Photographer Charles “Chuck” Farmer

A large format photographer of the inner landscape, Charles “Chuck” Farmer was born in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1947. He grew up in Platte City, Missouri and graduated from Platte City High School in 1965. He received his education at Northwest Missouri State University in music and Draughon’s College where he received a degree in Topographical Engineering. He began the shift to art and serious photography some forty years ago. In 1978 he relocated to Santa Barbara where he met his wife, Marta. In 2011 they moved to Grass Valley, California.

Since that time, his work has appeared in countless exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States. A highlight of his art was the publication and exhibition of Portfolio I, “Sonata in F#” and Portfolio II, “Alexis,” which have been acquired by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Many of his images are in private and corporate collections throughout the world. He has released his new handmade limited edition collector’s book, “Photographs, Friends & Yarn”.

He has been published frequently during the course of his career in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Art West, Photographers Forum Magazine, Leisure Magazine, The Denver Post, Shutterbug Magazine, View Camera Magazine, Photo Techniques, and Jobo Quarterly.

As a photographic consultant, Chuck had been a frequent lecturer to the Brooks Institute of Photography. He has worked with a number of view camera builders utilizing his combined talents of engineering and photography to make a unique contribution to the improvement of the tools of the art. Others who have consulted with him have included various equipment fabricators, darkroom chemical and equipment manufactures, optical engineers and corporate heads desiring special equipment. He has further served as a consultant to private photographic collectors and fine art photographers.

At present, Chuck continues to produce his art and is the proprietor of Charles P Farmer Photography and Large Format Consulting Services. He is now a Board of Directors member for Viewpoint Photographic Art Center in Sacramento, California and Charles is heading up their field workshop programs. He is also heavily involved with the Student Outreach program for further education of the arts of photography.

An expedition to the top of Mt. Whitney in the Eastern Sierra with his 8×10 camera was a landmark in history. This was the first camera of such great size ever packed to the summit. He has also expanded his work to incorporate a series of large format workshops held throughout the United States and has become one of the most popular and sought after instructors in the field due to his patient sharing style and wealth of knowledge. It is his hope that he can in this way share his knowledge and experience in photography and contribute something to this unique art form. In his words, “We are all in this crazy world of large format photography together”.

Photographer Don Kirby

Don Kirby literally grew up turning the surface of the earth upside down—on his parent’s sharecropper farms in Northwestern Missouri. Failing in that enterprise, his family moved to other work as he studied math and physics in college with a beginning interest in photography. Emerging with advanced math and science degrees, he moved to the West Coast and began a career in aerospace. Escaping frequently from the city to maintain sanity, he became a backpacker, mountain climber, and river runner, always carrying a slide camera to document his and his friend’s activities. A decade and a half later, for reasons still not clear, B/W film replaced slides, subject matter changed, a darkroom was built, and serious study of expressive photography began, utilizing workshops by Bruce Barnbaum, John Sexton, Ansel Adams, and ultimately teaching with Bruce, Jay Dusard, Stu Levy, and Huntington Witherill. Aerospace was abandoned a few years later.

Don’s photography in the ensuing 40 years has been landscape oriented, concentrating on the lands west of the 100th meridian. Major projects include over 20 years (1989 to the present and continuing) of periodic work on the Ancestral Pueblos of the Colorado Plateau, 15 years (1991-2006) in the Wheatcountry of the Northwestern US, and lately 5 years in the National Grasslands and other grasslands in the US. Most recently he has begun a series of projects focused in Santa Fe.

Don’s photographs have been exhibited in more than fifty individual and group exhibits. Additionally, his photographs are included in the collections of the George Eastman House, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Joy of Giving Something, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Portland Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, New Mexico History Museum, and private collections.

Nazraeli Press published Wheatcountry in 2001, You’re not really initiated until your eyes are redder than your lips in 2002, Grasslands in 2009, and The Anasazi Project in 2012.

Don met his wife Joan Gentry in 1992 and eleven years later Joan, a New Mexico gal, led them home to Santa Fe. They run a photography workshop program and travel the country in a pop-top camper in pursuit of their photographic interests.

Works with: Film, Digital, Archival Pigment Ink Prints, 4×5, 2 1/4, 35mm, Gelatin Silver Prints, PDF’s, light/shadow, ideas.

Project specifics: Work exists as fine art prints, books, PDF publications and handmade Chapbooks.

For More Information about Don Kirby, please visit www.DonKirby.com

Photographer Huntington Witherill

Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1949, and having been initially trained as a concert pianist, Huntington Witherill began a career in fine art photography in 1970. During the early to mid-1970’s he studied photography under such notables as Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Steve Crouch, and Al Weber.

Over the past 45 years, Witherill’s photographs have been included in more than one hundred individual and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world, and his photographs are maintained in numerous distinguished public art collections. Since 1975, he has taught photography for a variety of institutions and workshop programs around the country, and his work has been the subject of three hardcover monographs– Orchestrating Icons (2000) Botanical Dances (2001) and Photo Synthesis (2010).

In 1999, Witherill was the recipient of the “Artist of the Year” award presented by the Center for Photographic Art, in Carmel, CA.

To view more of Huntington Witherill’s photography please visit his comprehensive on-line gallery and website at http://www.huntingtonwitherill.com.