Ansel Adams, El Capitan, Winter,
Yosemite National Park, California, 1948

The Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to present Our National Parks. Photographs by Ansel Adams, William Bell, Wynn Bullock, Anne Brigman, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, Imogen Cunningham, William Garnett, Rolfe Horn, Philip Hyde, William Henry Jackson, Rondal Partridge, Eliot Porter, Michael Rauner, Alan Ross, Don Ross, John Sexton, Carleton E. Watkins, Brett Weston, Edward Weston and others. The exhibition will be on view through March 27, 2010.

On August 25th, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law an act creating the National Park Service. It was photography and the photographs made as early the 1860s by Carleton Watkins and his contemporaries that brought our national treasures to recognition and preservation. This exhibition celebrates the beauty and majesty of our country's landscape from Yosemite National Park to the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Carleton Watkins, Best General View,
Yosemite, Circa 1867

Nineteenth century photographs are represented by Carelton Watkins' grand Yosemite views, William Henry Jackson's dramatic Yellowstone scenes, and William Bell and the Kolb Brothers southwestern vistas. H.C. Tibbitt's photograph, The Fall Of The Monarch With Troop F, Sixth Cavalry, United States Army, Mariposa Grove, 1899, illustrates the military measures used to protect Yosemite.

America's foremost landscape photographer and ardent environmentalist, Ansel Adams is prominently featured in this exhibition with his early photographs, From Glacier Point, 1927 and Monolith and The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927, plus classic images from Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, McKinley National Park, and Cape Cod National Seashore. Adams received a camera and made his first trip to Yosemite in 1916, both significant events for the young man. Inspired by the splendor and overwhelming sensory experience of Yosemite Adams wrote, "a new era began for me". He soon joined the Sierra Club, serving as director and member throughout his life. His photographic book, Sierra Nevada, the John Muir Trail influenced the creation of Kings Canyon National Park in California.

Philip Hyde, Mt. Denali, Reflection Pond,
Denali National Park, Alaska, 1971

“The most significant parks and monuments are those which serve to protect supreme natural beauty and retain wildness quality” — Ansel Adams

In 1955, at the request of the National Park Service, Ansel Adams with Nancy Newhall curated an exhibition for the Sierra Club's Le Conte Memorial building in Yosemite Valley. The exhibition and subsequent book, This is the American Earth, became a popular success. Exhibited across the country and Europe, the exhibition included the photographs of Wynn Bullock, William Garnett, Philip Hyde, Eliot Porter, Brett and Edward Weston, and many others featured in Our National Parks.

The National Park mission remains the same today as it did hundred and fifty years ago to those inspired by the magnificence of our country's natural wonders — to make the parks accessible to all and to preserve them for future generations.

For more information please call the gallery at 415 788 4641 or email at info@scottnicholsgallery.com. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11-5:30 and by appointment.

Creek, Izu, Japan, 2008

Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to present a collection of photographs by Rolfe Horn, Shinjosui ~ Mind Like Water. The exhibition will be on view from November 5, 2009 through January 2, 2010.

In Rolfe Horn's darkroom hangs a scroll lettered in Japanese calligraphy which roughly translates, may your heart/mind/soul be pure like water. This phrase has become a mantra for Horn, "the saying means so many things.... but what I gather is that we, as human beings have to flow like water, sometimes it is very tough, and other times it is smooth."

This exhibition is the culmination of his fall 2008 trip to Japan and focuses on serene, calm, more meditative landscapes. The photographs all contain an element of water, from the fluid filled rice fields, to the raging waterfalls, to water flowing through the stalks of the bamboo. Horn makes images you can get lost in: quietly spectacular evocations - not just visual records-of their subjects. "There is a certain point in time," he says, "where the harmony of light, atmosphere, and spirit collide, a place in the cosmos where the rhythm of nature unfolds in front of the camera. This can only happen once."

For over 20 years Horn has worked unceasingly in the creation and recreation of his oeuvre. His love affair with photography was sparked at seven years old when he would explore the trails around his home in Northern California. His formal training began in the traditional style of West Coast landscape photography with the instruction of Mark Citret. In 1993 he entered the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California where he studied with Nick Dekker, who introduced him to experimentation with alternative processes. He graduated in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts degree as the most outstanding graduate of his class.

