| Brent
McCullough
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"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
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
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About
Working With West Coast Imaging
"The
Giclee prints you've produced on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag for my
upcoming exhibition were stunning and a joy to behold. I'm
very grateful for your early suggestion to test several substrates
before begining this project, to really get an understanding
and feeling of how each would look.
Having
printed my own Cibachromes (Ilfochromes) for 12 years in my
darkroom left me hoping that some day I could work in a color
process which 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 Hahnemuhle 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 were superb!
I was wonderfully lucky to be able to work with everyone on the
staff, each one of which brought a high level of expertise to
the various phases of printing. The master scanner (Jeff)
and master printer (Michael)
who I worked with were always available to respond to my requests
and share their knowledge and experience. The dialogue created
among us was extremely helpful. The shipping went smoothly, and
the way you carefully packaged
the prints to protect them was impressive.
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