ROGER BENNETT

MEDIUM

Photography

ARTIST STATEMENT

“I am a traditional black-and-white landscape photographer. My desire is to communicate the beauty I see in the natural world to others and to capture the excitement I felt when I took the photograph.”

ARTIST BIO

Roger Bennett was born in Philadelphia, grew up in New York City and moved to beautiful southern California in 1977. Roger has a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering, which prepared him for the technical side of darkroom and now digital photography. While he designed satellites for a living, his passion has been photography since he was a teenager.

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 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 Roger had built a large, fully equipped darkroom to handle 4×5 negatives. Roger’s film use increased from 35 mm to 4×5 inch negative size as his desire for more detail and better control of the process grew. Roger uses the darkroom prints from his 4×5 inch negatives as the “baseline” image quality from which he improves the image in the digital process. He began using digital cameras in 2003 and is currently using a 100 MP medium format Fuji camera. In the past few years digital technology has improved immensely in image resolution, dynamic range and print permanence. 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. However, Roger believes that pure AI-created images are not “photographs” but rather “digital illustrations”.

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, “(good) 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 and Los Angeles areas, 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, the BC Space Gallery and City Hall in Laguna Beach. Roger has been in the Laguna Beach Art-A-Fair as well as at the Laguna Beach Festival of Art from 2012 through 2025.