John Radigan: The Adirondack Heart

photography monograph
Adirondack Photography Institute / John Radigan

From the artist’s statement:
My photographs are not meant to literally document the Adirondacks. They are my way of making visible the relationships I sense here. I walk these woods watching, listening, absorbing; creating images when I feel so moved. At other times I put pen to paper, attempting to give voice to my experience in that way. I feel that the partnership of these two forms of expression best describes my reality, my truth, of the Adirondack experience in all its concrete and unknowable beauty.

From the introduction by George DeWolfe:
Photographing the Adirondacks is like photographing a complicated Japanese kara-sansui rock garden. You are presented with the simplest of visual elements: shape, change, and color. It is nearly impossible to photograph it so that one gets the whole and parts together. It is the ultimate visual (and spiritual) puzzle. No ordinary technique can coax the complete sense out of it. It is the simple paradigm of photography—how to resolve the whole and the parts, how to show the spiritual nature of it. Only by spending a lifetime of hope and energy can one aspire to penetrate beneath the surface of this beautiful place and find the spiritual and the mysterious.

9 x 11.25 inches
128 pages