Sawhill Covered Bridge

Transcription

FEMALE SPEAKER: I've been a big fan of Art for many, many years. And a couple years ago, I actually went to his studio in Seattle, Washington, and was able to take a seminar, The Art of Composition. And it really helped change my view of how I look through the viewfinder of the camera. And you're going to get a taste of that today, which is really exciting. Art is an award-winning photographer. And he's traveled around the globe. And he documents wildlife, landscapes, and native cultures. He hosted the popular television series, "Art Wolfe's Travels to the Edge." He's also released over 60 books and is a Canon Explorer of Light. He is an honorary fellow at the Royal Photographic Society and a fellow of International League of Conservation Photographers. And the list goes on and on. Visit his website. You'll see. To sum it up, Art focuses on what's beautiful on the earth. And it's my extreme pleasure and honor to be able to introduce to you Mr. Art Wolfe. [APPLAUSE] ART WOLFE: Normally I roam the audience, but speaking of the audience, I would just like a show of hands of how many people in this room are just hiding out from what you would normally be doing on a Friday afternoon or are you really interested in photography? How many of you are, in fact, photographers? Great. So I now know how to talk to you. This talk is really just pulling out from various lectures I've given over the years. I teach a lot of seminars, workshops. I'm working on books and various projects. So I'm going to show you a little bit of everything in the next 45 minutes, at the end of which if there's any interest in engaging me one-on-one, we'd invite you to walk up to the microphone. And so during the course of the next 40 minutes as I'm talking, if you think of a question that you think might be salient for everybody else, keep it in mind and come on up and join the conversation. I decided to start with some of the lectures that I've put together. And what I teach is not about technology. In fact, I only know how to use probably 4% of what my camera can do. And that's the reality of these modern cameras these days. What I try to teach is what I've learned to do. My background as a painter and an art educator allows me to kind of dissect an image, to, more importantly, find the images. If you think about somebody starting off in photography and somebody that's been doing it like me for 40 years, what's the single hardest thing for a photographer to do? And I'll answer it. It's to find a compelling image out there in that 360 degree world. We're all going see the Golden Gate shrouded in fog with the city beyond. And that's a very common and beautiful sight. But most people, whether it's your aunt from Dubuque, Iowa, or a rank amateur, it's going to see the same at the same time. We may have different points of view. But we're going to see the subject. What I try to teach is finding the subjects as you're walking down the street in any location on the planet and pull out something that 99% of the rest of the population would never see and try to make a compelling argument that this is worthy of photograph. That's easier to say than do. And so when I started a curriculum years ago, it was based on some of the interviews that I have had with magazine editors who would normally say, OK, who has been your influence? What photographers have really directly influenced your career? And as I really pondered the question, I always and invariably would come up with, well, it wasn't really photographers that really have influenced the way I see. It was really my background in studying art history. So I'm going to make that case. And I'll make it fairly clear in the next series of photos that follow. And then after that, I will kind of lately dance upon a few of the book projects I've worked on over the years and the points of view of those books. And then I'll end up with a body of work that I've been working on for the last couple of years, and, and, and. OK? One of the people I've drawn from for finding photos-- and it's interesting statement to make this, and I'll go back to the first slide, that for the longest time in human history, paintings were not considered as artwork. Digest that for a second. Paintings weren't considered art. They weren't hung on the walls of houses. They were really records of what had historically gone before. Paintings of Crusades and wars and Biblical scenes were primarily what was painted. And they were what photographs are today. And so over the evolution of the years, eventually came the Renaissance. And at the backside of the Renaissance was the Impressionist period. And that's where I kind of started, looking at the Impressionist paintings and mining their work for photographic compositions that I would argue I simply wouldn't have found before. So within the Impressionist period that occurred towards the late 1800s and early 1900s, one of the famous painters was Seurat. Seurat had a way of painting his pictures-- and now they're painting everyday scenes in a city, like along the Seine in Paris, or still lifes, or your uncle or somebody, but not Biblical scenes and certainly not wars. So during the Impressionist period Seurat painted with tiny points of color. And it became known as pointillism. So if you look at a Seurat painting and people like Gustav Klimt that followed, it was just tiny points of color on a canvas, really different than what we tend to teach, which is horizons and leading lines and balance. That was just simply tiny points of color on a canvas. And how is that relevant for me? Well, when I'm out traveling the world, as I'm doing nearly 9 to 10 months a year, I'm on guard looking for photos to take back, to capture