About John Bostwick

“What we see is what we want to see.  Art should be simple to understand and should be attractive; great art is meant to inspire.” - Unknown

    I don’t recall it being anything out of the ordinary, except that it was was always special for me at my grandparents’ farm in southern Oklahoma.  I was probably 10 or 12 years old and the trick at hand was to tote what was then a rather large gun up the backside of a fairly steep pond dam. With luck, I would get to the top without alerting the hoped for ducks of my arrival. It was cold, clear, and calm; the kind of morning that I still find so invigorating.

    I made it to the top, peered over and sure enough there were a lot of ducks and even Canadian geese, seemingly having a very pleasant morning. I am now supposed to scramble to the top of the embankment, allow the prey time to clear the waters surface, and then blast away with my single shot 410. That’s when something memorable happened. As I surveyed the situation to identify my likely target, I became completely captivated by the scene. The waters’ surface was like glass reflecting the blues and reds of the morning sunrise. The ducks were so wonderfully arranged as if for a picture.  I couldn’t and didn’t rise. I lay there mesmerized! I remember thinking that this was just too wonderful not to somehow capture. A modest realization and beginning!

    My father was a small town vet in Northwest Oklahoma. From the age of six until I went into the military, I worked with him in what seemed like every available spare moment I ever had; kids!  His practice covered the better part of three counties so by the ripe old age of 10 I was driving while dad napped. The small towns and villages changed with every season, economic boom and bust, or national crisis but there was always a foundation of lovely beauty in the things and ideals that had come before: the rusting bicycle carcass that had been leaning against that barbershop window for time untold, the building murals depicting a community perspective of 1905, the 13 cent bottled beer sign, Doctor Pepper at 10, 2, and 4.

    With the completion of my military adventures in Europe and the Mediterranean, I decided that photography was not just my chosen medium but more significantly offered me a life to express my vision in art.  I enrolled at the University of New Mexico to get a formal education. Here fortune smiled on me in that Beaumont Newhall and Van Daren Coke, the number one and two photography historians in the world at the time, then headed the Photography History Department.  Though the school was sorely lacking in the technical training aspects of photography, the exposure to Newhall and Coke’s knowledge, vision, and how they defined art in photography set me on a new course. The eye opening foundations and references for how the masters might have approached an image led me to believe that what I aspired to do was not only possible but worthy.

    I relay this sequence of events because they have such influence in my past as well as current work.  Though I couldn’t live in a small town, I do still find them to have a pastoral effect on my soul. Contributing to my canvas are the influential effects of Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Henry Cartier-Bresson to name but a few whose work engenders such excitement and passion for the beauty that I wish to convey.

I find the world as seen in the rectangle as both fascinating and so incredibly challenging. I believe that an image should grab your attention from a distance via its shapes, forms, and contrasts.  Abstracts from afar I believe the image should pull you in with ever-increasing detail, only to then be transported to another time and place. I wish to convey not a thousand words of a traditional photograph but rather a history that we don’t know but can instantly feel and understand. In short I wish to share with you the simple yet sometimes haunting beauty of the unexpected!

Technical things:  Most of my work is film based though I have switched to digital. As the changeover is a fairly recent event, I have a lot of work that is not yet available simply for having to scan hundreds of negatives.  There is much to come in both black and white and color. My work spans many years and tens of thousands of miles traveled on the maps’ blue highways. Please note that the blue highways is a reference to William Least Heat Moon’s “Blue Highways” travellogue which convinced me that I was not alone in seeking the beauty in the blue highways towns and villages.

Edward Weston once remarked, and I am paraphrasing here for brevity, that he never saw the image until he saw it on the ground glass.  I am afraid that is not how it works with me. Somehow I am drawn to these images as if someone out of my past or an otherworldly presence is directing me. I don’t seem to see them as much as feel them.  Consequently I do not take a lot of pictures; I do not try to “make” images. I also do very little once the image is captured. I do not own nor do I use Photoshop. With the exception of very small cropping and exposure adjustments for print quality, I do not alter or manipulate the images.  And finally I print all images myself using only archival papers and inks to present what I feel should be a lasting and somehow timeless image.

With that, Welcome to my Old Town Road Gallery! I hope you will jump into my Karma, put on some good music, and join me in my adventures on America’s blue highways.  Please Enjoy!

John Bostwick

Born: Oklahoma

Current resident of Dallas, Texas