Although rooted in tradition, Horn has always challenged the norm with his unusual images of the urban landscape and of nighttime scenes. As viewers we sense Horn's fascination with the world- we see redwoods like bodies dancing with outstretched arms, parking meters rising like young saplings in the night air, and curved lines of a highway like wings of a bird across the sky. While working, he says, "I become a child where I am fascinated by the scene until it reveals a unique beauty which can only be expressed visually."

Horn is able to create such scenes of drama- luminous images that seem to glow with their own sources of light- by using complex and advanced printing processes The technique of photography is so deeply ingrained in his being that he feels it is "like a reflex- a reaction to the visual and emotional senses". Through alternative processing founded upon his training in the zone system, he is able to create his images exactly as he imagines them in his mind's eye. He has been called a perfectionist in the darkroom.

Rolfe Horn's photographs have been shown in numerous exhibitions since 1989 and are held in many private and public collections.

For more information please call the gallery at 415 788 4641 or email at info@scottnicholsgallery.com. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11-5 and by appointment.

Eucalyptus, Carmel, 1939

Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to present a collection of vintage photographs by Johan Hagemeyer, A Pictorial Interpretation, on view from September 9 through November 3, 2009.

Formally trained as a horticulturalist, Johan Hagemeyer (1884, Amsterdam, the Netherlands - 1962, Berkeley, California) is remembered for being an early 20th century photographer, artistic intellectual, close friend and important early influence in the career of Edward Weston.

Hagemeyer emigrated to southern California in 1911 to grow fruit trees with his brothers, but it was a trip to Washington D.C. and a visit to the Library of Congress where he encountered Alfred Stieglitz's seminal publication, Camera Work. The following year in 1916 an afternoon with Stieglitz at Gallery 291 in New York City convinced him to devote his life to the then emerging world of artistic photography.

Returning to California with an introduction to Anne Brigman he took up residence in San Francisco, attending photography exhibitions and apprenticing with a portrait photographer. But it was a visit in 1917 to Edward Weston's Tropico, California studio that proved to be beneficial for both young photographers. They immediately forged a friendship and working partnership that would have a profound and lasting influence on each others' artistic development.

Portrait of Robinson Jeffers, 1932

In 1923 he opened a portrait studio in San Francisco and also built a summer studio in Carmel, California which soon became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, that included Imogen Cunningham, Roi Partridge, Tina Modotti, and Edward Weston. Inspired by Stieglitz's Gallery 291, Hagemeyer's studio exhibited paintings, sculpture, as well as photographs. Specializing in portraiture, Hagemeyer photographed many prominent figures of the day, especially in the arts, literature, and sciences, including Albert Einstein, Robinson Jeffers and Salvador Dali.

Although Hagemeyer had an intensly intellectual influence on Edward Weston, a divide emerged over their developing and divergent styles. When Weston organized Group f/64, Hagmeyer refused to adapt the theories of straight, unmanipulated photography. His modern compositions embodied a pictorial, soft focus with quiet tonalities. The images in this exhibition are striking for their soft-focus renderings of figures, urban and industrial landscapes, organic forms, like flowers, hands and still lifes.

His 1938 one man exhibition of over 100 photographs at the DeYoung Museum prompted San Francisco Chronicle critic, Alfred Frankenstein to write, "His textures and colors run, rather, to dark-toned richness, but never, and rather miraculously, to the loss of clarity in the representation. In short, the man behind the camera has a painter's sense of the picture surface and a modern photographer's sense of the living, characteristic, unposed moment in the subject's life".

He left Carmel in 1947, disenchanted with its commercialism, and returned to San Francisco, photographing the city from his studio on Telegraph Hill. By 1952 he had settled in Berkeley, where he would spend his remaining years in the company of a few friends from the academic world. He died on May 20, 1962 poor and virtually forgotten at age 78.

For more information or images please call the gallery at 415 788 4641 or email at info@scottnicholsgallery.com. Gallery hours are Tues-Sat, 11am-5:30pm, and by appointment.

Ansel Adams- Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona, 1937

Photographs by Ansel Adams, Morley Baer, Horace Bristol, Paul Caponigro, William Clift, Imogen Cunningham, Philippe Halsman, Lotte Jacobi, Yousuf Karsh, Mark Klett, Arnold Newman, Eliot Porter, Alan Ross, Paul Strand, Todd Webb, and Brett Weston

Scott Nichols Gallery is pleased to present, An Enduring Friendship, Ansel Adams & Georgia O'Keeffe. The exhibition will be on view from June 4th through August 29th, 2009.