and bring back. And sometimes a little red light in my mind is blinking a Seurat. It could be blinking other painters that I'm familiar with, but in this case, Seurat. And when I'm in a Swedish forest in the fall where there's a little bit of snow, I'm not looking for horizons. I'm not looking for lines, leading lines. I'm looking for little points of color. So that to me is a Seurat. And therefore, it reveals a subject before me, because I'm looking for photos to bring back. In the north woods of Minnesota, you look at the scene and again, no horizon. There's no big, solid areas or dark areas. There's not what we call negative and positive space to hang a photo. It's just flat color and tiny points of color. Even the birch trees, which we think of as white trunks of trees, are little bits of gray and little bits of white. So to me, again, a point in this painting reveals itself. And therefore, I see the image. I think that anybody with any disciplines-- maybe your history, you have a much more profound knowledge of music, for instance, or poetry. The point I'm trying to make is my background was painting. And I would see different painters in the landscape or the urbanscape before me. You may see or hear music when you look at water flowing down a stream or the wind blowing through blades of grass or whatever it may be. Those are the things you start to mine to help reveal a subject that we didn't see seconds before. Monet, Claude Monet was another famous painter during the Impressionist period. And he painted in his later years very, very imprecise brush strokes. And in fact, the word Impressionism comes from the fact that the people at that time of their life had very poor sight. There was no cataract surgery or latest contact lenses. They had really poor sight. But they were hard-wired to paint from young painters. But now, in their late '80s and early '90s, they were hard-wired to paint but they could not see what they were painting. Do you believe that? And hence the expression, Impression. They were paying the impressions of what they thought they were painting. And none of them had very precise lines within. So all right, as a photographer that's looking for new subjects and new ways of creating a dialogue between myself and my audience-- But at any rate, here's another one that painted really fine details and yet in the late '80s, late '80s in his life, much more Impressionistic. There's not a sharp line within this painting. So as a photographer 20 years ago, I thought how can I pay homage to these Impressionist painters? So I started experimenting with long exposures. Wherever wind was blowing through trees, snow was falling, water was flowing, birds were flying, anywhere nature was on the move, I was intentionally taking long exposures of the camera. And I learned to become a better photographer all along the way. At that time, Ernst Haas was doing some really interesting studies with Olympic athletes and bullfights. But he was also an influence. But it was the painters, the Impressionist painters, that really influenced this body of work. And when you have two or three photos that are connected, you have the beginnings of a magazine article. When you get up into the 20s or 30s, it's a viable book. And this eventually became a book called Rhythms From the Wild. But as I said earlier, I started studying the subjects before me and kind of visualizing what a long exposure would mean with leaves floating down a creek, or what it would look like with people getting up in Tibet and stretching after a long prayer session. And I knew that a lot of my photos would just look like garbage, where there's nothing sharp enough in the frame to really warrant the image. It always worked where there was one element. And in a shot like this, you see the monk in the lower right, he's sharp enough. He's frozen enough that he is the point from where your eye references the rest of the movement. It was a great project, because if you think about it, in today's world now you can take a picture with a digital camera and see instant gratification. A lot of the mystery of whether you're getting a shot or not is kind of dispelled by seeing it instantly. Back in these days, it could be, in the case of an Everest expedition that I participated on, three months before I could confirm I got what I wanted. But for me, it was the discovery at the end. In an experiment like that, I could not pre-visualize exactly what I was getting. So the element of surprise brought fun back to taking pictures. Horses racing across the Rhone River delta in southern France became a study of motion. And I certainly realized at that point and during that process that some of the most graphic images of horses that I had taken, where everything was frozen in the moment of time, were less appealing than ones that conveyed motion. This started to look, then, more like the paintings and the history that I had. I remember taking this picture 20 years ago. Now I've desaturated and used Nik software to make it a nice black and white. But back then, I said, oh, I almost got it. But I didn't quite get it. But it was too early on in my career to even recognize some potential photos. So I didn't throw it away. I kept it in the archive. And 20 years later, it got rebirthed. And now it's an image that we have in galleries that sells. So people love that Impressionistic view. Van Gogh was another famous painter during the Impressionist period. And as you look at an image like this, and if you look at the trunks and the branches of the trees, there's not a sharp image, not a sharp line in the entire painting. And a couple years ago I was in Shanghai. And along the [INAUDIBLE], or the most famous walking avenue in Shanghai, there were