David Muench Shares his Portfolio: Organ Mountains
The Legendary Landscape Photographer presents mages from New Mexico.
Hi, I am Charlie Borland and welcome to my All About Photography newsletter. I have been a pro photographer for over 40 years and have a lot to share with you. Please join the photo adventure by subscribing to this reader-supported newsletter.
Hi, I am Charlie Borland and welcome to my All About Photography newsletter. I have been a pro photographer for over 40 years and have a lot to share with you. Please join the photo adventure by subscribing to this reader-supported newsletter.
David Muench Shares his Portfolio: Organ Mountains
Note: This is a podcast-style video that was originally recorded a few years ago and you can watch it below.
Legendary Landscape Photographer David Muench presents his Portfolio on New Mexico's Organ Mountains. David is legendary in the American landscape photography community.
For more than 50 years, he has explored the United States capturing the land with his 4x5 view camera. He has discovered and photographed a diverse range of unique and beautiful locations, many captured with his camera for the first time. Some of David's discoveries are popular locations with landscape photographers today.
In this interview with David Muench, he presents his portfolio of photographs from New Mexico's Organ Mountains. The Organ Mountains are an arid desert region with sand dunes, abundant flora and fauna, wildlife, and it’s now a National Monument.
David's images show a masterful use of composition, lighting, and framing. David first photographed the Organ Mountains region in the 1960's and has returned many times to this area to capture its stunning beauty.
The Organ Mountains is a land rich in scenic beauty and pre-American, New Mexican, and American history. The area includes training sites for the Apollo Space Mission, Billy the Kid's Outlaw Rock, the Butterfield Stagecoach Trail ran through the area as well as Geronimo's Cave, some World War II aerial targets, and thousands of Native American Petroglyphs and Pictographs.
David’s biography begins in the Sierras, as a child on pack trips with his parents, his father the noted landscape photography pioneer; Joseph Muench, and his mother, a writer.
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These first views were David's introduction to wild places that became the subject for his own photography, but more than that, these places that have offered him a lifetime of solace, adventure, of joy.
As a child, David watched his father photograph and that led him to his own photographic work. David helped his father do his photography work as a young child and then as his model. As a teenager, he helped his father print black and white photographs.
David made his first photographs as a teenager in the late 1950s and had his first photographs published on the front and back covers of Arizona Highways when Raymond Carlson was editor, and David was still in high school.
For David, there was never any question about his career. He attended Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, and the Los Angeles Art Center School of Design, both experiences providing him with the formality of a degree in photography, and an understanding of the technology of the time, but he felt -- and continues to feel -- that his most profound learning experiences were in the field.
Even now, as the technology of photography explodes in directions undreamed of in his early days, David continues to learn, to expand in new directions, and it is nature that remains his teacher.
David's work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Center for Creative Photography, and Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. But his most enduring accomplishments are the more than 50 exhibit format books he's photographed and published. The books allow him to share in depth the subjects and the landscapes that inspire him. Two of these (and several articles) have been produced along with his wife, the writer Ruth Rudner.
He is among the archived photographers at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson, short-listed for this honor by Ansel Adams, founder, and with John Schaefer, of the CCP.
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As a two-time Canon Explorer of Light, David worked with the Canon Systems cameras that were the mainstay of his 35mm work. Participation in a UNESCO/Panasonic sponsored project to photograph World Heritage Sites propelled him into learning to photograph with digital cameras. He revels in the freedom these cameras bring. But, for him, photography—with any kind of camera-- is a matter of seeing.
Perhaps, for David, all of life is that which makes his biography quite simple! He photographs as he sees and he sees what is wild. David says he cares that his photography speaks for the wild beauty he treasures and cares that his children, Zandria and Marc, both photographers, continue that legacy. Do biographies have a beginning and an end? Or do they simply have a continuing mission in the work one does . . . . for David, the journey continues . . .
http://www.davidmuenchphotography.com
We hope you enjoyed this video interview with David. Stay tuned as we will feature more interviews going forward regarding more of David’s photo projects. If you have questions, comments, or any thoughts to share, please leave a comment.
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