It's kind of like the game kids play. "made you look!" is the cry of victory--both in child's play and in the arts.
For decades, David Muench has turned our heads--and held our attention. Dubbed the Ansel Adams of color photography, he has brought us the West's giant vistas, a West we seldom see but are happy exists somewhere in the general vicinity.
Muench relishes being part of a short--though solid--tradition of Western landscape photographers. What William Henry Jackson did for Yellowstone and Adams for Yosemite, he likes to think he has done for other Western sites, such as Arches National Monument in Utah and the central coast of California. "The more important I make it, the more people will think it's important," says Muench.
In a career that spans more than 30 years and 40 books, he has revealed a talent for making wild places seem both familiar and breathtakingly unique. In the way he photographs the twisting sandstone and granite, the vast stretches of undulating desert, the knuckled coast above a boisterous sea, we sense that he has found something--a quality of light and space--that, even had we been there, we would not have seen.
No place is more important to him than the mountains above Santa Barbara, in whose shadow he grew up and still lives. From his own backyard comes one of the more beautiful photographs in his most recent book, "California." It shows one of the dozens of caves in the Santa Barbara/Ventura area where ancient Chumash paintings can be found. In typical Muench style, there are two focal points. In the foreground is the colorful design of the wall painting. In the background, seen through the entrance to the cave, is an undeveloped stretch of the Santa Ynez Mountains.
Muench is a master of this photographic "near/far," a compositional technique in which a powerful image in the foreground is played against a sharply contrasting background. He may juxtapose a burst of very living flowers in the foreground with the stark and life-threatening world of a glacier-skirted range of mountains in the background. He knows, he says, that a picture is good "when the edges get hot," when "opposing primal forces" meet, such as in one scene from "California" shot on the coast. In the background, a splashing wave is set against a Rothko-like sky of muted yellows and grays. In the extreme foreground, the cascading water of an earlier wave, spent on the jutting rock above, rushes back to sea. Talk about opposing forces.
