Page 25 - the NOISE August 2012

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STORY & PHOTOS
BY SARAH GIANELLI
BY SARAH GIANELLI stretching photography to another level
Remember that (somewhat cheesy) movie What Dreams May Come in which Robin Williams is searching for his wife in the Technicolor fields of the Hereafter? Well, photog- rapher Shane McDermott doesn’t go so far as to turn tum- bling mountainsides fuchsia or the sky electric green, but his images do vibrate with a vivid clarity that invokes a heavenly otherworldliness. It is as if he is showing us what we would see if the windows of our perception were washed clean of the grime that obscures our ability to experience the natural world in all its unfathomable, mind-blowing beauty.
In a sense, eradicating that film of dullness is precisely what Mr. McDermott is doing to his photographs. Using digital sliders, he brightens the highlights and darkens the shadows — all of which were present in the original photo- graph but lost in the limitations of technology. He does not consider his photographs enhanced, but “optimized.”
“I don’t manipulate my image content,” he explains. “All the detail was there. There’s never anything that I add or delete except for the occasional dust spot.” His goal is to optimize the color, saturation, detail and luminosity to reflect not only what he saw, but also what he felt at the time of capture.
At the time he took the photo that would become Ephem- eral Highlands, a large aluminum print currently on display at Gallery 527, he felt “a sense of deep peace, vast expansive- ness and freedom. And also a feeling like it was otherworldly. It encompasses in one image the whole spectrum of what I experience in my life, from the darkest depths of edginess to the most brilliant heights of clarity.”
Ephemeral Highlands was taken at nearly 14,000 feet in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, where Mr. McDermott rode out 30 hours of treacherous weather in his tent, waiting for the storm to break and the light to pour through. Silvery- blue Ice Lake is cupped beneath white peaks, a thin trickle snaking out into green meadowlands.
“That isn’t anything like what I saw,” he says, showing me the original photograph. “It’s sort of like looking through cel- lophane. It doesn’t capture the clarity, the detail, the sharp- ness or the luminosity I saw at the time of capture.” In the image after he “worked” it, the grass is alive with green, and the individual blades are crisply defined. The sunlit portions of the storm clouds are a blinding white; there is even detail in the darkest shadows of the rocky terrain.
As Mr. McDermott explains, in daylight a camera does not register light value to the same extent our eyes do. It only captures light through five stops of difference, while
our eye can see approximately 30 stops. (The opposite is true in nighttime photography, the setting of some of Mr. McDermott’s most stunning work, when the camera is able to pick up more light than our eyes. This phenomenon can be seen in pieces such as Ancient Star Gazer in which a gnarled tree stands against an impossibly purple star-clustered sky.) Mr. McDermott uses vari- ous computer programs to increase the dynamic range of his day- time images to create a closer representation to what your eye would have perceived.
Old time photography greats such as Ansel Adams and Clyde Butcher (whose company Mr. McDermott has shared in the pag- es of Arizona Highways and Outdoor Photographer) were doing similar work — heightening the contrast, bringing out the detail
— in the darkroom, albeit through different means, sometimes working an image for years until they got it just right.
“Photography itself is manipulation,” says Mr. McDermott, com- menting on the sticky subject. “It depends on the lens you use, what you include in the frame. As a photographer, I’m only going to include the elements I want you to look at and somehow dis- tort the scene to invoke a specific response in the viewer.”
Mr. McDermott leaves it open to the viewer to what they want to experience, but what he hopes comes through is a strong, im- pactful way of seeing nature in all of its glory.
“That’s why I don’t shoot ugly scenes,” he says. “I want to cel- ebrate the beauty and astonishing fragility of nature. And have that conveyed as ‘Oh my God, is this really our planet? This is the planet we’re trashing?’”
It was surprising to learn that Mr. McDermott has only been photographing for eight years. His primary work has been as a holistic healer, and has had a practice in Flagstaff for the past 11 years.
A safari wedding in Africa sparked his interest in photography and for the next four years he traveled the world, amassing a li- brary of nearly 300,000 images. Clearly displaying a natural talent, he began getting requests from friends and encouragement to submit his pieces to magazines. It was an invitation to be fea- tured in Outdoor Photographer’s annual landscape edition in 2008 that turned a soul-satisfying pastime into a budding business. In December 2011, he had a two-page spread of Northern Arizona’s Grand Falls (colloquially known as Chocolate Falls) included in Arizona Highways’ 50 greatest landscape photos of all time. In September, Mr. McDermott’s work will most likely enjoy the cover of Arizona Highways for an issue that focuses on Jerome.
“Photography has always been, and really still is, just a hobby. Being published sort of changed that and I don’t know if I like
the way it changed it,” he admits. “I almost never get to photo- graph any more. In the beginning, it was used very intention- ally as part of my spiritual practice. It was a profound way for me to get in touch with my extended self, which is all of nature. Years of meditating can lead to a sense of being disconnected; photography was a way of grounding it into something real and practical.”
This is a pivotal time for Mr. McDermott and his photography. Currently he shows his images on thin sheets of aluminum; emulsion dyes are actually etched into the metal, giving them a luminosity and durability impossible to attain on paper. The medium is fitting for his images — the high gloss and depth a reminder of the lens through which we inescapably perceive the world. But Mr. McDermott seems restless and dissatisfied with the limitations of the camera and photography in general. He wants to take his photography in a direction he hasn’t seen before: getting rid of the square frame entirely, incorporating sculptural elements, and experimenting with nontraditional framing and matting styles and materials.
“Part of why my interest in photography has waned is be- cause it seems so confined — so stuck in a box. I have to get out of the box with my own photography or I won’t do it,” he says. “It has to keep evolving and the evolution has to be pur- poseful. It has to serve something greater than myself. It has to contribute to the larger evolution of how we relate to the natural world, and how we relate to each other.”
“We’ve seen nature photography displayed the same way for close to 100 years and it really hasn’t fundamentally shifted our relationship with nature. Environmental degradation is hap- pening worse than ever. To me, the dysfunction of how we see and treat nature is just a reflection of our own inner dysfunc- tion. As a nature photographer, I’m asking, ‘is there a role that I could play that would help shift the mass perspective and our relationship to nature in a way that changes something?’ I don’t know. Maybe it’s very naïve. But I think it’s worth explor- ing.”
Mr. McDermott’s work — a refreshing variety of wildlife and landscape photography that goes far above and beyond the stock Southwest imagery — is on display at Gallery 527 in Je- rome, Goldenstein Gallery in Sedona, and at the Work of Artists in Scottsdale. A photo gallery is also online at shanemcder- mottphotography.com.
| Sarah Gianelli sometimes frightens those around her when she writes. sarahgianelli@hotmail.com
thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news magazine • AUGUST 2012 • 25