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"Morning Mists,
Oregon Coast, 1979" ©
Huntington Witherill
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Born in Syracuse, NY, in
1949, Huntington Witherill moved with his family to Santa Monica,
California, in 1953, where he began to develop an interest in music.
At the age of four, he began taking piano lessons and continued to do
so through his late teens with intentions of becoming a concert
pianist. However, upon entering college as a music major, Witherill
became interested in the study of two-dimensional design. This shift
in artistic medium eventually led to a career in fine art photography
beginning in 1970. During the mid-1970's, he studied photography under
such notables as Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Steve Crouch, and Al
Weber.
Witherill's photographs have been exhibited in more than eighty-five
individual and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout
the world. Additionally, his photographs are maintained in numerous
public art collections worldwide, including the United States
Department of State- Art in the Embassies, the National Museum of
Modern Art- Kyoto, Japan, Fundacióe Van Gogh d'Arles- Arles, France,
the Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH, the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse,
NY, and the Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA, among others. His
photographs represent an unusually diverse approach to the medium
including classic landscapes, studies of pop-art, botanical subjects,
urban architecture, abstracts, and digital imaging.
In 2000, an acclaimed hard bound monograph featuring Witherill's black
and white landscape photographs, entitled: Orchestrating Icons, was
published by LensWork Publishing. The following year, a companion
monograph featuring his black & white botanical still lifes entitled:
Botanical Dances, was also published by LensWork. Both books have
received national and international awards for design and printing
excellence.
Since 1975, Witherill has continued to teach photography for a variety
of institutions and workshop programs throughout the United States,
including the University of California, The Friends of Photography,
and the Ansel Adams Gallery, among others.
As a recipient of the "Artist of the Year" award presented by the
Center for Photographic Art, in 1999, Witherill continues to expand
both the variety and overall scope of his unique and often lyrical
approach to the art of photography.
"Like the fantastic voyage one experiences studying his new work,
Witherill himself has ventured far from the gelatin silver finery of
his past work. Instead of pictures capturing a fragment of nature, the
same nature made so familiar by so many straight photographers,
Witherill has embraced the new technique and run with it. He's run
right into a new reality that he is able to define, unfettered by
photography's past, but still full of his reverence for the natural
source." (Rick Deragon, 1999)
For the past 35 years, Huntington Witherill has made his home on the
beautiful central coast of California.
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