these giant metal pandas. And as I walked close to the giant metal pandas, in the indentations of the sculptures, I could see the reflections of trees behind me and in fact myself. But as I looked into this reflection, I thought, wow, that looks like a van Gogh. And hence, I shot it. I would not have seen it or even possibly processed it if it wasn't connected back to something I recognized. And that's the point I'm trying to make, and I do in overall lectures. I wasn't a big fan of Picasso when I was in my 20s in art school up in Seattle. I was too immature to get him. I looked at his work and thought, ah, it just doesn't speak to me. I remember studying the Cubist period during Picasso's life. And it was 15 years later. I was in Siberia in the middle of the winter, a miserable place, I have to say. And there was all these overturned boats along Baikal. And as I saw it, I thought instantly back to Picasso. It looked like a Cubist painting, and therefore it revealed itself as such. So that's the point I try to make about all these different painters. Georgia O'Keefe painted the American west in very simple forms, with very little detail. And there are times where I'm inverting photos, reflections on lakes, or taking the very subjects that she painted, and I shoot them as I discover them as I'm traveling through an environment. Her watercolor images of giant roses I see in the icebergs in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. So instantly, as I'm floating around the Antarctic Peninsula and I see an iceberg, it looks to me like a Georgia O'Keefe subject. So if you have all those painters, and knowledge of their style, it just opens up the world of possibilities, because we all can shoot Yosemite from the viewpoint. But it's finding, turning around and looking at the way the sign is cracking and dented that there could be a shot there. There could be a shot that 99% of people never found. I never was into Jackson Pollock when I was young. I was just too immature. My mind, I painted-- when I was a painter, I painted very realistically. And this was just too abstract for my brain. But as I've matured, as I have studied other art, I've started to understand the nuances of Jackson Pollock. So when I see a Jackson Pollock, I start to see it in a mud-spattered vehicle in southern China. To me it looks like a Jackson Pollock, and suddenly, a subject. So I see a Jackson Pollock in a half-painted building on the outskirts of Marrakesh, Morocco. The random pattern of paint or the way those willows are hanging in front the wall, those are subjects I would definitely never have even considered when I was younger. I started off in the late '70s and early '80s. And my primary subjects and the way people know me today is through wildlife work. At any one time, if you wanted a grizzly bears or polar bears or emperor penguins, I was one of three or four photographers you would go to if you were an editor to buy those photos for a magazine. Today, I'm shooting everything from rusting cans in the gutter to the grand landscapes and everything in between, because as an artist, having a background in painting and illustration and graphic design, I shoot without prejudice. And it just opens up the world. Colleagues of mine that started off at the same time in the same period of time that were into birds or mammals kind of exhausted their subject matter. And if they were not willing or open to evolving their intellect or their eyes, they simply found some new discipline to go onto. I never run out of ideas. It's not hard for me to, after I've gotten up early in the morning and I've photographed portraits of people in downtown Delhi in the old city, as I'm walking back to my bus looking at these old walls, these old walls you see everywhere where posters have been posted over the last 20 years, and seeing the beauty in that old decay. There's a story about rebirth and renewal and reinvention in yesterday's society. And that really comes from my studying of American Abstract Expressionism, looking at what made those photos sing. And they're. by the way, among the highest paid. If you're going to buy a painting, American abstract painters now are the hottest thing on the market. So looking at the abstract now, rather than the literal, is where I'm taking my audience and the work I'm doing. And you'll see that come home as we migrate through this conversation. So in those abandoned buildings, those old ruins, are amazing photos to be yet discovered. I have traveled to Havana twice over the last 15 years. And Havana as a city is an amazing place, great columns and arches and verandas. It was once the most beautiful city on the planet. And now as it's in decay, it's a great place to go and photograph from a street level. And by the way if you've ever gone to Havana, you will know this to be true. The people are the easiest people ever to photograph on the street. If they find out that you are from America, they embrace you. They want to invite you into their homes to have food, because they uniquely identified with the United States from the birth of the nation. So Havana is a great place to find the unexpected. You know, I'm opening a gallery in Soho, New York-- any rate, this is a wall in Havana. And it's just all chipped, old paint. But if you can tell yourself this looks like a modern Chinese painting, if you think it, you can make it that way. And I would guarantee you if this was well printed, and it will be, and framed and matted and signed in limited edition, there will be somebody in New York that will buy it and put it in their living room. Is there any doubt about that? There shouldn't be. There should be no doubt about that. So it's interesting that now as I've come down to San