Paradise Found

BY JAMES ALINDER

Christopher Burkett is the hardest-working artist I know. For two months of each year he searches for subject matter, driving about the country with his wife Ruth to discover locales where distinct images can be unearthed. The other ten months he spends printing in the darkroom, logging six, fourteen-hour days each week. Burkett developed this high degree of discipline, both physical and mental, and forged what would become his creative philosophy during his seven years as a brother in a Christian order. The principles of simple, devout living that he learned as a member of a monastic community have remained with him as he has developed both his artistic vision and daily routine. Over the past twenty-five years Burkett has produced an extraordinary body of creative work, one remarkable in the history of photography.

 

Burkett's discerning eye and resolute perfectionism define his choice of camera and his personal control of the color printing process. Many people viewing Burkett's photographs for the first time are utterly astonished, principally by two factors, color and clarity. Whether subtle or extravagant, Burkett's use of color is always masterful. His print clarity results from an 8x10-inch view camera that produces equally large transparencies. It is common knowledge amongst photographers that an 8x10 is no longer obligatory: that cumbersome equipment is simply unnecessary given today's fine-grain films and excellent optics, not to mention the recent possibility of enhanced digital resolution. That conventional wisdom masquerades as truth until one of Burkett's thirty-by-forty-inch Cibachrome prints is experienced in person. Overwhelmed with the physical beauty of these prints, viewers often say these cannot be photographs. But they are, and they are simply exquisite.

 

Very few photographers who work with color transparencies make their own prints since excellent professional custom labs exist for this purpose, but Burkett will have none of that. He makes each print himself and with a skill that is unsurpassed. Controlling contrast in color printing is difficult, particularly with transparencies made in bright sun. Many photographers actually avoid working in full sun, because they know that they will be unable to control the contrast: the range of tones in the transparency is considerably beyond that of the paper. To control that contrast, Burkett makes a black and white negative, identical to the color transparency, and prints with it as a sandwich in exact register. By varying the contrast and density of the black and white contact negative, he precisely adjusts the contrast to fit the paper, to create luminous prints with remarkable color and detail. He also employs masking techniques to control color density and the color tone of local areas. As many as seven masks, in multiple stages, are used in the exposure of the print paper. The use of these techniques and others redefine the way color prints are made, bringing his prints superlative finesse.

There is no denying that Burkett has great technical resources. He requires, in Baudelaire's terms, "absolute material accuracy," because he insists that the image cannot be separated from the precise integral quality of the print. Many artists, by contrast, abhor the rigors of technical precision. They want only to express themselves, but do not appreciate that technique makes expression concrete.

 

Art and technology have had interlocking relationships for centuries. Plato made no real distinction between art and technology, he used the same word for both: techne, which has to do with knowing how. This unified conception of art and technology remained in effect long afterward. During the Italian Renaissance, there was a strong emphasis on the technological aspects of art, and on the artistic aspects of technology; the works of Leonardo da Vinci provide clear illustration.

 

With an awareness of the traditions of landscape imagery that preceded him, our appreciation of Burkett's work deepens. The Western artistic conventions that define what landscape pictures should look like hail from seventeenth century Dutch painters. This genre, filtered through the eyes of British artists, came to the colonies well before the invention of photography. These paintings depicted nature tamed, and therefore "improved", by man's efficacious efforts. The raw, unsettled landscape itself did not become a suitable subject for artists until the end of the eighteenth century, just decades before the invention of photography in 1839.

 

Photography was well suited to make landscapes, but initially its most popular use was for portraits. After the Civil War, photographers began to document the West, and William Henry Jackson, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Carleton Watkins became legendary for their dramatic, glorious interpretations of an emerging land. Many of their images have what twentieth-century viewers have come to see as a barren modernism; other photographs revel in the resplendent beauty of the natural scene. Although their negatives were often made on geographic surveys to map new territory, today we appreciate their landscape images as visual antidotes to our present predicament of over-population and pollution.

 

In the twentieth century, photographs of the land were made as personal expressions of artistic sensibilities. Alfred Stieglitz pictured the land and sky as metaphors for the secrets of creation and his philosophy of life. Edward Weston made formal modernist constructions from nature—taut and elegant images-where form merges with content. Ansel Adams visualized an American landscape that was unspoiled and majestic, caressed by light itself. Others followed, but too often in their predecessor's tripod holes.

