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Final Chance to Win a Solo Exhibition this March! Deadline: February 18, 2025
Final Chance to Win a Solo Exhibition this March! Deadline: February 18, 2025
Vicky Stromee
Vicky Stromee
Vicky Stromee

Vicky Stromee

Country: United States
Birth: 1950

How I got interested in photography
I was immersed in the arts from an early age. My father was an amateur photographer and my mother a painter and pianist. At 8, I got my first Brownie camera and began shooting everything I saw. Watching an image magically emerge from the developing tray in my dad's darkroom; spending afternoons lying under the baby grand piano with waves of sound resonating around and through me; texture, pattern, fluidity, and change - these were my earliest influences, and they continue to unfold in my work.

Where I live and my work can be seen
I am fortunate to call the Southwest - a place of incredible natural beauty - my home. I have lived in Tucson, AZ since 1975 when I moved here to pursue a master’s degree in Counseling at the University of Arizona. When I retired from a long career in mental health, I turned my attention full time to photography, ultimately finding my niche in photographing natural subjects. More recently I have begun to create photomontages incorporating these natural objects into both abstract images and scenes of imaginary realism.

My work hangs in galleries, hospitals, and private and corporate collections throughout the US. It has been featured at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston; Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe; PhotoPlace Gallery, Vermont; A Smith Gallery, Texas; Fotonostrum, Barcelona; and Afterimage Gallery in Dallas. Selected images have representation through Cynthia Byrnes Contemporary Art in New York.

What captures my imagination and what I explore in my art
I am interested in edges and intersections of transformation where one thing moves inexorably to become something else. When is the moment when love fades into anger and resentment; when disillusionment erupts into a violent uprising, when order descends into chaos? And when is the moment when war turns towards peace; unbearable grief shifts towards acceptance; or when pain gives way to relief?

I feel the daily bombardment of stories about conflict and anger towards “otherness.” I’m disturbed by the disintegration of public discourse that has devolved into shouting tropes at one another and refusing to entertain differing points of view while using violence to subjugate and silence others. The cacophony of misinformation drives me into further retreat. I’ve always felt a kinship with Buddhist thought and the concept of nonduality - the belief that there is only one reality that is the summation of all experience. That there is no separation between subject and object; inner self and outer experience; self and other. We are drops in the ocean, interconnected manifestations of spirit. When I am engaged in the act of creation – no longer focused on trying to create, but simply being a conduit – time disappears. I’m following an intuitive process to listen for what comes next. The external chatter recedes, I feel a sense of calm, I feel connected to a deeper flow. Touching into these moments provides a respite and allows me to re-engage in the world with all its seemingly unresolvable conundrums. I make art as much for myself as for others; creating visual meditations is an end in and of itself.
 

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Robert Adams
United States
1937
Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through the book The New West (1974) and the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). He was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in photography in 1973 and 1980, and he received the MacArthur Foundation's MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. Robert Adams, son of Lois Hickman Adams and Ross Adams, was born on May 8, 1937 in Orange, New Jersey. In 1940 they moved to Madison, New Jersey where his younger sister Carolyn was born. Then in 1947 he moved to Madison, Wisconsin for five years, where he contracted polio at age 12 in 1949 in his back, left arm, and hand but was able to recover. Moving one last time in 1952 his family goes to Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, when his father secured a job in Denver. The final strength in really great photographs is that they suggest more than just what they show literally. -- Robert Adams His family moved to Colorado partly because of the chronic bronchial problems that he suffered from in Madison, New Jersey around age 5 as an attempt to help alleviate those problems. He continued to suffer from asthma and allergy problems. During his childhood, Adams often accompanied his father on walks and hikes through the woods on Sunday afternoons. He also enjoyed playing baseball in open fields and working with his father on carpentry projects. He was an active Boy Scout, and was also active with the Methodist church that his family attended. He and his father made several raft trips through Dinosaur National Monument, and during his adolescent years he worked at boys' camps at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. He also took trips on pack horses and went mountain climbing. He and his sister began visiting the Denver Art Museum. Adams also learned to like reading and it soon became an enjoyment for him. In 1955, he hunted for the last time. Adams enrolled in the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1955, and attended it for his freshman year, but decided to transfer the next year to the University of Redlands in California where he received his B.A. in English from Redlands in 1959. He continued his graduate studies at the University of Southern California and he received his Ph.D. in English in 1965. In 1960 while at Redlands, he met and married Kerstin Mornestam, Swedish native, who shared the same interest in the arts and nature. Robert and Kerstin spent their first few summers together in Oregon along the coast, where they took long walks on the beach and spent their evenings reading. In 1962 they moved back to Colorado, and Adams began teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In 1963, Adams bought a 35mm reflex camera and began to take pictures mostly of nature and architecture. He soon read complete sets of Camera Work and Aperture at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. He learned photographic technique from Myron Wood, a professional photographer who lived in Colorado. While finishing his dissertation, he began to photograph in 1964. In 1967, he began to teach only part-time in order to have more time to photograph. He met John Szarkowski, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, on a trip to New York City in 1969. The museum later bought four of his prints. In 1970, he began working as a full-time photographer.Source: Wikipedia Nature photography… that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear—it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves. -- Robert Adams Robert Adams is an American photographer best known for his images of the American West. Offering solemn meditations on the landscapes of California, Colorado, and Oregon, Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature. “By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet. Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil,” he wrote. “What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.” Born on May 8, 1937 in Orange, NJ, his family moved around the Midwest throughout his childhood, finally settling in Wheat Ridge, CO in 1952. Adams went on to study English at the University of Redlands and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California in 1965. It wasn’t until the near completion of his dissertation for USC that Adams began to take photography seriously, learning techniques from professional photographer Myron Wood and reading Aperture magazine. In the 1970s, he was released the book The New West (1974), and a year later was included in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Adams has twice been the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and once the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Adams lives and works in Astoria, OR. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Source: Artnet
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