Yesterday I learned that the photographer Rick Maloof passed away on December 27th. I didn’t know Rick well but did have the good fortune of spending a day with him and his wife Joan, a Terrain.org contributor, up in the old-growth rainforests of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the summer of 2009. That trip resulted in an article by Joan with slideshow by Rick in Terrain.org’s Fall/Winter 2009 issue: view it here.

Though I only had that small window of interaction, I knew right away that Rick was a caring, compassionate, wonderful individual. I’ve long known that about Joan. Rick and I spent hours along the trails and the bumpiest bus ride in my memory, anyway, talking photography, conservation, literature, and beyond. Even in that short time he has inspired and influenced me, as his memory and photographs will continue to do. Safe travels, Rick.

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Obituary from the memorial service, held January 16 at Salisbury University:

Richard D. Maloof of Quantico passed away peacefully at home on the morning of December 27th, just as the sun came out on the fresh snow. The cause of death was renal cell carcinoma which was diagnosed in late September. Rick is well known as a photographer-philosopher. His work has been shown in many local galleries, and it continues to enliven many walls.

Rick leaves behind a wife of 32 years, Joan Maloof, and five children: Natalie Maloof; Richard Maloof Jr. of Quantico, MD; Traci Stroupe of Lost Creek, WV; David Maloof of Big Sur, CA; and Alyssa Maloof of Philadelphia, PA. He also leaves behind two brothers: Daniel Maloof and Robert Maloof. He was preceded in death by his parents: Caroline Morris Watson Maloof and Daniel Maloof. Rick made friends very easily and he also leaves behind many close friends.

Rick Maloof was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942. He graduated from Bladensburg High School in 1959 and joined the Army in 1960. He was part of a Long Range Recon Patrol company and later joined the Special Forces. He served his country in Vietnam and eventually became a commissioned officer, attaining the rank of Captain. His last years in the military were spent teaching ROTC at the University of Delaware and Salisbury University. Although Rick served 23 years in the Army, he was a pacifist at heart and supported many organizations promoting nonviolence.

After retiring from service, Rick devoted his time to photography. He produced many “slide shows” for local nonprofit agencies, and he worked for a while as Salisbury University’s official photographer. He photographed countless weddings and produced an endless stream of artwork. His years in photography bridged the era of film and darkroom to digital and lightroom.

Rick led an adventurous life and had many skills. He traveled all around the world, including Greece, India, Thailand, Pakistan, Mexico, Germany, Spain, New Zealand, China, Indonesia, and many more places. He was a pilot, a skydiver, a scuba diver, and a backpacker. In addition, he was a great cook and a lover of fine red wines. He felt very satisfied with all that he had experienced, and he left this life with no regrets.

Donations in his memory, and all proceeds from his artwork, will be used to print a book of his forest photography titled A Path to Beauty: Ecology of Ancient Forests.

Photo from Frank Schirrmeister's Plain City collection. Click to view slideshow.

Get up at dawn with your camera and take a walk through your neighborhood, tour your city, your town, your countryside. What do you see? How does place change for you in those early morning hours? Photographer Frank Schirrmeister lives in Berlin, and has done just that for the past four years. His images of Berlin, often considered Europe’s trendsetting city, ask us to consider the way a place is in a constant state of transition, of transformation.

His collection of photographs, Plain City, is a way of “reducing the city to its plain, naked existence” in an effort to “approach the essence of the place.” Everything is in flux, constantly changing. Soon the light will change, the weather, people will fill the sidewalks, and vehicles will fill the streets.

Schirrmeister says, “I often have the feeling that my own city doesn’t belong to me anymore, but to the forces of the global economy. When photographing Berlin, I am constantly trying to scrutinize and to challenge the popular image of the city. I explore the town beyond the facade, delve into the deeper layers of the metropolis.”

Often we move through the day without thinking about our environment, the natural landscape and the structures within it. What would it take to transform our perspective of the mundane, of our everyday place, and view the world around us in a fresh light?

In 2002, the PBS program, American Experience, produced a documentary film about his life and work. Born in San Francisco in 1902, Adams was hyperactive and drawn to nature at a young age. His pursuit of music became a substitute for formal education. Relying on a photographic memory, he taught himself piano at age twelve and trained to be a concert pianist.

