Artist Statement

“I came to photography late.  Assisted by my immediate family, who loved to hike, fish, swim and ski, I found nature before I found photography.  Wandering around outdoors was a habit I inherited.  Photography came later. 

On the East Coast I grew up with amazing natural beauty. I can readily recall the feeling of light filtering through a grove of maple trees with leaves of yellow, orange and deep maroon.  And, of blue morning twilight creeping along a mountain ridgeline slowly, almost imperceptibly, growing into sun-up purples and pinks over landscapes like those that had been painted well over a hundred years before by the artists of the Hudson River School.

Years later, due West, nature’s spell continues. I stand before a North Rim Grand Canyon panorama layered into the rising wilderness by forests painted like zebra bands of half shadow and half highlight.

A few hours later, the same view is transformed. The sky is now filled with enormous dark thunderheads. A very different Grand Canyon panorama appears. Dangling from beneath the thunderheads I see deep purple hanging veils of mist backlit by the setting sun here and there glowing like red and yellow fireworks.

The double full-circle rainbow that appeared high above and far below my feet at nearby Point Royal on the north rim of the Grand Canyon was a William Henry Jackson moment. His biography noted seeing a double full-circle rainbow in Colorado 1871. Galen Rowell reported that it was the kind of rainbow that could only be seen and photographed from an airplane.

There it was with the Grand Canyon stretching out below. The realization that I had been at the nexus of something as unrepeatable as a full double-circle rainbow on earth was so stimulating and demoralizing at the same time that I didn’t make a photograph for months thereafter. Nothing else I witnessed was its equal.  Why bother?  

The challenges of creating images of the un-capturable, the un-imaginable, the un-controllable … the brightness, the darkness and the color and shapes of nature’s extravagance has become my reward. Thank you for Wandering Around Outdoors with me.”

Tom Gamache

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