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Artist: Richard Sundeen
Dick Sundeen has been studying the art of photography and photographing creatively for 45 years. In the mid 70's he discovered and was smitten by the exquisite precision of large format black and white photography. He quit his economics major in Utah and enrolled at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, although not to learn about photography, per se. He studied composition, perspective, light and dark, color, and other fundamental components of the visual arts. Dick travelled to California to take workshops that led to visits in the living rooms and darkrooms of some of the giants in the art of creative photography, from Adams to Weston. When Clarence John Laughlin (considered the first true surrealist photographer in the U.S.) came to Minneapolis to teach a workshop. Dick spent a rainy day driving him around and chatting about photography, Edward Weston, and the surrealism in the work of Eugene Atget, the French photographer who has been an enduring inspiration and influence in Dick's work.
Dick has photographed from coast to coast, north into Canada, and south to the Pole (where he learned that selected shutter speeds have minds of their own at 80 below). He loves the deserts of the American west and has photographed in Death Valley and the driest parts of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. The amazing ever-changing light in the desert showcases the rock formations, sands, shapes, and colors of the landscape as it continuously changes in appearance and reality.
With the onset of Covid and the need for social distancing, the nearby deserts were the only place Dick could travel to photograph in good conscience. With one camera and lens and a gallon of Purell he went camping and happily made pictures in the middle of nowhere. These have been strange times and the surrealism he felt is present in many of these photographs. Most of these images are selections from photos made during that period, his "Pandemic Portfolio".