Range of Light Photography | Range of Light Photography™ | About

About

This website celebrates the enduring beauty of the fine art gelatin silver print (GSP) as interpreted through the camera and within the enduring expessive prints of master photographer/printer Ben Dewell. Although my prints are available in editions of up to 100, every print is a unique, hand-made work of art. All monochrome images represented on this website are digital scans of actual silver prints (as opposed to photoshopped negatives), made exclusively by the artist.

My interest lies primarily with the the California plein-air landscape style, and in particular with natural light photography of the incomparable Sierra Nevada Mountain Range where I have reveled in ecstacy for most of my life and in which I plan many more adventures, photographic and otherwise.

As of this writing, the market for fine art photography is undergoing radical changes in both aesthetic and substance. Although I feel many of these changes are ill-advised for both "artist" and consumer, the runaway train of adulterated machine mass production pixelations seems unstoppable.

My epiphany as to the value of a traditionally-based photographic site was the toppling in 2009 of a much loved oak tree photographed most famously by Ansel Adams circa 1950 ("Early Morning, Merced River"). I began photographing it as a tribute to Adams' 100^th birthday in 2002. Even with its precarious stance over the Merced River, it was impossible to foretell that within the span of less than a single decade it would be gone, drowned and eventually swallowed by the seasonal tides of its brothering stream. But the tree survives in my heart and mind, thanks to photography. It lives on, welcoming and vigorous to this very day upon my bedroom wall, rooted among the shoulders of lichen-clothed granite boulders, its outstretched arms greeting the soft light of the warming morning sun.

And so it has become clear to me that the value of my prints lies beyond the fickle, unfathomable market forces of the art world alone, but surviving as documents to a restless landscape, a longing memory, and a yearning heart.

Range of Light Photography is the sole artistic/commercial enterprise of master photographer/printer Ben Dewell. All images, © 2005 - 2024 Ben Dewell, all rights reserved. All photographs and images © Ben Dewell, all rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright owner.

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