Francisco, I'm going to be going out tomorrow to Treasure Island and down to what they call the Dogpatch and into the back alleys of the Bay Area, looking for graffiti where it's built up over time, because in that old graffiti of different artists and different statements are photos I am mining. And what I'm going to do with this work is turn it into black and white and then take a human nude and lay them over the top of what I'm creating and then hand-painting them into the scene. As you will see, this is a new direction based on what I'm going to close this lecture with. The other lectures that I give during a day-long course is talking about how to use wide angles. And this is maybe a little more pedestrian. But it's nonetheless interesting. The next three shots are actually taken with the same lens, same subject. It's a abalone shell that I've put out on the Washington coast. I placed it there to illustrate this point. And as I've moved in closer, the relationship-- the background remains the same, but the relationship of the foreground subject becomes obviously more dominant. So it's perspective and point of view that I'm talking about. And as I shoot, as I travel around, if I'm using a wide angle, I'm trying to create a sense of depth, a relationship between the foreground elements, the middle ground, and the background. And the reason that's important is the more depth that I can convey within a photo, your eye goes in and out, forward and backwards. And that's what we as photographers would want to ascribe to have our audience, the people ultimately that look at our work. We want their eye to stay with the subject, to move throughout the composition, because you're hooking them in. Otherwise, if they simply look at a photo you've taken and go, all right, got it, move on, you haven't connected with them. They wonder why you took the picture. But if you can just have them move throughout the entire composition, even if it's for just a few seconds, you're connecting with them. And that's what any writer, any sculptor, any painter or dancer, you want to connect with the audience that ultimately looks at your work. So with a wide angle here, I've gone back to a place I love in the Nagano district west of Tokyo. And about 25 years ago, snow macaques discovered the luxury of hot water on a cold day, a natural hot springs that leaches out of the mountains. And so for the last 25 years, these macaques and their parents and their grandparents have come down once during every day in the winter and gotten in, so much so that they're so blase about people you can virtually be within a half-inch with your camera, shooting these macaques. And as long as you don't try to touch them, you're good. You broach that one half-inch of space between you and they could bite you. But as long as you're reverent-- Here's a Weddell seal, for instance, down along the Antarctic Peninsula. So using that wide angle perspective, getting in close, moving slow, I did an entire book using a wide angle perspective. So when you hear about leading lines, this is what we're talking about, lines that you can incorporate into your composition and you're basically directing them. All these lines force your eye to look, in this particular case, to an old stone church in the Italian Alps. So I often find ways of directing the eye, because what I'm trying to do is connect you to the subject that I chose to shoot. So I'm leading you, with these tracks, right to the animal that made the tracks. I'm not filling the frame with the bear. I'm not trying to spell it out so overtly obviously. I'm trying to bring you in, allow you to discover it. And so leading lines, these tracks are like those leading lines that take you there. Your eye cannot help but go here. All these lines are forcing your eye to stay there. This is a rural road on the outskirts of Kyoto. And you know, if you try to look up here, you are constantly being forced to look back where I want your eye to go. So it's a pure form of communication, these leading lines. A lot of people think photography is like, whatever you want to shoot. Everybody's got an opinion. And there's good shots and bad shots. But really, there is a lot of formal lines of composition. There's ways you think about a subject to bring it out. There's ways you can cover a subject that's less obvious than the other ones. I like to take photos and direct your eye to where I want it to go or have it hidden as an agenda. There's a lot of different books I've worked on over the years that have very distinct points of view. You know, a shot like this means I had to get up early in the morning. I gathered icons of the culture. This is in Benares, India. And what the people of Benares do is they buy little offerings of marigolds that have been pressed into the shape of-- or banyan leaves pressed into the shape of bolts. In the evenings, they'll come down to the river's edge, the Ganges, and light the candles and offer them to the waters, because the waters, the sacred waters of the Ganges, represents the gods. The gods, the Hindu gods, reside in the Himalayas, from which the Ganges comes from. So there's a beautiful history and tradition that I try to capture in a single photo. In Benares, during much of the early part of the year, there's a natural haze, buildup from burning grasses in the entire subcontinent of India, which basically means it's a beautiful sunrise. Every morning you get this red orb. For five seconds, you've got a moment when the sun is coming out, it's not so bright that it's going to create lens flare. And so you have to get it right. So you have to get up early enough that all these people who initially stare at you, gawking at you, become bored of you. And then they start