkroom using silver gelatin to create prints with exquisite tonality. He can push the images to the extremes playing with highlights and dark areas to generate pictures with high contrast but -amazingly - with smooth tonality.

His work, “Transfigurations“, is one of the most impressive series of fine art photography I have seen in a while. Now, his work can be enjoyed in a book published by Radius Books that comes also in a limited edition that includes a limited edition gelatin print of any of the images in the book [an image of your choice], all for a reasonable price. Here you can see some images from the times when the book was edited.

© Michael Lundgren

I have been photographing in the desert for quite some time now. It has become myhome. Why go out there? What is it that draws so many of us to this space? Of course there really is no answer to these questions, yet those of us who are addicted always return. Perhaps it is a world cleared of attachment, brought down to the bare essentials of experience. We are connected to this, first through our biology and later through our desire.

I once read that “the twilight is the crack between the worlds.” When dusk comes, a grayclarity permeates the air. It is a dark that one can see into. As Emmet Gowin once said, it is here that one can “participate in the game of feeling the unknown.”

These photographs are a lust for the primitive, for what lies behind personality, for that which stands in the thin shadow of what I know. They are a search to understand beauty and terror, which are inseparable and which are bound to one utter certainty-that they will change. In this I hope to photograph the impossible; to fix the fugitive on film.

For the past few years I have been looking for time. I haven’t found it. All that exists is its residue; one can only experience change, not time. In the desert nothing remains the same, even the rocks move. Yet there is a thread that runs throughout and sometimes, film can see this.

In the field I have no idea what I will photograph. I have to wait a long time before any inclination appears and I am continually educated by this requirement for patience. The impulse is not related to the stuff of the world; the route is circuitous for the elusive cannot be looked at directly. Later, in the darkroom where the other half goes to work, I am always baffled by what appears in the tray. They are gifts. Where did this come from? Did I make this? I often fear that when I come upon something good it may be the last. – Michael Lundgren

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