Art Rogers: The Rustic Landscape

Art Rogers: The Rustic Landscape

For more than forty years, photographer, college instructor, and Guggenheim Fellow Art Rogers has documented the agricultural community of western Marin County, located across the Golden Gate Bridge from the city of San Francisco.

Rogers began his photographic career in the early 1960’s, in Raleigh, North Carolina, working as a freelance photojournalist. During that time, he documented the Civil Rights movement and the folk and early rock music scene. In 1966, he worked as a baby photographer in department stores to earn the funds to move to San Francisco. Shortly after his arrival, he began to photograph the 1960s counterculture.

While teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, he moved to Point Reyes Station, California, and established his studio, where he made portraits of families, children, large groups, rural scenes, and landscapes.

Rogers’ early influences were Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and the iconic LIFE magazine photographers. He eventually found an artistic connection to the early twentieth-century photographer Darius Kinsey, best known for large-format images of the railroad and logging industries in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the twentieth century. Rogers prefers to photograph his subjects in their natural environment, surrounded by the tools of their trade. Large negatives and slow shutter speeds provide his black-and-white, gelatin-silver prints with extreme detail and crisp sharpness.

Rogers received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marin Arts Council, and the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He was honored in 2012 as a Cultural Treasure of Marin. His work can be found in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Center for Creative Photography Archive in Tucson, Arizona, the International Center of Photography in New York, and Le Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland.

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