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) and Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) shared a fifty-year friendship and a mutual love of the Southwest. Both were drawn to the magical and inspirational landscape; the dramatic, big skies, unusual rock formations, and the extraordinary light of the region.

"All was diamond bright and clear and I fell quickly under the spell of the astonishing New Mexican light." Ansel Adams

In 1927 Adams accompanied Albert Bender, patron and mentor, to the Southwest; in Santa Fe he met writer Mary Austin and immediately began a collaborative book with words and photographs on the architecture and indigenous people of Taos Pueblo. Their trip continued to Taos where Adams took pleasure in the company of art patron, Mabel Dodge Luhan. The community was rich with artists; the painters Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, the photographer Paul Strand, the poet Witter Bynner and myriad other quests converged at Luhan's ranch, Los Gallos. In 1929, O'Keeffe was spending the first of many summers in New Mexico painting, Adams was photographing Taos Pueblo, thus began their shared appreciation for the beauty of the Southwest.

Ansel Adams - Rear of Chuch, Cordova, New Mexico 1938

By 1930 Adams had already made numerous trips to the Southwest, but it was meeting Paul Strand that proved pivotal to his career, affirming his dedication to photography and ceasing his musical ambitions. Strand was photographing the local architecture in New Mexico and the stark landscape. He did not have prints to show Adams, but his recent negatives. The simplified shapes and luminous, richly detailed compositions confirmed for Adams the direction his work on Taos Pueblo was taking him. It was this event that moved Adams from pictorial photography to "straight photography". To quote his autobiography, "My understanding of photography was crystallized that afternoon as I realized the great potential of the medium as an expressive art".

In 1933, Adams traveled from California to New York for the first time. He met Alfred Stieglitz, photographer, gallerist and promoter of modern art. They too forged a friendship and in 1936 Stieglitz gave Adams an exhibition at his gallery, An American Place. Adams considered Stiegltiz an important mentor and began a correspondence that would last until Stieglitz's death. Included in the exhibit is Imogen Cunningham’s Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1934, photographed against his most treasured O'Keeffe painting, Black Iris, and Ansel Adams photograph, Alfred Stieglitz at An American Place, New York City, 1944, showing Stieglitz surrounded by the paintings of O'Keeffe and John Marin.

For Adams, the Southwest was second in inspiration and importance to his beloved Yosemite Valley and the High Sierra, he even considered moving to Northern New Mexico at one point. He toured Northern New Mexico, Arizona and Southwestern Colorado with O'Keeffe and art patron, David McAlpin in 1937 and the following year the group joined Adams on a pack trip through Yosemite. Adams and O'Keeffe continued their correspondence and visits well into their senior years. Many of Adams most celebrated photographs were made in New Mexico; Moonrise Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941; Aspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958; Thunderstorm Over the Great Plains, Cimarron, New Mexico, 1961, all included in this exhibition.

Enhancing the exhibition are southwestern photographs by Morley Baer, Horace Bristol, Paul Caponigro, William Clift, Mark Klett, Eliot Porter, Alan Ross, Paul Strand, and Brett Weston, In addition, portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe by Ansel Adams, Philippe Halsman, Yousuf Karsh, and Arnold Newman are included, plus photographs of O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu homes by Todd Webb.

April 16 — May 30, 2009

Photographs by Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernhard, Wynn Bullock, Mark Citret, Imogen Cunningham,
Lyle Gomes, Leland Rice, Alan Ross, Brett Weston, Edward Weston, Jack Welpott and Minor White.

Please join us for a reception Saturday May 9th, 1:00 - 4:00 pm

Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to present, A Tribute to Don Worth (1924-2009), Influences and the Influenced. The exhibition will be on view from April 16th through May 30th, 2009. Please join us for a reception honoring Don's legacy, Saturday May 9th, 1:00 - 4:00 pm.

Don Worth was a quiet presence in the bay area for over 60 years, capturing the illusive and ethereal landscape, and tropical plants in his award winning garden. Worth's large format photographs - made, generally, with large format cameras - have an incisive clarity and quiet meditative mood. Many images involve enormous spaces, and often use the transformative power of fog, mist and other atmospheric conditions. He was a master printer, interpreting his negatives like a musician interprets a musical score. His unwavering and painstaking dedication has resulted in some of the most beautiful masterworks of twentieth century photography, securing an honored place among the California photographers, who influenced him, Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Edward and Brett Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Bernhard and Minor White.