doing what they normally would be doing, which is talking. And by the time I'm ready to take the picture, they're completely not paying attention, which adds to this whole image, the cinematic view of culture. Here I'm laying in the snow on the edge of the lake right at the base of Mount Fuji. But by laying in the snow, I'm gaining the perspective of the reflection of Mount Fuji, the frost-covered rocks, wide angle as I was speaking about before. So yeah, I could stand like everybody else in this image and just get the mountain at sunrise. Or I can lay down and gain a perspective that gives it a little more subject to work with. And what I said earlier really applies, creating depth, movement of the eye, and just carefully constructing the image. In this particular case, I'm higher than low in the sense simply because the flame would obscure these two men that have just spent the day coming out of the heart of the Sahara with their camels laden with salt. So at the end of the day, at dusk, they routinely will build a fire. They will commence their dinner by having some tea. It's a very ritualistic way of ending a day. So I wanted to be there at the right time. I had to wear a turban. Why do you think I had to wear a turban. Do you think I was trying to ape Lawrence of Arabia? The reason I had to wear a turban was the camels. If I was wearing a baseball cap, those camels would distrust me, literally. So I had wear what they would normally wear. And the camels were pretty chill. I was photographing Himba girls, which are people of the desert of Namibia. And I was originally going to photograph their amazing hairdos and all that as portraits. Then I saw their big feet. They have big feet that are created as a result of never wearing shoes. And they live in an environment of thorn acacias. So what it means is they get big, fat, wide feet that are analogous to tennis shoes. And so that became the perspective. So I instantly went from portrait to more of a wide angle perspective, paying to the strength of the image. OK. How did I get that shot? Do I kind of wave magic fairy dust at these animals? Do they know who I am and they want to be part of a National Geographic spread? I have a pretty good working knowledge of animal behavior. I studied-- when I was seven, I had a little tree book, mammal book, bird book. I virtually knew everything that was in the forest. And over the years, as I've paid attention, I know that goats, wild goats, mountain goats, and wild sheep, crave salt. That's why mineral licks occur in the mountains where animals come every day. And so I drank a lot of water. I urinated on the rock right here. Anybody dispute that? No, I did that. I peed on the rock. And I set up with a wide angle. And I got them as they came in. All right. So drinking water is critical to get pictures of wild animals. You paid your money. You paid good money to be here today, right? So you hear the story. But here the story was about the habitat. This was a book I was working on called The Living Wild. And for the text, I had George Schaller, who is one of the world's foremost wildlife biologists. Jane Goodall, who you know through her work with chimpanzees, John Sawhill out of the Nature Conservancy, and Bill Conway, who created the Wildlife Conservation Society. They all wrote original text about the need to preserve more land than we currently have under protection. Simply put, animals in a habitat without proper habitat will go extinct. So from that perspective, I started shooting with wide angles. Wherever I could sneak up or stay and wait for animals to come to me, I would do it so that I could shoot not just the goats, but the mountain ridge, the clouds, and everything around it. Historically, we as wildlife photographers would focus only on the animal and anything before it or behind was out of focus. Now the habitat was as critical as the animals. So in this series I got close. And that was the style of the entire book. Traveling to South Georgia Island, to the Amazon, I did some things that are, as I look back, saying, God, that was really stupid. [LAUGHTER] ART WOLFE: And I realize that these are caiman. These are not alligators or crocodile that historically would kill people. But they do bite. And they can bite. With a big mouth full of teeth, they can bite. So they were there because ranchers in the Pantanal Marsh of Brazil would come down at the end of a day and huck chicken bones at the caiman. And that was their afternoon fun. They didn't have TV back then. And so I went down there. And all these animals came crawling out of the river and wanted chicken bones. But it was just my skinny little body and a camera. So they were a little disappointed. They were ready for dinner. This was probably the stupidest thing I've ever done. These are badges of stupidity, not honor. By getting down close to a waterhole and waiting for elephants to come out, you cannot outrun a bull elephant. Just simply put, you cannot outrun one. So you have to kind of be there and you're committed to getting the shots. But some of these big boys would be annoyed. And they would come my way and just kick dirt all over the top of me. And I would have a guy that was like 40 feet behind me saying, don't run. Don't run, because if you run, you create a chase instinct. And you don't want to try to outrun and elephant. I would crawl out on the rocks of the Galapagos Islands and wait for marine iguanas to come out of the waters. And they spent the entire day under the ocean eating algae. That's what marine iguanas eat. And then towards the end of the day, when the light is beautiful, they come out. They warm their bodies in the sun. And they're sneezing, sneezing, sneezing, because they expend salt that