ROGER BENNETT

MEDIUM

Photography

ARTIST STATEMENT

“I once read: ‘If you buy a camera, then you are a photographer; if you buy a flute, then you own a flute.’ I believe that as a fine art photographer, my images should look like a ‘symphony on paper.’”

ARTIST BIO

Roger first became interested in black and white photography when he saw an exhibit by Ansel Adams of landscape images. The power and emotional impact these photographs had surprised him. Roger had always thought that the colors of the landscape would always be required for a photograph to impress him, but the absence of colors in the image made the contrast, patterns, and textures of the world stand out, and the composition of the elements in the image become of paramount importance.

In 1977 Roger set up his first darkroom, in a bathroom. By 1983 he had built a large, fully equipped darkroom to handle the 4×5 negatives from a view camera. Roger currently uses a Fuji medium format 102 MP digital camera to create large, detailed digital prints of the landscape. Roger believes that the “digital darkroom” and programs like Photoshop allows for more control over the photographic process than traditional darkroom and film techniques ever could.

Roger’s love for landscape photography comes from his desire to communicate the beauty he sees in the natural world, and his love for wilderness, largely unaffected by our modern civilization. Roger attempts to perfect his photographic compositions from the scene he sees in front of his camera. As Edward Weston put it, “composition is the strongest way of seeing”. The excitement he feels when he takes a photograph is what he tries to capture in the image.

Roger has had several one-man shows in fine art galleries in the Orange County area, including the Forest and Ocean Gallery in Laguna Beach, the Huntington Beach Library, The ArtiSan Juan Gallery and The Center for Creative Photography in San Juan Capistrano, and the “Off the Wall” gallery at Cypress College. Most recently, he had a one-man-show at the Center Gallery in Anaheim. Roger has also have been part of group shows at the Art Museum in La Habra, the Irvine Fine Art Gallery, Chemers Gallery in Irvine, and the BC Space Gallery in Laguna Beach. Roger has been in the Laguna Beach Art-A-Fair and the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts shows since 2012. These two juried art shows both exhibit a wide variety of art of the highest quality.