RESONANCE OF STONE
Landscapes with nudes set on the shores of Lake Powell, Resonance of Stone is a fusion of American landscape photography and the human form, creating a visual and emotional impact moving beyond either genre alone. These photographs were made during 2013-2015. This project is ongoing, with the intent of publication, exhibition and sales in the future.
See a representational sampling of these images:
Contact Craig Blacklock for inquiries about this project.
ARTIST STATEMENT
MY VISION
As an environmentally concerned wilderness photographer, the landscape has dominated my vision most of my career; the figure provided the viewer a portal into these places I loved, and wished to help preserve. The models interacted with the environment, mirroring both line and content. I sought to capture an ideal, harmonious relationship between human beings and earth.
Following a near-death experience in 2014, in which I was trapped in a burning building and badly burned, and several deaths of people close to me, I found myself needing to express an upwelling of feelings of vulnerability, terror, pain, scarring, healing, love, longing, mourning and acceptance — emotions universal to all who live long lives. I saw these places I’ve explored over and over again with fresh and grateful eyes and utilized the figure’s expressions and gestures to channel these feelings. This amalgamation of personal emotions and environmental themes became the prominent weft threads woven over the supporting warp of the landscape.
ACKNOWLEDGING MY PREDECESSORS
My photography continues the evolution of the nude within the landscape. It builds upon the heroic nature-feminist statements, and high emotions, expressed in the Pictorialist works of Anne Brigman manifested through the bold, straight photography of Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston and other members of Group f/64.
Like Brigman, I endeavor to generate visual, tactile, and emotional connections between you the viewer, and the landscape — expressing not only what I saw, but much more importantly, what I deeply felt.
My sense of composition began with American landscape painters and photographers (including my father), and the sculptural styling of Ruth Bernhard and Lucien Clergue, it also has influences from Northwest Coast Native American art and travels in Korea.