they've accrued during the course of the day underwater through their nose. So if you get close like this, you are virtually covered in salty snot from a lizard. So if that's the lifestyle and that's what you want to do, this is what you would do. So I traveled all over the planet shooting animals in their habitat with a wide angle perspective. Migrations was a book about patterns. It was inspired by the work of MC Escher. And for the most part, I got in ultralights. I shot patterns of animals. And flying around in an ultralight in Africa just above flocks of flamingos or herds of wildebeests or Cape buffalo, it was a great project. But it was really about patterns. Now, this book became very controversial because in 30 of the images out of 100, we incorporated what we were calling at the time in the introduction digital illustration, where we now at the beginning of the digital era would put like three or four birds in here if there was no birds and it created a hole, a disruption, if you will, of the pattern. We would clone animals from one area of the composition and put it in there. And this was total blasphemy. We had hate letters from all around the world. And on one side of the fence were people that just hated the fact that we did this. Even though we identified it in the introduction, people hated the fact that we did this. And on the other side of the coin, it won international design awards. Never so clearly was the division between art and natural history. If we had called the book Wallpaper nobody would have complained. But we called it Migrations. But for the most part and everything you have seen except for that zebra shot, was unaltered. Everything was preconceived, getting above shooting down at patterns of animals. And as an extension from that point of view, I'm moving forward on a new book, and you'll see this in a minute, where I'm getting above cultures and shooting down. So yeah, here it's almost obscuring the view. You're looking at three donkeys covered in carpets in Morocco. From a ground perspective, this would have been a more traditional point of view. So now I'm again doing what I suggested I wanted to do, which is abstracting the subject, forcing you to kind of figure out what you're looking at. When I photographed these monks out at a monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal, the person at the hotel that I was staying at looked at it and said, what is that? Is that a flower? And he thought it was like a dahlia. And I said, it's monks. And it was totally different than any way he had ever seen monks before. So that's the trick and that's the challenge is to constantly come up with perspectives, points of views, that haven't quite been done before. That's what gets me out of bed. That's what motivates me. And in some cases, like this, I've had to build platforms over an area and bring in 200 dancers directly below me. And here there was an old ladder in a Rajasthani village out in India. And we just laid it across the top of a roof. And I had two people stand on one end of the ladder. And then I crawled out on the other to shoot straight down on these women around a medallion that was on the courtyard floor. So it's combining culture, natural history, with a sense of design and history and art that is where I'm chipping and carving out my niche. Vanishing Act was how animals really are seen in nature. They're not out there distinguished against a branch clearly focused and everything's out. It's like this. So that book was really a challenge to my audience. You know, in the previous book it was about migrations and patterns. In the book before that it was the wide angle perspective. In this book, it was hiding the animal in plain sight. And of all the books I've ever worked on, people started squirming and looking and then like yelling out, left-hand corner, leopard. And they could not help themselves. They wanted to find the animal first and demonstrate that they were smarter than anybody else in the room. So yeah, there's a leopard right actually here. This is so far from where you're sitting that you can't see it, even if you knew where it was. A Great Grey Owl, sitting on a tree. So we're showing natural evolution, the concept is eat or be eaten. So there's benefits for an animal to really disguise itself or hide in the environment. I would photograph a composition because I knew white shiny objects-- you humans are really simple people. You know, you're attracted to glitz and bling, right? So if there were shiny leaves, it would pull your eye away from the baby shore bird hiding in the leaf litter along the Arctic river. These are thorny devils that are broken up by light and dark areas throughout the composition. So the entirety of the book was about hiding the animal in front of you. There's a little seahorse that wasn't known to science 15 years ago that's no bigger than your little fingernail. So I got in coral reefs 60 feet below the surface of the reefs in New Guinea. I found scorpion fish and stone fish and all those kind of creatures that live in the coral reefs are highly decorative and camouflaged, so that they can eat other little critters that come their way. Do you see it? You're looking for an animal around this rock. So I hid the animal by scale. There's a polar bear up there hiding in the rocks. A nightjar on the rock in front of you. If that fox closes its eyes, it blends in with the habitat. There's two ptarmigan here. So that book alone took about nine years. When I work on a book, I usually commit about nine years to a project. And the most recent one that's coming out in September of next year is called Earth Is My Witness. And it's a look back over the years to some of the most memorable moments I've had