On a family trip at age fourteen, Adams was strongly influenced by the magnificent beauty of the Yosemite Valley. He later wrote, “From that day, my life has been colored and modulated by the great earth gesture of the Sierra.”

His editor and assistant, Andrea Gray Stillman, recalled, “He always said he was formed by those early landscape experiences and where he was living… I mean, once you’ve lived a while in San Francisco, you can feel …that fog kind of tiptoeing in, where it changes the sounds and kind of gets in to your bones. Or when there’s a glorious clear day…it’s just breathtakingly beautiful. And that was just part and parcel of Ansel.”

Conservationist, environmentalist, Sierra Club member, Adams’ inspirational work elevated the craft of photography to fine art. On the process of creating photographs, Adams said, “I’m interested in expressing something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.” He talked about seeking something in the landscape that did not actually exist. An image filtered by perspective. A work of art to inspire a nation.

Consider the man working with his glass plates, moving the camera into position to “make” a picture, creating something new in the space where his mind intersected with the environment around him. Adams again, “Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.”

Today, Adams’ archives are managed by the Center for Creative Photography, located in Tucson at the University of Arizona. Free to the public, more than 2,600 photographs are available for viewing online.

Animal Logic, by Richard Barnes

Animal Logic
by Richard Barnes
with contributions by Susan Yelavich, Jonathan Rosen, and Mark Strand
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009

A buffalo stands horns to head with a man who is calmly vacuuming the snow-covered plains beneath its feet. A herd of plastic-wrapped zebras surrounds a giraffe, while a man on scaffolding above them paints a lovely trompe l’oeil sky. Photographer Richard Barnes has spent more than ten years documenting the way we assemble, contain, and catalog the natural world. His behind-the-scenes photographs are haunting reminders that there is nothing natural about a natural history museum.

Animal Logic, Barnes’s first monograph, collects four related species of his photographic work that touch on themes relevant to science, history, archaeology, and architecture. Through his lens sights and objects normally hidden from public view — half-installed dioramas, partially wrapped specimens, anatomical models, exploded skulls, and taxidermied animals in shipping crates — take on a strange beauty. Barnes peels back layers of artifice to reveal the tangle of artistry, craftsmanship, and curatorial decisions inside every lifelike diorama and meticulously arranged glass case. Animal Logic investigates both the human desire to construct artificial worlds for “the wild” and the haunting and poignant worlds the real wild constructs. Barnes’s camera freezes migrating starlings to reveal the visual poetry hidden inside their dense formations. His extraordinary photographs of birds’ nests constructed from detritus — string, plastic, milkweed, tinsel, hair, dental floss, pine needles — sculpturally embody our often complicated relationship with nature.

Animal Logic presents more than 120 of Barnes’s photographs and features texts by Jonathan Rosen of the New York Times, former poet laureate Mark Strand, and curator Susan Yelavich that explore the themes that emerge from Barnes’s unique body of work.

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Animal Logic will be fully reviewed in the forthcoming issue of Terrain.org, “Virtually There,” publishing in mid-March.

http://www.simmonsbuntin.com/images/gallery/2009/victoria/index.html

Enjoy!

http://www.terrain.org/img/gallery/index.html

for images of recent Terrain.org and related literary events in New York City, including:

“The Future of Environmental Essay” panel at the AWP conference, facilitated by Terrain.org editor Simmons Buntin and featuring Alison Hawthorne Deming, David Gessner, David Rothenberg, and Lauret Savoy (look for the text of their presentations in the July issue of Terrain.org).

Terrain.org 10th Anniversity Reading, featuring Scott Edward Anderson, Teague Bohlen, Simmons B. Buntin, Scott Calhoun, Philip Fried, Deborah Fries, Suzanne Frischkorn, Donna J. Gelagotis Lee, Dennis Must, Shann Palmer, David Rothenberg, Andrew Wingfield, and Jake Adam York; at Cornelia Street Cafe

Salmon: A Journey in Poetry Anthology Launch & Reading, hosted by Salmon Poetry publisher Jessie Lendennie, and featuring Simmons B. Buntin and others; at the Bowery Poetry Club

http://www.terrain.org/img/gallery/index.html