Photographs: Remembered, Retold, and Dreamed

With his latest series, "In A Big World Wandering" making its national tour, artist-photographer, Bryan David Grifffith is gaining recognition for his traditional methods and poignant and challenging perspective. His process, lifestyle and reasons for making artwork are captured in this artist profile written by Deanna Wulff:

With his fingers icy and red, Bryan David Griffith holds his breath and watches the play of light and snow in the aspens. He has hiked up to the base of Mt. Humphrey’s, the highest peak in Arizona—in the middle of a blizzard. The wind blows up a white plume of frost, and he opens the shutter for a long exposure, counting the seconds aloud while shielding his lens from the snow. “For every exposure I make, I spend many days in the field just observing, waiting for that rare moment when the season, time and weather add up to just the right light,” he says.

He uses old-fashioned large format sheet-film cameras, which are larger, slower and more difficult to operate than 35mm cameras. “The large film produces incredibly detailed, nuanced images unattainable by any other means,” he says. “The world of photography is changing, but this process still produces the finest prints possible.” Griffith’s newest work delves even further into analogue techniques, using low-tech equipment and the nineteenth-century platinum palladium printing process. “It’s my attempt to get at the core of my reasons for making art, through using really basic equipment,” he explains. “The images have a blurry quality of being remembered, or recalled. A lot of them are metaphors for my life as an artist, but I try to make them deliberately open-ended and ambiguous, so viewers can fill in the narrative with their own experiences.”

A self-taught photographer, Griffith left a successful career in management consulting to pursue photography full-time. It was a riches to rags transition for the first couple years, with Griffith essentially living out of an old van, traveling across the country and saving every cent for film. Since then, his portfolios have won numerous awards, including two first place awards in photography at the Sausalito Art Festival—ranked the top art fair in America—and three first place awards at the Scottsdale Arts Festival, ranked the top art fair in Arizona. His work is also held in several university, corporate, and private collections, but Griffith feels most honored by the hundreds of “ordinary people who’ve given my work a place in their homes and lives.”

IN A BIG WORLD WANDERING is currently showcased at Translations Gallery through September 28th. There will be a closing reception for In A Big World Wandering on Wednesday, September 28th from 5-8:30pm where published books of the exhibition can be purchased and signed by the artist.