Worth's childhood on an Iowa farm produced a life long interest in horticulture and he designed and maintained a large subtropical garden at his home near San Francisco. His early life was dedicated to studying the piano and composition. He attended the Juilliard School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music where he received the Bachelor of Music degree (1949) and the Master of Music degree (1951). In 1946, he began serious photography and became the first full-time assistant to Ansel Adams from 1956 to 1960.

In 1962 Worth began teaching photography in the Art Department of San Francisco State University alongside photographer, Jack Welpott. For over thirty years from 1962 until his retirement in 1993 as Emeritus Professor of Art, he inspired scores of students. Included in this exhibition are photographs by a few of the students who continue to follow Worth's passion; Mark Citret, Lyle Gomes, Leland Rice and Alan Ross.

Worth was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and received an appointment from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980. His work has been exhibited in more that 50 solo exhibitions and over 100 group exhibitions. His photographs are owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Getty Museum, the Chicago Institute of Art, the Australian National Gallery, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and many other museums.

Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to announce our latest exhibition of photographs by Kiichi Asano, SNOW COUNTRY.

Inazumi, Japan, February, 1958		Tokamachi, Japan, January, 1957		Wajima, Japan, February, 1956

In addition to the photographs of Kiichi Asano the gallery will exhibit photographs from the Gallery Collection, including works by Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Morley Baer, Bruce Barnbaum, Lawrie Brown, Paul Caponigro, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Dawson, William Garnett, Rolfe Horn, Michael Kenna, Stefan Kirkeby, Barbara Morgan, Donald Ross, Sebastiao Salgado, Paul Strand, Peter Haakon Thompson, George Tice, Brett Weston, Edward Weston, and Marion Post Wolcott.

Ansel Adams, Young Oaks in Snow, Winter, Yosemite, 1935

Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of historic photographs by the late photojournalist Horace Bristol. Bristol's photographs cover a broad sweep of 20th Century history and were published extensively by LIFE Magazine in the 1930's. His poignant portraits of migrant farm workers in California's Central Valley, in collaboration with John Steinbeck, later inspired the novel The Grapes of Wrath gaining him recognition as a prolific photographer of his time.

In 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Bristol joined an elite team of naval photographers under Edward Steichen documenting key naval battles, including the invasions of North Africa, Okinawa and Iwo Jima. When the war subsided he moved his family to Japan where he continued to photograph the devastation wrought by the war and set up his own Photo Agency, East-West, focusing on Pacific Rim countries in transition. He sold his photographs widely throughout South East Asia, Europe and the United States.

After a personal tragedy in 1956 Bristol abandoned photography and destroyed many of his negatives. Packing what remained of his photographic archive into lockers, he moved back to his native California to pursue a career in architecture. If it was not for his son, who thirty years later was assigned to read the Grapes of Wrath for high school, he may never have reopened the footlockers and reassessed his life's work.

This retrospective exhibition, celebrating the centennial of Bristol's birth, pays homage to a lifetime of incredible photographic achievement and marks his place amongst the finest documentary photographers of our time.

In conjunction with Horace Bristol, Capturing LIFE, Celebrating a Century, the gallery will present, The New Deal, Photographs from the Farm Security Administration Era. The exhibit will be comprised of vintage photographs by contemporaries of Horace Bristol. Photographers included are Imogen Cunningham, Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee Wright Morris, Rondal Partridge, Arthur Rothstein, Todd Webb and Marion Post Wolcott.

Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of work by photographer Joel Leivick. Leivick works within the tradition of great landscape photography and this latest body of work explores the theme of beauty in chaos. Although seemingly dense and tangled, the repetition of plant forms in these photographs invite a state of contemplation in the realm of the garden. His large format photographs contain a unique combination of documentation, abstraction, and conceptual interpretation. Joel Leivick's photographs are exquisitely printed, with a wide tonal range and a quiet precision of means that recalls the work of 19th century luminaries George Barnard and Timothy O'Sullivan.

Joel Leivick is currently the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Photography in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, where he has been teaching photography for 25 years. He received his MFA from Yale University and his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been the recipient of multiple awards and grants and has shown his photography in museums and galleries both in the United States and world wide.

