Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Don Krohn, photographer

Shadow Study, Zagreb

Don Krohn began taking photographs as a child, and later went on to master the traditional photographic arts and become an expert printer in the tradition of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Although he is entirely self-taught, he has mastered virtually all aspects of the medium, ranging from photojournalistic style 35mm work to meditative large format photographic studies, working both in color and black-and-white. He has produced a highly regarded and constantly evolving body of work, and his images have been published internationally, shown in numerous museums and galleries, and are held in numerous public and private collections, including, locally, the Cape Cod Museum of Art. He has photographed in locales throughout the United States and in foreign places as diverse as Nepal, Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, among many others.

His work was recognized by Minor White, the famous mentor to a generation of photographers, as having “a definite sense of humanistic and symbolic presence.” Davis Pratt, for years the noted photography director at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, while curating a one-man show of Krohn’s work, described him as “one of the most talented and innovative photographic practitioners he had ever encountered.”

In the South of France, an award-winning book published by David R. Godine, is comprised of Krohn’s writings and photographs taken while living in France. He is currently working on a new book.

In addition to working as an artist, Krohn, an Orleans resident, has been active in civic preservation and educational activities. He drafted his town’s landmark Architectural Review Bylaw, and was the first president of the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School. He is a founding partner of the Orleans Whole Food Store and Orleans’ Main Street Books, and has earned degrees from Brandeis University and Harvard Law School.

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“Photography is an obsessive passion. So much effort to get everything right, all the technical and artistic decisions: layers of questions about composition, camera angle, format, film choice, lens and shutter settings, optics, processing, printing. And even though I have spent decades deepening and refining my knowledge about these issues, they are by far the easier things to handle in the creative process. These are the variables more or less in my control. “The vast territory that is not in my control presents the greater and more exhilarating challenge: changing light, shadow patterns, a person's expression, the shape of a mountain, the time of year. In short, all the wonderful wide world. As a photographer working in natural environments, outside of the studio, I have no control over what I am looking at, but I try to see it as clearly and profoundly as possible, and to communicate, in my images, something about what I am seeing and why I want to look at it, and in turn something about myself. It is an interactive process in which I am something of a catalyst, and which I have come to call, in my personal lexicon, ‘the influence of light.’

“My images are photographs, and the prints are called archival pigment prints. They are matted on 8 ply archival mat board and backed by archival foam core, and all are produced in limited editions of ten plus one artist’s proof. As to media, the paper is Breathing Color Elegance 300gsm 100% cotton fine art paper, and the inks are museum grade Epson UltraChrome K3. The editions are produced by Bob Korn Imaging, one of the nation’s most acclaimed fine art digital print shops. By limiting my editions strictly to ten, I enhance the current and future value of my work, both for the casual buyer and the serious collector.”

Click here to see more of Don's work.

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