Brent McCullough
View other featured artists

"After printing my own Cibachromes (Ilfochromes) for 12 years in my darkroom, I hoped that someday I could work in a color process that would overcome the deficiencies of this older method of printing, and allow my work "to sing" as it did on my original chromes.

You have shown me this is finally possible, and in many cases I think the Hahnemühle Photo Rag prints clearly surpassed the aesthetic experience of viewing my original chromes.

The unbelievably awesome sharpness and rendition of detail, the incredible gamut of color, and the ability to actually "feel" the depth of the surface of this paper has really excited me. The prints are superb!"
- Brent McCullough

• View McCullough's Portfolio
  
• Email McCullough
  

Artist's Statement:
I’ve lived my entire life on the East Coast, currently in New York’s Hudson River Valley, where I founded and continue to direct NorthLight Photographic Workshops. Over the last couple of decades, my work has been featured in Audubon, Orion, Sierra Club Calendars and in books by Abrams, Scribners and Time-Life. Teaching workshops for the last twenty years has allowed me to travel extensively all over North America.

This travel has allowed me to experience everything from the flat stretches of the Sonoran Desert, and the rolling Appalachian mountain range to the undulating red rock canyons and ocean shorelines of the Far West. Often I was in shock and filled with deep wonder, not just from the marvelous diversity of the peculiar geographies, but also because each region had a surprisingly unique character of light, so different from anything I’d ever witnessed before.

For me, light has always been the subject of art. I would find myself walking along a trail, and the light would suddenly change. For a few brief moments, it would reveal a subtle description of a very particular geography, while at the same time transforming everything which it touched. Something inside me connected, and the experiences began to change me. I slowly began, over a period of years, to understand that landscapes captured on film could powerfully convey temporal qualities of immutability and timelessness while at the same time describing that which was imperceptibly fleeting. Color film could create images where light seemed to be an entity in itself and a real feeling would be evoked.

And by often using longer exposures, film had the power to reveal a sense of the elasticity of light stretched over time. I could respond to both the changing intensity and the transforming colors of infinite modulations in light. These exposures, which often were minutes long rather than fractions of a second, actually captured things I was incapable of seeing with my human eyes. As years passed by, I began to form a body of work, now collectively titled "Terra Luminis".

Over these years, several of my images were exhibited in Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum, and the Museum of the Hudson Highlands in New York, and published in the Graphis Press Annual Design Awards. And I was encouraged to keep working by receiving a Fellowship from the NJ Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Only recently however, have technical breakthroughs in digital imaging , allowed me to feel I can finally work with color photographic media, in a manner which can fully portray all the complex color and light relationships I originally experienced in my color transparencies. The gifted people at West Coast Imaging, who have refined their color printing skills to a new state of the art level, truly impressed me with what can be brought forth with current technology. To my great delight, I found Scan Master Jeff Grandy and Master Printer Michael Jones to be exceedingly gifted collaborators, working with me to produce the "Terra Luminis" exhibition.

- Brent McCullough, 2004