Page 21 - the NOISE June 2014

FAllIng In loVe
ThRoUGh The leNs
ABOVE: Whisper of Wind, an example of the equestrian portraiture Shane Knight has become internationally famous for.
sToRy by ClaiR aNNa Rose
On a May afternoon I meet shane Knight at his gallery, 5 time. sometimes it was five years later.” He started photographing the horses and the land, and
east Aspen, in downtown Flagstaff. I have an abundance of questions about film photography, as the artist exclusively shoots in film. Mr. Knight takes the time to answer my ques- tions, explaining the steps it takes to use one of the folding bellows land cameras he shoots with.
For Mr. Knight, a commonly asked question is: why in this digital age does he shoot film? He sums it up in one word: Romance. The whole process of going somewhere he wants to shoot, learning and getting to know the place, looking through the lens, setting up the shot, seeing the negative on the light box, developing the photo and seeing it finally mat- ted, framed and hung on a wall is romantic.
“My subject matter is all based on what I love,” he tells me. “I only photograph what I like. I only photograph what I know and I know horses. I surround myself in this landscape. when you’re in the upper desert in these canyons and you’re by yourself for five days and you’re the only one making tracks
— you start getting intimate with the landscape. You build a relationship and I have a relationship with horses. I loved horses before I photographed them.”
In addition to landscape and horse photography Mr. Knight has another genre of photography he is drawn to, and though he hasn’t done a show on the subject he tells me a bit about it. “I love roadside images. I love that stuff. I’m not that old, but I’ve been on the planet long enough and I’m starting to see things go away. For example, if I see a really cool gas station I take advantage of it. If I’m like, ‘Oh that’s really cool, I need to come back and photograph that.’ Five years later that gas station’s gone and it’s been paved over and there’s something else. You see it disappear in front of you ... and you see that often. now if I see something I like that stops me, and it’s old and I know it may not be around in five, ten years, I’m going to photograph it.”
Mr. Knight is often out hiking, looking for new subjects to photograph and sometimes may hike for days and not take a single picture, he simply gets to know the landscape, and makes mental notes of what he’d like to photograph and when, taking into consideration the time of year when the light may be just right. Prehistoric, an image of a rock forma- tion that looks curiously like a T-Rex’s head (on this month’s cover) is an example of a photo he scouted for years and took numerous trips in order to make the piece possible.
He’ll spend a lot of time waiting for the perfect shot to line up, and he doesn’t mind the wait. “There is the addiction of trying to get something unique and you try to compare it with the shot in your head, and when it comes close enough, then it goes up on the wall. In every shot you see on the wall, there is a couple that just presented themselves for the first
Over time, Mr. Knight has learned to go with his instincts and tells me how the photograph Spirit was captured. while driving home from a day of shooting on the navajo nation he passed a black horse grazing alone in front of the bold con- trast of red wall. He contemplated stopping to take a photo, but decided he had done enough for the day and kept driv- ing. As he drove on, he felt the pull to go back and turned the car around. Back at the spot, he changed his mind again. He found himself driving back and forth between the horse and the way home, before finally going back and setting up to take photos. The horse was too far away to get its atten- tion, but it happened to look up at the perfect moment the photograph was taken.
At the age of 15 Mr. Knight bought two camera lenses with the hope of re-selling them. He found out then that one should never buy lenses without a camera. no one would buy them. He found himself searching for a camera that would fit the lenses, and found an Olympus sLR. “To test everything you have to start shooting it, and once I looked through the lens that first time I fell in love,” he shares. “I still have the camera.”
His first jobs were in photography. He found he was lucky to work in a print shop, and could go shoot a roll of film and take it in to work to be processed. At one early job he was hired as a printer in a portrait studio. One day the photomeis- ter didn’t show up, and Mr. Knight was asked to step in. He had never done studio portraiture before. when the shots didn’t turn out, Mr. Knight wanted to figure out how to be good at portraiture, and practiced for many hours with a stuffed bear as his model, experimenting with lighting, lenses and settings. He became good at studio photography and ended up doing shoots more than printing, and in Denver he worked as a wedding photographer.
“Then one day I was just burned out,” he recalls. “I sold all my gear except for one camera and I came out west.” He got a job working with horses on saguaro Lake Ranch in the Tonto national Forest. “I was being interviewed to be a ranch hand and the owner tried to talk me out of the job.” The owner de- scribed the hard labor that the job would entail, and for Mr. Knight, at that time, it sounded perfect. “My only request was,
‘Don’t ask me to take any pictures.’”
while working on the ranch Mr. Knight almost sold his
camera. “The guy looked at me and asked, ‘Are you sure you want to sell this camera?’ He told me to take a week and think about it.” In that week he went out to shoot again, to make sure the camera was still working. “I just fell in love with it again,” he tells me.
after getting a print of the ranch made in Phoenix, his boss saw it and asked if he could do some more photography of the ranch and Mr. Knight reminded him of their original ar- rangement.
His job at the ranch in Arizona led to a ranching job in wyo- ming, where he would spend the summers. while working in the Jackson Hole area of wyoming, he saw an ad to enter into a tailgate sale for fifty dollars. “It was a horse event,” he de- scribes. He matted and framed his horse photographs for the show. when he drove up and let down his tailgate in about four hours he had made a thousand dollars. “People just went wild for my horse images.” He had been bitten by the bug to do art shows and started showing his art frequently.
Later, his photographs happened to be in the right place at the right time — a friend was looking at his photos on the ranch where she worked when a guest saw them and ex- pressed interest in buying a print. when another guest want- ed to buy prints, it caught the ranch owner’s attention, and she asked if Mr. Knight would be interested in photograph- ing her guests; but he was only interested in photographing horses without riders. six months went by and he got a call from the ranch owner asking him to reconsider. “she caught me at the right time,” Mr. Knight tells me. “I said ‘I’ll do this for you if you let me show my artwork at the same time.’”
He started photographing the guests at the dude ranch — a new group of people each week. He would show the guests the photos he took of them with his artwork on display on easels behind the prints of the guests. “It was an overnight success,” he remembers. The job at the dude ranch led to jobs at other ranches and bigger art shows. “In a short amount of time I’m in the Arabian Horse show — the largest horse show in the world and I’m a sponsor. It just went so fast. Pretty soon I was doing the national Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. we saved up our money and opened up a gallery here in Flagstaff.” One of the main reasons Mr. Knight and his wife chose to move to Flagstaff was for Hidden Light, who used to be Mr. Knight’s printers in wyoming and had also relocated to Flagstaff.
now, a month shy of eight years later, the shane Knight Gallery is opening a second location at 226 w. Route 66 in williams. For Mr. Knight, the town compliments his artwork
— a cowboy town, the gateway to Grand Canyon and home of a famous railway — and for the town, which hallmarks the quintessential western Frontier, it’s just short of photographic knighthood. ShaneKnight.com
| Clair anna Rose can ride those wild horses.
arts@thenoise.us
thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news • JUNE 2015 • 21