Stephen Strom
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American, born 1942
Projects/Portfolios
Earth Forms
Introduction
These images were assembled from photographs of the southwest taken between 1981 and 2001. They attempt to capture what is nearly beyond the camera’s grasp: a land shaped by millennial forces and yesterday’s cloudburst into undulations of color and form – its history reimagined in light that at once penetrates and sculpts.
For the poet Joy Harjo, “the(se) photographs are not separate from the land or larger than it. Rather, they gracefully and respectfully exist inside it. Breathe with it. The camera is used to see with a circular viewpoint which becomes apparent even though the borders of the images remain rectangular. The land in these photographs is a beautiful force, in the way the Navajo mean the word beautiful, an all encompassing word, like those for land and sky, that has to do with living well, dreaming well, in a way that is complementary to all life.”
I bring to this landscape the sensibilities of an astronomer who has lived in the desert for almost 20 years, and in whom the desert has lived for more than 30. My tools were simple: a 35mm SLR and long focal length lenses whose power to compress vast desert spaces can create an illusion of intimacy, of comprehension: inviting viewers to look deeply into what light and earth together form.
Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA, United States
Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ, United States
Verve Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe, NM, United States
Sand Mirrors. Richard B. Clarke and Stephen E. Strom. Polytropos Press, Tucson, 2012
Earth Forms. Photographs by Stephen Strom. Essays by Albert Stewart and Gregory McNamee. Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2009
Sonoita Plain: Views from a Southwestern Grassland. Jane Bock, Carl Bock & Stephen Strom. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 2005
Tseyi: Deep in the Rock. Laura Tohe & Stephen Strom. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 2005
Secrets from the Center of the World. Photographs by Stephen Strom. Text by Joy Harjo. University of Arizona, TUCSON, 1989
Secrets from the Center of the World. Joy Harjo and Stephen Strom. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1989
Artist Statement
I have spent of my professional life as an astronomer, searching out patterns encoded in the light from distant stars in the hope of understanding how our sun and solar system came to be. Over a research career spanning four decades, I have spent countless hours perched on remote mountaintops, looking upward mostly, but also contemplating the desert below during those precious moments of quiet and solitude before and after nights spent at the telescope.
During those times, I became drawn to, then seduced by the changing patterns of desert lands sculpted by the glancing light of the rising and setting sun: light that reveals forms molded both by millennial forces and yesterday’s cloudburst into undulations of shapes and colors. In response, I began what has become a 30-year long devotion not only to capturing in images those remarkable patterns and the rich history they encode, but to attempting the nearly impossible: via camera, paper, silver and ink, to evoke and perhaps recreate the powerful emotional responses that desert lands elicit in me. My tools are simple - a 4x5 view camera or 35mm SLR, and long focal length lenses whose power to compress space can create an illusion of intimacy, of comprehension, inviting viewers to look deeply into what light and earth together form.
During the past three decades, most of my work has centered on interpretations of the landscape itself. More recently, freed by digital cameras from the physical and psychological burdens of large view cameras and heavy tripods, I have turned my attention from the macro- to micro- worlds: choosing to image fragments of the desert and seaside beaches that express in their quiet, understated way the same powerful combination of pattern, history and emotion as the grander landscape.
My images attempt to provide a glimpse into what the late essayist Ellen Meloy described as a “geography of infinite cycles, of stolid pulses of emergence and subsidence, which, in terms geologic and human, is the story of the (earth) itself.” What I hope to re-create is what Meloy called the “calm of water”, the “spill of liquid silences”, and a “quality of light and color that pierces the heart.”
Stephen Strom spent his professional career as an astronomer. Born in 1942 in New York City, he graduated from Harvard College in 1962. In 1964 he received his Masters and Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University. From 1964-68 he held appointments as Lecturer in Astronomy at Harvard and Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He then moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook and served for 4 years as Coordinator of Astronomy and Astrophysics. In 1972 he accepted an appointment at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, AZ, where he served as Chair of the Galactic and Extragalactic program. The following 15 years were spent at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA; from 1984-1997 he served as Chairman of the Five College Astronomy Department. In 1998 Strom returned to Tucson as a member of the scientific staff at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory where he carried out research directed at understanding the formation of stars and planetary systems and served as an Associate Director of the Observatory. He retired from NOAO in May, 2007.
Stephen began photographing in 1978. He studied both the history of photography and silver and non-silver photography in studio courses with Keith McElroy, Todd Walker and Harold Jones at the University of Arizona. His work, largely interpretations of landscapes, has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is held in several permanent collections including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the University of Oklahoma Art Museum, the Mead Museum in Amherst, MA, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His photography complements poems and essays in three books published by the University of Arizona Press: Secrets from the Center of the World, a collaboration with Muscogee poet Joy Harjo; Sonoita Plain: Views of a Southwestern Grassland, a collaboration with ecologists Jane and Carl Bock; Tseyi (Deep in the Rock): Reflections on Canyon de Chelly co-authored with Navajo poet Laura Tohe; as well in : Otero Mesa: America’s Wildest Grassland, with Gregory McNamee and Stephen Capra, University of New Mexico Press (2008). A monograph comprising 43 images, Earth Forms, was published in 2009 by Dewi Lewis Publishing. His most recent publication is Sand Mirrors, a collaboration with Zen teacher and poet Richard Clarke (Polytropos Press, 2012).
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