Photographs by: Robert Glenn Ketchum

For forty years, Robert Glenn Ketchum’s photography has helped define contemporary color photography
while at the same time helping to focus public attention on complex environmental issues.
Ketchum’s imagery has always balanced traditional landscape subjects that celebrate
the beauty of nature with other viewpoints about our relationship to the environment.

Natures Palette – photography by Robert Glenn Ketchum

In more than ten books and hundreds of exhibitions, Ketchum’s work has influenced management of public lands, promoted better long-term planning of the interface between development and natural areas, swayed timber reform legislation and broadened the public view of global warming. Recent work supports bills in the House and Senate to preserve the last and most productive wild salmon fishery in the history of the world. These newest images of Bristol Bay and southwest Alaska are currently on display in a separate exhibition at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

In 2006, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, organized and exhibited “Regarding the Land: Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Legacy of Eliot Porter.” This was a major exhibition and publication surveying 40-years of Ketchum’s work, while comparing and contrasting it to the images and career of Eliot Porter, Ketchum’s historical predecessor.

Ketchum’s success as a photographer and conservation advocate are underscored by numerous acknowledgements. They include the United Nations Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award, the Josephine and Frank Duveneck Humanitarian Award, the Robert O. Easton Award for Environmental Stewardship, and the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography.

His undergraduate studies at UCLA, with Edmund Teske and Robert Heinecken, two very non-traditional photographers, peaked his interest in photographic experimentation.

Working through the UCLA-China Exchange Program, he developed a long term relationship with the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute of Suzhou China. This relationship has resulted in the production of some 35 embroideries based on his landscape imagery ranging from wall hangings to large multi-paneled standing screens.

Very recently, Ketchum has also been creating new designs for the Chinese embroiderers that are derived from digitally manipulated photographs of nature. These newest pieces also assume a very different scale from his better known prints. In this exhibition, Lumière has selections of work from each of these differing periods of the photographers working career.

Ketchum’s prints are included in numerous collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art (NY); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Amon Carter Museum; Los Angeles County Museum; High Museum of Art; Stanford University Museum; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; National Museum of American Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; George Eastman House; Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts.

Featured in this exhibition is the work of Robert Glenn Ketchum.

Select this link to view his complete artist page.

Robert Glenn Ketchum (1947) For 40 years Robert Glenn Ketchum’s imagery and books have helped to define contemporary color photography while at the same time addressing critical national environmental issues, and have made him one of the most successful artist/activists in American history. As an undergraduate at UCLA, Ketchum studied with Edmund Teske and Robert Heinecken. His first published photographs were of 1960’s era rock bands, including The Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Donovan and Traffic. Mentoring with Leland Rice during post-graduate work at California Institute of the Arts (MFA, ’74), Ketchum expanded his discipline from black & white to color and began to focus on the natural world and the legislative policies that manipulate it. What has transpired since is a notable legacy to both art and nature. Ketchum and close friend, master printer Michael Wilder, pioneered Cibachrome color printmaking in the early 1970’s.

They were also among the first contemporary photographers to explore print scale. The distinctive prints are in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the National Museum of American Art (DC), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), to name a few. Significant archives (more than 100 images) have been acquired by the Amon Carter Museum (TX) and the Huntington Library (CA), and substantial bodies of work can be found at the High Museum in Atlanta, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum (OH), Stanford University Art Museum (CA), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Cornell University (NY), and the National Museum of American Art. As a curator and author, Ketchum has published with Abrams, Viking, and has 7 individual titles with Aperture. Prior to his emergence as a photographer, he was a widely recognized curator, discovering the Paul Outerbridge, Jr. estate, bringing recognition to the overlooked work of James Van Der Zee, and authoring the historical classic, American Photographers and the National Parks. Since publication of this last title, he has concentrated primarily on his own politically focused projects and publications such as The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest (Aperture, NY, 1986).

He is perhaps most recognized for his work in the Tongass, which is credited with helping to pass the Tongass Timber Reform Bill of 1990. This significant legislation established 5 major wilderness areas and simultaneously protected more than one million acres of old-growth trees in the largest temperate rainforest in the world. Ketchum’s work has been similarly integral to many other diverse environmental struggles including the development of a Hudson River Greenway from the Adirondacks to Manhattan; the enlargement of Saguaro National Park and mitigation of neighboring resort developments; the acquisition of World Biosphere status for the Tatshenshini River corridor, Canada and the U.S. (2 million acres); the defense of one of the great whale nurseries in San Ignacio Lagoon (Baja) from industrial development by Mitsubishi; creating three new state parks in California; guiding the future planning of “gateway communities” – cities and towns that lie adjacent the entrance to national parks; several scathing critiques of federal land management policies (Overlooked in America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management and Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry); popularizing the Arctic and its beauty to underscore the threat to it from global warming; and, contributing to an internet library of images and scientific information about Russia’s wild biological reserves. Most recently he has been part of the largest land conservancy negotiation in the history of California, purchasing the conservation easements to the entirety (83,000 acres) of San Simeon Ranch, the well known William Randolph Hearst estate, for which he is the exclusive photographer. American Photo magazine named Ketchum one of the 100 most important people in photography, and Audubon placed him among the 100 people “who shaped the environmental movement of the 20th Century.” Other acknowledgments suggest the breadth that the imprint of his work has had: the United Nations Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award; the Josephine and Frank Duveneck Humanitarian Award; the Robert O. Easton Award for Environmental Stewardship; the UCLA Alumni Award for Excellence in Professional Achievement; the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography; and Outstanding Photographer of the Year (2001) from the North American Nature Photography Association.

Aside from his commitment to his art, Ketchum has had a lifelong dedication to public service founding Advocacy Arts Foundation and serving as board member or councilor to the Alaska Conservation Foundation, the American Land Conservancy, and the Alaska Wildlife Alliance. Previously, he was Curator of Photography for the National Park Foundation for 15 years, and was a member of the board, vice-president, and president of the formative Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies during the 1970’s. In the fall of 2006, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, TX will display a 35-year retrospective of Ketchum’s work, comparing and contrasting his imagery and accomplishments with a large selection of photographs from the Eliot Porter Archive. An extensive publication, Regarding the Land: Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Legacy of Eliot Porter will accompany the exhibition.