MARK JAMES

 

 

 

 

Mark James is a Colorado-based landscape photographer who has worked for over thirty years with one of the simplest tools in the medium—a pinhole camera. His black-and-white images portray the land as timeless, meditative, and enduring.

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Working mainly in the Rocky Mountain West, especially Colorado, James has created an oeuvre that stands as perhaps the most comprehensive exploration of the landscape ever made with a pinhole camera.

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Building on the legacy of Ansel Adams, Edward Curtis, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Photo-Pictorialists, as well as the 18th-century survey photographers who first documented the American frontier, James pairs pinhole photography with black-and-white film to strip away modern conventions and reveal the elemental forms of the land—continuing a dialogue between past and present visions of the American West.

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In 1987, James founded Illustrated Light, a gallery devoted to black-and-white photography that became a regional hub for fine art and the American West. Under his direction, it grew to include fifty photographers and attracted Hal Gould, founder of Denver’s Camera Obscura Gallery and a leading advocate for fine art photography, who provided curatorial support and loaned exhibits. James stepped away in 1995 to pursue his pinhole landscape work full-time.

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James’s most significant exhibition, Remnants of the West: Edward Curtis and Mark James, curated by Stacy Petersen (Dubuque Museum of Art, 2017), presented his photographs alongside twenty original Curtis photogravures, creating a dialogue between past and present visions of the American West. Photo historian George Slade expanded on this pairing in his lecture Time Capsules and Anachronism.

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Building on his four-year Pikes Peak project and the story of his ancestor, Edwin James, Mark is advancing his pinhole photography into a new phase, preparing books and portfolios that reflect a lifetime of ongoing artistic discovery.