Richard Boutwell

ARTIST STATEMENT

I see myself as mixture of documentarian, photographer, digital artist, and printmaker—intertwining my personal connection to the history of the American West and focusing on issues of land-use, recreation, conservation, and the confluence of the natural and human-impacted landscape.

Working with a camera as a way of exploring and documenting the world has always been a personally exciting experience. My creative process starts with a reaction to an idea or simply something seen in the world (which often involves seemingly chaotic aspects within the landscape). Then, through the camera, it transforms into an emotional interaction between myself and the subject. That interaction continues and evolves as I scan the film and work with the image on the computer. Once digitized, I work with image’s tonalities on a purely abstract level, exploring all the film has captured to create or intensify the movement and tension within the image. The final result, while still based on what was actually in front of the lens, becomes part document and part internal creation.

I have always felt that one of the most rewarding aspects of photography and printmaking is the handmade aspect of creating something with light, drawing from physical qualities of the interaction of light and metal salts that give the print an inherent potential to be a beautiful object—regardless of the subject that is actually photographed. I find the purely digital realization of the image ultimately unsatisfying, and output the digital file either as large-scale, immersive pure carbon inkjet prints, or as negatives to use with historic hand-coated photographic processes—effectively bridging the 19th and 21st centuries.

BIOGRAPHICAL

Richard Boutwell, originally from Joshua Tree, California, is a photographer and print-maker based near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

His work is based around aspects of archaeology, family history and myth, and the influence of spirituality, technology, and social media on how we interact with the natural environment. Through it, he examines his personal connection to the greater cultural, industrial, and environmental history of the landscape—mostly involving issues of water rights and the impact of recreation in the desert landscapes of the Southwest. In addition to his traditional landscape photography, he is now combining his photographs with 3D scans of the environment, found objects, historical materials, and appropriated mapping and scientific data.

Boutwell began photographing in college in the year 2000 while studying music and pursuing a career as a jazz bassist. Shortly into his first darkroom course and being exposed to the beauty and creative possibilities of fine-art photographs, he dropped all his music classes and devoted himself to studying the history and craft of photography. Instead of pursuing a formal fine-arts degree, he relocated to Bucks County, Pennsylvania to enter an intensive long-term apprenticeship with the photographers Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee. He worked as their darkroom, studio, and field assistant from 2002 until 2008, and then became their full-time printer and ran the scanning and digital studio at their photography book publishing company, Lodima Press, until 2015.

In balance with his family life and fine-art practice, he teaches photography and fine-art printing privately through https:/www.bwmastery.com. Boutwell also created specialized software that helped advance the craft of digital black-and-white and historic-process printing now used by photographers worldwide.

His photographs have been included in national and international group exhibitions and are in private and public collections. He has served as a guest lecturer on the history of landscape photography at mid-Atlantic colleges and universities.

CONTACT

Curriculum Vitae