around the globe in the genres of culture, wildlife, and landscape. So what I try to do with the work and the time on this planet is to inspire, to uplift, to inform people that look at my work. It was stated in the introduction that I photograph beautiful scenes. Well, there's a reason I do photograph beauty. I photograph destruction and carnage as well. But I don't choose to show those within a context of a book. I think that there's enough negative news coming through our airwaves every day that I choose to do the work that uplifts people, inspires them to travel. And when I teach workshops, they're usually geared towards people in the second part of their lives that have been successful in their chosen endeavor but now they're looking for passion. They're for looking for passion in their lives. Because of the very nature, they're in my rooms, they are there because of photography. And I say, do not treat photography like a hobby that you're just relegating to once a week or every two weeks. Jump in it with both feet. And live it. Live your life around photography. And cultivate the passion of it, because it's all about really keeping your psychology healthy. In a time of a lot of stress and a lot of frustrations, I think creative people-- that's the reason that the Impressionist painters that I cited lived into their late '80s and early '90s. At that time, they were living 20 to 25 years longer than the average person. And I think that's true today. The creative types tend to have happier, longer lives. Poets do. Writers do. Dancers do. Photographers do. So in this book, I celebrate humanity in all its glory. And I'm not a religious person, but I can navigate Islam or Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity with impunity. I don't have an agenda, in other words. I see it all as good and all races as good, so you see that reflected in the work that I present from throughout the world. In India, in early March, Holi is celebrated. One particular temple in the center of India is this ancient temple. And 5,000 people cram in there and throw paint at each other and water's flying and it's just a great time. In Jaipur they paint elephants to look like other creators. I've traveled many times to Myanmar, starting about 10 years ago. It's a country waiting to be discovered. It's changing fast. Hillary Clinton and Obama went there in the last year. And suddenly it's the place to go. So if you ever entertain thoughts of going to Myanmar, now would be the good time to do it. I love working around Buddhist monks, simply because they're so chilled. You can ask if you can photograph this or that, and they just go, whatever. Fine. And so it's great to work around that. These photos all have been photographed in Myanmar. And then in the landscapes section, it's going around the world and capturing moments like a total eclipse of the sun in southern Australia 40 minutes before sunset, which meant I could incorporate the eclipse within the context of the earth, which is a rare view of a solar eclipse. Anywhere from Antarctica to the Arctic, tops of exploding volcanoes, I've gone and capture the earth's deserts, mountains, rain forests. This is in Namibia, where the sand dunes rise 1,000 feet in this beautiful orange ochre color. Beisa oryx or gemsboks are at the base. So I've been very lucky. I was raised in Seattle, on the outskirts of Seattle, in the early '50s. Like many families at that period of time, there wasn't very much money in our family. I never dreamed that I would be able to have traveled as far as I have. The camera that I adopted early on has literally become the passport into the world's cultures and landscapes. And I have had the great fortune to be healthy and have a lot of drive, so all those things are part and parcel to a life that I've lived. And I'm very, very fortunate to have lived that life. And more importantly, being open and receptive to evolving my work, my intellect, my ideas to find subjects that haven't been shot or go places that haven't been traveled is part of who I am as a photographer but also as an educator. Giant river otters in the Amazon, jaguars coming down to the river's edge, all those are a monthly routine for me. A month ago, I was down in Patagonia photographing wild lions. Next week I'm travelling to Borneo and the week after that, North Australia. So I continue to travel. These are the mountain lion shots I just shot down in Patagonia, completely wild. Here I was about from here to this gentleman with the camera away, and this mountain lion, a male, came out of some shrubbery, looked at me, and stared at me for about three minutes, and then just disappeared. A bear up in Alaska last year has brought three cubs. And she's watching a river otter with a pup move across the grass. She's concerned about what it was. The cubs are waiting for instructions. Are we going to run away or are we going to stay here? What ? What? What? And then she just relaxed. And then they start playing again. I've been there on the first day cubs are brought out of a den in the Arctic, up in northern Manitoba. Two months ago I was in Haido photographing whooper swans and Steller sea eagles. So it's a life that's enjoyable and full of exciting things. And the last body of work was inspired from work I did 20 years ago in remote areas of Africa called Tribes. And now I'm going back with a different perspective. Thomas Knoll, who wrote Photoshop, is a good friend of mine and travels with me frequently. And we went back to some of these remote cultures, showed them photos of their fathers that I had photographed 20 years before. And now it's collaborating with them on looking at cultures and humans, nudes, in a new way. So abstracting the culture from