Polar Eve →

October 8, 2017 Tama Baldwin

I sailed into the high arctic at the beginning of last winter on board a 1957 fishing boat retrofitted to appear like a tall ship. This floating art and science residency brought artists together from around the world for a three week adventure along the northwestern coast of Svalbard. My colleagues arrived in Lonyearbyen from far flung cities such as Shanghai and Seoul and Barcelona and Luxembourg and Athens and Belgrade. Together we endured close quarters and trying circumstances--rough passages and bad weather and multiple unexpected mishaps and detours not the least of which included a broken desalination machine which greatly limited our supply of freshwater. By the final week we were at sea we only had four hours of workable light per day for making landings, each of which required elaborate preparation. Four rifle toting women would make land first to clear a perimeter in which we were allowed to work, and once we were on land we had to work fast in dim light and weather so bizarrely warm and wet it was hard to believe we were actually in the high arctic.

News and Blues

June 2, 2017 Tama Baldwin

http://visitcenter.org/photosummer/exhibitions/

It has been a long, strange winter filled with hard work and many odd twists and turns. I am particularly grateful to Frank Walker for his feature on my recent work on the Adorama Learning Center website https://www.adorama.com/alc/meet-a-pro-tama-baldwin I specifically appreciate the connections he made between my different bodies of work. I would never have thought to refer to myself as a documentary photographer, but when I told Frank Walker that he just let out a big laugh. Sorry, he said. You are. Maybe, I said. But I didn't mean to be.

The Los Angeles Center of Photography Third Annual Members' Exhibition and a Little Story about an Arctic Wedding

July 21, 2016 Tama Baldwin

There's a lot of news to share and it's much better news than what you'll find on American TV at the moment I am pleased to say, but for now I just want to mention this group show I will be a part of through the next month at the Los Angeles Center of Photography. I am super excited to be in such good company with yet another Kotzebue image--this one of one of the strangest buildings in the village. I feel a little silly offering up a picture of a warehouse as part of a landscape series, but the structure made me laugh every time I walked past it so I finally made a portrait of it one day last summer when I was in northwestern Alaska for the wedding of two of my favorite people, a wedding that strangely enough I was responsible for documenting with my cameras (please note I did not nor will I ever refer to myself as a wedding photographer; I don't have the courage for that trade and I am in awe of those who can herd cats, perform advanced crisis counseling, and take pictures at the same time.)

Royal Photographic Society International Print Exhibition 158

October 8, 2015 Tama Baldwin

I would that I were in London right now, taking this whole scene in, meeting some of these photographers. I feel so fortunate to have my work in such good company! The show will tour the UK through 2016.

Center for Fine Art Photography

September 22, 2015 Tama Baldwin

The Center for Fine Art Photography is a fantastic resource for anyone who loves fine art photography. I loved being a part of the Center Forward show and loved even more meeting and sharing work with the photographers included this year. I highly recommend the center as a place to visit regularly as the work featured in the galleries is as innovative and fresh as any I have seen in galleries anywhere. What a thrill!

Los Angeles Center of Photography Members Annual

August 6, 2015 Tama Baldwin

I so wish I could have been there to see this show. The next best thing though is to have one of my photographs there on the wall.

Full Moon Aurora

May 7, 2015 Tama Baldwin

I met a man in Kotzebue who told me he was sure it is possible to hear the sound of the aurora borealis. He said you had to wait for a night when the air was perfectly still and you had to take yourself far out where there were no other sounds whatsoever. The kind of quiet he said where you are suddenly aware of the sound of your heart beating and then as the light descends toward you you can hear it crackling through the atmosphere.

Postcards: 14 Dogs at 40 Below

April 5, 2015 Tama Baldwin

This weekend the Kobuk 440 sled dog race is taking place in arctic Alaska. The start and finish is in Kotzebue and the trail takes the teams 440 miles through the Kobuk Valley. It is April, which means the days are blindingly long, over 14 hours of daylight now, and though the temperatures are considerably more mild there are still all the dangers of winter travel in the arctic--the challenges of river ice, the isolation of the wilderness that deftly punishes the incapable and the unprepared.

The Pine Effect

March 8, 2015 Tama Baldwin

The Pine Effect is a wonderful new full-length collection of poems by my Aldo Leonardo collaborator Andrea Spofford. It's a thrill too to see one of my photographs serving as the cover, this lonely shot from the December Meditation series. Congratulations Andrea on the publication of your book. Those of you on my list who love exquisitely well-made poems will truly appreciate Andrea's work which rewards one fully as only the best writing can. The interweaving of personal and natural history from poem to poem leaves you feeling at times that you have read a field guide to a specific heart--a heart that celebrates all the things of the world, from the mundane to the grand, the broken to the wholly new. Preorders for Spofford's book can be placed here: The Pine Effect.

Meanwhile, I am hunkered down in Kotzebue, Alaska, dozing through one wind and cold-shocked winter storm after another, nursing a cold with an Inupiaq antiviral elixir, a shot glass full of stinkweed steeped in vinegar given to my by my tirelessly gracious host Norma. Photos to follow soon. . . . if I ever again see the out of doors that I trust is out there beyond the foot thick walls of this house and the blur of snow flying past the impossibly small high windows. . . .

January Postcards: Southern Winter

January 28, 2015 Tama Baldwin

We followed through with a promise to ourselves to pursue warmer weather in January to break the spell of winter. It was good to drive to the south, through the south, to feel the physical reality of states that have become too abstract in the political dumbshow of recent years. In the foggy mountains of Tennessee, we discussed important battles fought along the Cumberland and the Tennessee Rivers and Wallace Stevens' poem "Anecdote of the Jar." This postcard series is a meditation upon that poem and "the slovenly wilderness" surrounding us everywhere.