Monday Inspiration – Galen Rowell

Today I start a new series of posts about photographers who have inspired and shaped my own photography. The first was one of my earliest influences, and he remains one of the most important today.

Way back when I took my first high school photography class, my teacher introduced us to a photographer by the name of Galen Rowell. The only thing I remember from the Rowell video that we watched was his story of photographing the Potala Palace in Tibet. As he was shooting, he noticed a rainbow that seemed to touch the ground some distance from the palace. Being a quick thinker, Rowell took off running as fast as he could until he had lined up the rainbow and the palace, so that the rainbow seemed to be landing on the palace. The resulting photograph was stunning and stuck in my mind, but I didn’t encounter or think of Rowell again for a couple of years.

Some time later I was browsing through the photography books in the library when I ran across a book of his, Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape, and remembered the Potala Palace image. I checked it out and quickly devoured it, then read it again.

Rowell was a master photographer, equally adept at capturing expansive landscapes and intimate portraits. He termed his style “adventure photography,” and not only documented the adventure, but lived it as an avid climber and hiker. Through his books I enjoyed images of subjects ranging from Torres del Paine in Chile, to mountaineers in the Himalayas, to rock climbers in the eastern Sierras of California.

Through Galen Rowell’s images and text, I learned for the first time to see light. He taught me to anticipate it, how to look for it, the necessity of patience to wait for it, how to use it to create an amazing photograph. Because of this, Rowell was and remains one of the biggest and most important influences on my own photographic style.

Several years ago I was curious to see what Rowell had been up to lately – the last book of his I had read was a couple of years old. I found his website (appropriately called Mountain Light) and was saddened to discover both Galen and his wife Barbara had been killed in a plane crash a few months earlier.

To see some of Rowell’s work, visit his Mountain Light website, and spend some time browsing through the gallery of fine art prints. The Potala Palace image I described above is featured in the Tibet and China gallery – it’s the photograph in the middle of the first page. For more information, check out his Wikipedia entry.

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21 April 2008 | Other Photographers, Photos | Comments