that above perspective that you saw early, now I'm extending into photographing the human form. But it's not sexual or even sensual. It's more theatrical. It's using camouflage and abstraction to photograph nudes. I hate to say the word nudes, because it instantly implies something that I'm not trying to mean. The human form would be a better way. I'm incorporating Jackson Pollock. So from where you're sitting looking at this, it may not make sense. But you could imagine a giant print on a moderate house and there's three people painted within. And that's that moment, that aha moment, that there's actually more there than meets the eye. So I'm incorporating my knowledge of tribal designs throughout the planet and putting humans in it. Now these are PC photos, because this will be broadcast through Google+. So there's a lot more nudity, if you will. I'm showing you more tamed down versions of it. And I'm also learning how to clay people, cover them in clay, dry the clay, and do something analogous to Vanishing Act. And the gallery in New York will open with this work in September. And if I can raise enough money, we'll create a film that will be broadcast on either Showtime or PBS, depending on how we edit it. So that's my little talk. It was never put together or talked in this group of photos before. But as you can see, I just talk. I just talk. And now it's your turn. Anybody that has an idea or a question or anything, don't be shy. None of you are shy. [APPLAUSE] ART WOLFE: Thank you. AUDIENCE: How to be a good judge of your pictures? ART WOLFE: How to be a good judge of your pictures? I think time and distance gives somebody perspective. You know, when you go out and you take a picture, it's pretty fresh in your mind and you're pretty excited about it. But after two weeks if you look at it again, it may not either be as good as you thought or it actually may have hidden things that you didn't even see. So I think creating a perspective is a good starting point for judging your own work. Taking classes and getting involved in the dialogue is a good way. And I think that Google+ is going to be championing that. It has been. That open dialogue between people that do this professionally and people that are getting into it, the terms they use, if you pay attention, you will learn to look at your work objectively and see what ones are better than not. AUDIENCE: In talking about the Impressionists, you were talking about using motion to help blur your images and get that kind of feel. Have you considered or experimented with actually changing focus to get a more Impressionistic feel? ART WOLFE: You know, it's a good question, because if you put a photo out of focus, then theoretically everything within the frame is going to be out of focus, I believe, right? And what I said earlier in that context is the ones that really work are when there's one monk that's sharp and by contrast, then the rest of it can be wildly out of focus. If everything's out of focus, it's more static and it looks frustrating, because the human eye, our eyes, our intellects, want to have a starting point. We are searching in that frame for that point of reference from which the rest of the frame can be wildly out of focus. But I don't know that just simply putting something out to focus-- a lot of the mystery and the beauty of shooting those long Impressionist shots is they're creating movement of the eye. And when it's simply out of focus, if it's a static shot, is going to be a static shot. AUDIENCE: So perhaps using extreme depth of field reduction on a long-- you were showing very much with a wide angle lens foreground and distance, use something like that with a very tight depth of field control? ART WOLFE: I would stop talking right now, because I think you're on to something and you should be doing that book. Honestly, when I give a talk, most of the people in my audience are 40- to 70-year-olds. To give a talk before people that are younger than me and very smart people, I love this. Nobody would have ever come up with that as a suggestion. So thank you for that. I would have to kind of execute it and see if that would work. But it is worthy a try. Thank you for the contribution. AUDIENCE: Could you talk a little bit about the equipment that you use? And have you tried a plenoptic camera? Do you have an opinion about that? ART WOLFE: I am completely camera illiterate. As I said from the get-go, I know 5% or 4% of what my camera does. I am so uninterested in technology that it's painful. Seriously. People that take my class often know way more about the cameras and technology than I do. I don't even know what that camera was. Seriously. So yeah, I mean, nobody is a complete package, right? I mean, God, I've got a great build and I'm just drop-dead gorgeous. And I can take a composition. But I don't have that technology side of me. AUDIENCE: Any place you haven't been to yet that you want to go? ART WOLFE: There's a lot of places I have not been to. I have not been to Egypt. I have not been to Spain. I have not been to places that people just say, are you kidding? This is where we went last year for our vacation. So there's places that I've been back to. I've been back to China since 1984 15 times, or Antarctica 12 times. I go back to places that tend to deliver, knowing full well that I'll go to Spain. I know everything about Spain, having studied it, and Egypt. And know where I want to go? I haven't been to Jerusalem. I want to go Oman. I want to go to places I've not been. And you know, I do have a few more years. And I'll go there. But that's a good question. All right. Well, listen. Thank you very much for coming today. You honor me. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] Thank you.