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

From the concluding paragraph of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species 1859

Kenneth Baker reviews Leivick's Gardens:

Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to announce our latest exhibition Frida & Diego, A Personal Memoir, Photographs by Lucienne Bloch. Celebrating the centennial of Kahlo's birth and coinciding with San Francisco MOMA's Frida Kahlo exhibit, this show reveals a collection of personal and intimate photographs taken by artist Lucienne Bloch over a three year period in the early 1930's. This is the first exhibition to show this work in the Bay Area.

Lucienne Allen, grand-daughter of Lucienne Bloch was present to share her grandmother's stories.

Scott Nichols Gallery will concurrently present photographs by contemporaries of Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera who photographed in Mexico. Amongst these will be rare and vintage photographs as well as a selection of work by San Francisco based photographer, Reid Yalom.

The Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to present The Summer Online Show III, a selection of photographs from the gallery's collection. Included in the show are over 100 vintage and contemporary prints by Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernhard, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, Imogen Cunningham. Monica Denevan, William Garnett, Lucy Goodhart, Rolfe Horn, Andre Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Danny Lyon, Barbara Morgan, Michael Rauner, George Tice, Brett Weston, Edward Weston and others.

Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to announce the opening of our latest exhibition Rhythmic Vitality: Dances in Silver, photographs by Barbara Morgan. The show will include a selection of works of expressionistic dance, incorporating her manipulated and multiple imagery.

“The only record of a dancer's instrument is his body bounded by birth and death. When he perishes his art perishes also...The work of an individual can be explained, criticized, or eulogized by means of the written word...Photographs present more tangible evidence of a dancer's career. Photographs, when true to the laws that govern inspired photography, reveal fact of feature, bodily contour, and some secret of his power.”

Brett Weston was born in Los Angles in 1911, son of the famous photographer Edward Weston. With his father's help, he began photographing in Mexico at the age of thirteen and was showing his photographs alongside of his father's at the early age of fifteen. In 1929 he moved with his father to San Francisco and then to Carmel, where they opened a photography studio together in 1929. He was included in the influential German exhibition "Film and Foto" in 1929, which brought together an international group of artists with a highly progressive outlook. He also showed in 1932 as part of the Group f-64 show at the M.H. De Young Museum in San Francisco.

Brett Weston set himself apart from his father by pushing his work into the realm of abstraction, and thus participating in the mid-century movement of abstract art. Brett Weston bridged the gap between representation and abstraction by creating images that were realistically rendered yet composed in such a way as to emphasize abstraction in composition and form. His accomplishments in photography could be seen as a key to understanding the basic tenets of abstract art as expressed by artists working in more obviously interpretive mediums. Merle Armitage wrote of Brett Weston's work in 1956: "here are the patterns, the arrangements, the designs and the evocations sought by the finest abstract painters."

During WWII Brett Weston was drafted and stationed in New York. Luckily his superior was Arthur Rothstein, who recognized the young photographer's talents and arranged a commission for him to photograph the City. After the war, Weston received a post-service Guggenheim to photograph the East Coast in 1947. In 1948 he returned to Carmel and made photographic trips to Europe, Baja California, Hawaii, Japan, Oregon and the Northwest, and Alaska. After many visits to Hawaii, Weston built a permanent studio there in the early eighties and continued to travel between Hawaii and Carmel until his death in Hilo, Hawaii in 1993. During the course of his life, he generated an immense body of work both from these trips abroad and his continuous work in California and Hawaii.

Brett Weston garnered media attention in 1991 when he made a public announcement that he was burning all of his negatives with the intention that no one would print from them in the future. He died in January 1993, and though he had destroyed almost all of his negatives, he left behind an immense body of work spanning over six decades of active work as a photographer.

The Scott Nichols Gallery has one of the largest private collections of Brett Weston's work. A Visual Journey 1925 - 1980 features some of the highlights from this collection and represents each decade of his photographic career.

An-My Lê’s photographs tell the multifold story of Vietnam as a country in transition. Her photographs involve a complex interplay of her own memories and the reality of modern day Vietnam. Lê left Saigon in 1975 at the age of 15 and emigrated to the United States with her family. After receiving an MFA from Yale in 1993, she received the Blair Dickinson award which enabled her to return to Vietnam for the first time in 1994.

