Pages:  Home | VIDEO | GIVING BACK | REBECCA | PRINTS | CONTACT | BLOG
Portfolios:  I WANT US TO GO WEST | ART STABLE EXHIBIT 2011 | WESTERN HIGHWAYS | PALOUSE: AUTUMN | ICELAND | GREENLAKE | I WENT INTO THE GARDEN | AFRICA | PEOPLE | Local Non-Profit

REBECCA

When I was 17, I bought my first SLR camera at the mall in the small town in Montana where I grew up. The enthusiastic guy who sold me the camera was also my biology teacher and he was crazy about photography. I have been a photographer since that day.

In the very beginning I photographed the landscapes that stretched out interminably in every direction. My childhood felt lonely, growing up in a vast and empty place in the last house on the edge of town, and the way I shoot has always been influenced by that view of the world outside my window, a giant somewhat somber canvas, usually breathtakingly beautiful or heartbreaking, punctuated at times by people and their lives.

As a photographer I have traveled around the world and ventured into countless diverse settings as an observer and participant and it has been enormously satisfying and joyful to make pictures of people and the landscapes they inhabit.

For me photography is about synergy, my obsession with a beautiful melding of subject and setting. It's rarely enough to have a pretty face or a perfectly lit face. I am looking for complexity and the relationships that exist in any setting between all of the elements. Ultimately, for me, a successful photograph is very much about evoking powerful emotions. I am naturally drawn to our deep interconnectedness as human beings and even when I have been shooting in the most abject poverty in the world I am attracted to our similarities.

I want my photographs to inform our progress as a human society even as they allow the viewer to hopefully understand or remember something they know of themselves. I have a deep sense of compassion and commitment to issues that informs my work.

At Vassar I studied art and history and all of it comes together for me in my love of photography and writing. I think that photography is a courageous art and even as ideas about the medium are changing in this digital age, it still means having a giant curiosity and the intention to put ideas, experience and emotion into the making of an image that will endure for a very long time. Every photo I take is about what happened in the past and it's equally about wanting to express something that will be meaningful to someone in the future.

The direction of my work has changed in recent years. I divide my time between 2 efforts. I create and sell lovely, interesting large-scale landscape photographs to individual collectors and corporations, large and small. My current body of work is titled "I WANT US TO GO WEST." I spend some time each year on the road with my digital Hasselblad, shooting as the spirit moves me and capturing images that reflect my roots and love of our Western landscapes.

In 2009 I made a commitment to spend some of my time each week working on a long-term documentary project with the 4C Coalition in Seattle, an organization that is changing the lives of at-risk teenagers. This is a volunteer project. I read an article in the Seattle Times about Hazel Cameron and I had been looking for a way to make a contribution in my city to an effort that I felt might make a difference in the lives of children. It has been very compelling and worthwhile. I have uploaded a couple of my short videos on this website under MULTIMEDIA. The website for this amazing organization is http://www.the4ccoalition .org

I am pleased that Global AIDS Alliance features many of my photos from Africa on their website and in their printed materials. http://www.globalaidsalliance.org

Check out a fantastic organization called RESULTS to see more of my work. They an international grassroots lobbying organization, working to end the worst aspects of poverty in the world. www.results.org

In recent years I have shot assignments for magazines, completed numerous advertising shoots for large and small companies, sold stock photos through Getty Images, exhibited photographs from my current bodies of work and also photographs that I have shot in Ireland, Turkey, Africa, Iceland, Newfoundland, Italy and the San Juan Islands in Washington State. My work has been purchased by public art programs and won top honors in juried art competitions.