 

There is an interesting comparison between a group of 1930s photographers and Christopher Burkett. In 1932, Adams, Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and others formed a loose association called Group f/64 for the purpose of promoting what they called Pure Photography-that is, photographs that capitalized on the inherent qualities of the medium. The Group's name derives from a very small lens opening used to give great sharpness in depth, with maximum definition throughout the image. Because of their concern with fine detail in black and white, members frequently used the 8x10 view camera. However, they made small prints, often contact prints, that were by definition the same size as the negative. Redolent of the same philosophy and using the view camera with the lens often stopped to f/64, Burkett applies the Group's tenets to express his own aesthetic: large prints and a rainbow palette. In doing so, he both embraces the tradition of Pure Photography and transcends it.

 

Although Burkett has been influenced by the masters of black and white landscape photography, his choice to work in color connects him with the history of color photography.  Since the medium's invention there has been a desire for color, early daguerreotypists for example, made hand-colored portraits in response to popular demand. When practical color photographic processes were invented at the turn of the century, however, little serious landscape work was being done.

 

The introduction in 1937 of 35mm Kodachrome transparency film greatly increased the public use of color, but since its popularization in mass-produced postcards and calendars, color landscape photography has been dismissed by those who have advocated the fine art status of photography. The color landscapes familiar to popular audiences were over-saturated scenes of tourist destinations, clichéd souvenirs of places visited on summer vacations that often did not even identify the photographer. Few serious photographers in the middle half of the twentieth century saw the possibility of overcoming the stigma of kitsch that color landscapes connoted, and black and white continued to provide a sense of abstraction that agreed with the modernist sensibilities of landscape photographers.

 

Some of the best known black and white photographers experimented with color processes but never produced color work that they felt reached the potential of their gelatin-silver prints. Furthermore, because color prints were very difficult to make, photographers did not have control over the vital artistic process of printing. During much of his career, Ansel Adams made color photographs for commercial assignments. Adams, who was a master printer of black and white, never developed or printed a color image himself. Adams, like Burkett, felt that the making of the fine print was an integral part of his creative process. With black and white he could control the tonal zones and contrast in ways that were impossible with color materials at the time. At the end of his career, Edward Weston exposed a few sheets of Kodachrome, noting that, "The prejudice many photographers have against color photography comes from not thinking of color as form." But neither Adams nor Weston achieved the quality of photographs in color that they had in black and white.

 

Eliot Porter may be the exception. He was an acknowledged master, first established in black and white, who realized the potential in color photography. Porter's large format color pictures are subtle in hue, complex in structure, and feel natural to the land he photographed. They were precise descriptions of a fragile natural world, personally printed in the difficult dye-transfer process. His work in the landscape was a chromatic beacon that gave a glimmer of hope to the next generation.

 

Today, Burkett continues the fine print tradition, reaching a high level of precision and polish through use of 8x10-inch film, modern lenses, and the refined printing techniques mentioned above. Burkett's photographs are an excellent lesson in how the development and use of superb technical abilities can serve one's imagery. Burkett's craft certainly separates him from his peers working in color, but his subject matter also reflects a very personal vision of the natural world. He finds his subjects in places that are available to us all. He does not routinely photograph in the designated areas of photographic beauty in the National Parks, finding most of his photographs in the ditches by the roadside, idle fields, or quiet woodlands. The great showplaces of majestic scenery are unnecessary for him, because he finds the affirmation of life everywhere. Burkett's creative directions and working methods can be better understood by examining several of his photographs.

 

Cottonwood and Light, Utah, 1987. One can only imagine Burkett's heart pounding as he turned a corner to spot this scene. He does not have a programmatic art strategy; rather, he reacts freshly to what he sees. For the moment of this exposure, a canyon wall behind Burkett is reflecting sun onto the tree, providing both front and back lighting. Seen against the blue shadows of the far canyon wall, the tree's bare branches gleam intensely, a glorious silvery white that is in dramatic contrast to the harsh desert landscape, with its earthen colors, in the foreground. The cottonwood could be the Burning Bush.

