Debra Bloomfield

DEBRA BLOOMFIELD has worked in the landscape for over 35 years. Her poetic, large-scale color photographs draw on the visual language of metaphor and explore the relationship between interiority and the external world. Her images have been described as infused with a magnificent unpredictability, and emanating a sense of hope. The contemplative nature of Bloomfield’s work invites the viewer into the relationship created within the photograph.

"My work is highly personal in origin, often motivated by a particular question I am exploring in my life. The process begins without premeditation, and often I understand it retrospectively. When I begin my explorations, I have a general sense of the direction I am going, but I navigate as if in a sailboat, letting the skies and weather direct my intuition. My images are the culmination of my visual, emotional, and intellectual responses to what is in front of me. They also reveal to me my own stories, my memories, and my experiences."

Bloomfield’s most recent work is collected in Wilderness (2014), an environmental monograph comprising images and soundscapes she recorded over a five-year period in a remote area of northwestern America, “a landscape that is metaphor for wilderness everywhere.” Immersing herself in this unknown terrain, Bloomfield purposely repeated her movements through the seasons with a contemplative stance. With author Terry Tempest Williams as contributor, the Wilderness series is equal parts art and environmental advocacy.

Submitted by Etherton Gallery