Photography by Brooke Hammerle

The subject of my work is the mystery of light in the landscape. Although I visualize my images through the camera, my former background as a painter and printmaker prevails in my concern for the formal elements of that vision, and its translation of light into color. My work is a synthesis of what I see through the lens and the isolating and organizing of form and color for its own sake. The illusion of light is translated into luminous relationships of color space.

In particular my landscapes with water, water becomes both a space and a surface where I can explore worlds hidden within multiple dimensions, and spatial ambiguity between surface and reflection. These elements act implicitly, rather than anecdotally; I am drawn in search of a unity, the subtlety of shapes and patterns floating in a rhythm of their own space and time, as I search for the poetry of nature's design.
I am a photographer who had been shooting my work on 35MM and 2 ¼ color transparency film for 30 years. Since 1999 I have printed my work digitally, from high-resolution scans. Inkjet printing on paper then became the realization of my aesthetic vision. In 2010, as the local processing of color transparency film was being discontinued, I started shooting with a Nikon D300 digital camera. Although shooting digitally has its conveniences and the auto focusing system is necessary for some of my work I still enjoy working in the 2 ¼ format of transparency film with my Mamiya and Hasselblad cameras.