 

Radiant Mountain Aspen, Colorado, 1997. This is an ode to joy, a celebration of the splendor beyond words of the natural world. Two tree trunks rise through the center, displaying a veil-like trellis of intensely back-lit foliage. One unifying factor in his vision is that, in every image, light seems to be coming from within the photograph, self-illuminated.

The leaves appear in all their delicate and fragile glory: thin as paper, attached by a hair, they will be on the ground with the first snow. Burkett visualizes the final print he will make before squeezing the cable release to open the shutter and he knows that the intensity of the yellows played off the deep blues and greens of the background, combined with the high contrast of the scene, will provide an exceptional printing challenge. Here Burkett uses both light and color to flatten the picture plane, which moves us beyond an appreciation of only the physical scene.

 

Beaver Lodge at Sunrise, Colorado, 1997. When the photographer looks into the ground glass of the view camera, the image appears upside down and reversed, providing a sense of abstraction that influences image arrangement. While composing this scene at sunrise, Burkett saw the brilliant reflection in the water right side up. The subtle purples and greens on both banks of the stream bed feed the eye in this topsy-turvy world of natural magic. Burkett often works with contrasting colors, and here the hues appear brighter because of their interaction. Whether contrasting or complimentary, the forms created by color must be integral to the image. This photograph provides an excellent example of Burkett's use of color as form, totally integrated with the other picture elements. When Burkett looks through the ground glass of his view camera, he sees the image using what can be called "soft eyes", the analysis of all the picture elements as a whole, but in an intuitive way. Each situation is unique, and there are no immutable rules for composition. Edward Weston defined composition as the strongest way of seeing. For Burkett, when the composition is strongest, he knows, his vision locks and the framed image is captured on film in its wholeness. Burkett preserves the integrity of his inspiration at the moment of exposure by not cropping his photographs, printing each image full frame.

 

Sunrise and Autumn Blueberries, Maine, 1994. Sometimes, pictures happen instantly, others need time to reveal themselves to the photographer. Burkett camped beside this scene waiting for the moment of revelation. With the colors changing hourly, he made some fifty exposures. At sunrise on the third day, he realized he had fifteen seconds to make the ultimate picture: after sunrise, but before the sun melted the light coating of frost on the blueberries. Having thus achieved the rhythms of form, it is color itself that arrests the eye. This picture takes red to the hilt, with every possible shade maximally saturated but fully detailed. Seen alone, the intense color of the scarlet blueberry field would not be believed but to keep us grounded in reality, Burkett has included a band of trees at the top of the image, providing normal fall colors.

 

Blue Glacial Ice, Alaska, 1993. Many of Burkett's images are close-up details of the landscape, here with emphasis on color and texture. This composition is an elegy to blue. Huge glaciers hold delicate details as the hundreds of small crystalline rectangles and triangles of ice form a naturally cubist image. A year after Burkett first sent this image to our gallery, he demanded its return saying that he had dramatically improved it. As he labors in the darkroom, he makes a series of work prints, employing his unique masking techniques to painstakingly refine the color and contrast relationships, print after print. Even extremely minute changes of color balance can also affect tonal separation and the sense of luminosity. When I received the new print, I had to be told by him where there were three small areas where he had brightened the highlights. He is prodigiously diligent, a vastly underrated quality for an artist. While there is the creative moment with the camera, there will also follow days of production to bring the work of art into being. Such monastic attention to the exquisite points of color reproduction, to that "absolute material accuracy" lift Burkett's renderings to the realm of consequential art.

 

The best of Christopher Burkett's photographs have an almost mystical sense of connection to us, one that cannot fully be conveyed through words or reproductions. This connection can best be made by experiencing his original prints. In the age of digital reproduction, the craft of the photographic artist has begun to severely decrease in significance as computer technology replaces hands on darkroom technique. However, some artists, like Burkett, whose printing skills resonate through their prints, will continue the fine color print tradition. In the first half of this century, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin forecast the dissolution of a work of art's "aura" or mystery, because photographic reproductions of works of art would make rare objects readily available. Somewhat ironically, Christopher Burkett's photographs restore aura to the original work of art. His prints have an infusion of light and life that can only be meticulously and rigorously crafted.

 

The making of art is a process by which the artist communicates to and through the culture. The most powerful art is a reflection of the artist, defined through the work created. Christopher Burkett's photographic epiphanies reveal images with a profound beauty that can only be hand-forged and bless us with a paradise found.