Scott Nichols Gallery is currently showing a selection from the series Vietnam, which was supported by a Guggenheim fellowship awarded in 1997. In this work Lê’s intention is to refer obliquely to the legacy of the Vietnam War while continuing her portrait of contemporary Vietnam. Her studies of tropical vegetation, gardens, and landscapes on fire are exquisite descriptions of the land and its potential for growth and renewal. But they also refer to the difficult terrain that was a central issue in the way the war unfolded and that ultimately bore the scars of devastating bombing raids and defoliation campaigns. A photograph taken in Kontum of a traditional ethnic minority funeral site shows small wooden planes suspended atop long wooden poles. The local villagers here have substituted planes where traditionally birds were used as symbols intended to carry away the spirits of the dead. Many of Lê’s photographs poignantly capture such examples of the residue of the War as it has been incorporated into contemporary Vietnam.

This exhibition coincides with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "An-My Lê Small Wars" thru Sunday May 4th 2008.

Life on earth is imperiled by human degradation of the biosphere. Earth Island Institute develops and supports projects that counteract threats to the biological and cultural diversity that sustain the environment. Through education and activism, these projects promote the conservation, preservation, and restoration of the Earth.

Earth Island Institute (EII), founded in 1982 by veteran environmentalist David Brower, fosters the efforts of creative individuals by providing organizational support in developing projects for the conservation, preservation, and restoration of the global environment.

Artists Exhibited:
Ansel Adams, Morley Baer, Anne Brigman, Wynn Bullock, Paul Caponigro, Michele Clement, Robert Dawson, William Garnett, Joseph Holmes, Rolfe Horn, Philip Hyde, Koichiro Kurita, Eliot Porter, Michael Rauner, Ryuijie & Camille Derindinger, Penti Sammallahti, Sebastiao Salgado, Carleton Watkins, Brett Weston, Edward Weston and others.

Mona Kuhn was born in Germany, raised in Brazil and later immigrated to the United States. She received her B.A. degree from Ohio State University in 1993 and later went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute and The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California.

Mona Kuhn employs a visual language that is at once classical and contemporary. In her photographs she weaves together gestures taken from traditional iconography with the natural body language of her subjects. She does this with a fluidity and grace that comes from both intimacy with her subjects and a highly skilled mastery of the medium.

Mona Kuhn does more than merely present the body to the viewer. Beneath the calm, relaxed surfaces of her photographs lies an explosive energy: the artist's controlled play with the power of sensuality. The compositions incorporate the flow of volume with tenuously held planes of focus that tempt the viewer and provoke the imagination. Each image explores dualities of human experience. Tension and uneasiness co-exist with sunlight and soft flesh. The subjects and their gestures are suggestive yet ultimately ambiguous. With only sparse reference to physical surroundings, the bodies seem to float in an idyllic picture space, part of a dreamlike narrative that exists just beyond the viewer's comprehension.

Mona Kuhn’s photographs exist in a space created by the artist and subject alone, of which the viewer is given a single fascinating glimpse, suspended in time, where one senses the resilience and vulnerability of the human body. The artist works very close to her subjects, often with a depth of field of only a few inches. This closeness reflects her intimate relationship with her subjects and also creates an almost tactile picture surface. Real world and image world seem to blend together as her figures bring with them the blissful essence of nature and the soiled reality of human complexity.

A fiercely independent artist, Rondal Partridge has spent seven decades building a body of work that reflects his aesthetic integrity, eccentric temperament and fascination with every aspect of the world around him. The result is a visual history like no other: the changing landscapes of Yosemite National Park and the San Francisco Bay Area; striking images from junkyards, and flea markets, and an amazing assembly of still lifes, portraits and unclassifiable but arresting compositions.

As the son of celebrated photographer Imogen Cunningham and as an apprentice to Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, Partridge began learning technique and developing his art almost from birth. Yet he has chosen to be as he says "the least publicized of the old fashioned California photographers."

This exhibition celebrates 75 years of his unique and incandescent work.

Excerpt from back cover of "Quizzical Eye:
The Photography of Rondal Partridge"
by Elizabeth Partridge & Sally Stein
published by Heyday Books.

The Scott Nichols Gallery is proud to present The Summer (Online) Show II, a selection of photographs from the gallery's collection. Included in the show are over 100 vintage and contemporary prints by Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernhard, Paul Caponigro, Imogen Cunningham, Monica Denevan, Rolfe Horn, Mona Kuhn, Danny Lyon, Michael Rauner, Sebastiao Salgado, Peter Stackpole, Brett Weston, and introducing Lucy Goodhart.

Scott Nichols Gallery honors the work of master photographer Paul Caponigro, one of the foremost landscape photographers alive today.