John Derryberry
Dallas, TX
John Derryberry is a contemporary, fine art photographer whose work explores abstraction, discovery, and the beauty of the overlooked.
Message
John Derryberry is a fine art photographer whose work explores abstraction, discovery, and the quiet beauty of the overlooked. Drawing from the visual language of urban environments and natural forms, his artworks transform commonplace subjects into meditative images that hover between representation and symbolism.
Across series such as Alley Flowers and Unseen, Derryberry engages in an aesthetic reinterpretation of botanical and urban imagery, using photography to dissolve literal description and invite slower, contemplative looking. Flowers growing in alleys and unnoticed urban surfaces become sites of visual transformation, where light, shadow, and repetition evoke accidental petroglyphs of modern life. Circles, marks, and layered forms emerge as visual echoes—suggestive rather than declarative—allowing the images to transcend their origins and resonate as something both familiar and elusive.
While grounded in abstraction, Alley Flowers also carries an understated ecological commentary. By elevating improvised pollinator gardens and spontaneous growth in neglected spaces, the work gestures toward environmental urgency without didacticism, framing resilience and beauty as quiet acts within the urban landscape. Influences range from the spiritual abstraction of Georgia O'Keeffe, Adolph Gottlieb, Malevich, and Paul Klee to Japanese woodblock artist Kunichika, to the photographic legacies of Keith Carter, Aaron Siskind and Irving Penn, where form, texture, and symbolism take precedence over documentation.
Derryberry’s work invites calm, engagement, and meditation—offering images that function less as records of what is seen and more as portals to what is felt or remembered. His photographs operate in the space between perception and meaning, encouraging viewers to pause, discover, and reconsider the visual poetry embedded in everyday life.
Statement
Alley Flowers This series is made to support and encourage other pollinator gardens in this time of urgent environmental need. It is centered around intentional and unintentional pollinator gardens, alley’s and abandoned spaces. I am challenging myself to take the cliched subject of flower photographs to a new place which is ephemeral but not too poetic, using references and aesthetics from Japanese woodblock prints, pop art and watercolor.
Unseen Series was from my lifelong obsession with looking at the ground, that started with searching for arrowheads as a child on my grand parents farm. Today, instead of arrowheads, I look for images in places which normally get overlooked or unnoticed markings and light patterns on the ground and walls. This is a meditative experience in response to the commonality of not paying attention to present and using the dichotomy of the cell phone as distraction or as away to see. I enhance these images using color, contrast and other techniques to find their hidden potential, with influences from Abstract Expressionism and Japanese Sumi-e ink paintings and even astro photography.