Brooks Jensen Arts

Welcome to my little corner of the web — and the world

My photographic artwork tends to divide itself into themed projects, each exploring an idea, place, or vision. Within each project listed below, you will typically find several types of media presentation — perhaps a folio or chapbook, a free downloadable PDF eBook or media monograph, a video, or other medium. Feel free to explore to your heart's content.

There is also my News and Latest Info page.

Market Day, Baotou, China, January 2011
A video example using environmental audio

I've assembled some images made during a recent trip to China into a simple, uncomplicated slide show to demonstrate the power of simple environmental audio. I encourage you to review the slideshow with your audio muted, then again with the audio playing. It's an amazing difference! If you are a photographer, start capturing audio to go with your images. It's fun and and incredibly powerful addition to a presentation of still images.

Suspended Without Wings
from the Sketches series

When I was a boy, no doubt influenced by the superheroes of my boyish fictions, I dreamt of flying. It was a difficult lesson for a young boy to learn; that the immutable laws of physics – gravity – could not be overcome by even the most fervent dreams and wishes of fanciful youth. I know, there are balloons and airplanes and helicopters – but I wanted wings.

On the White Wall
from the Sketches series

Every white wall starts as a coat of clean, pristine paint — and the hopes of its painter that the purity will last. But as every photographer knows, a perfectly pure-white object is a blank spot. Without some break in the purity, without some flaw in the surface or some texture in the blank, a white wall is perfectly invisible, perfectly featureless, without character, without life.

Uncle Kenny
from the Sketches series "Stories from My Ancestors"

Everyone has an “Uncle Kenny” — or should have, a man who works hard — with his hands — his entire life. His hands reminded me of his old tools — bent and scarred, a testament to years of use.

Fog in the Hills and Aits
from the Sketches series

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. (From the opening page of the 1852 novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens)

Hilo Palms
from the Sketches series

I have never been a great fan of palm trees. In my limited experience, palms were stick-like weeds with crudely-formed, tufted tops found along the freeways of southern California. Clearly, I had never been to Hawaii. Recently, during my first visit to those balmy islands, I learned how limited my experiences had been. There they were — the palms! — overflowing with life in a ravine near Hilo. What complex beauty! They were jazz brought to life in an explosion of jiggity details and repeating, graceful arcs that make a chord of wonder for a photographer’s eye.

Worlds Within Worlds

Learning photography by photographing through the microscope, I was struck how the vast cosmos looked so remarkably like what I was photographing in the tiny worlds in a drop of pond water. Seeing photographs of the great nebulae through the telescope reminded me of the amoeba under the coverslip. These similarities gave scientific testament to the words of Lao Tzu that, "The great Tao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right." Everywhere, including the cosmically vast and the microscopically small. Science, photography, Zen. Weaving these threads has been the constant theme of my artmaking ever since.

The Winter Light of Lvzu Temple
from the Sketches series "Stories from the Middle Kingdom"

It never occurred to us to question the sanity of visiting inner-Mongolia in the dead of winter. Sure, it would be cold, but the photographic possibilities promised to be a warming counter to the bitter winds. For days, we’d photographed in the freezing Gobi desert. When someone offhandedly mentioned the ancient Lvzu Temple in the city of Baotou, we jumped at the urban opportunity.

Longquan Swords
from the Sketches series "Stories from the Middle Kingdom"

I had an opportunity to photograph the one of the famed Longquan sword makers in Lishui, China. I wish I could tell you that they were making swords of legendary fame. I don’t know, and I suspect there was an element of the tourist trade involved in their production. Be that as it may, I can assure you they cut with ease — a testament I can verify by how easily one cut my finger before I realized just how sharp it really was.

The Fisherman with One Eye
from the Sketches series "Stories from the Middle Kingdom"

As I photographed the group, the one-eyed fisherman suddenly posed as though he knew this was a moment of importance. He stared directly into the lens and waited for me to finish making the photograph. We smiled and both nodded, the only language we shared. I wanted to know his story, but all I have is his portrait.

Living Landscape

Chinese classic poetry combined with fan-shaped landscape images. From my exhibition in Xiang Sha Wan, China in 2010. Details . . .

Winter Trees VI
The sixth of an annual series, each with five images of winter trees

This year, Boreas (the Greek God of Winter) must have been feeling particularly spry. These three folios were photographed and produced from a singular and spectacular storm the morning of February 23, 2011.

Winter Trees V
The fifth of an annual series, each with five images of winter trees

Atop each and every limb and twig an outline of white grew, poised, balancing, waiting. Mid-morning arrived with a stiff winter wind. The snow crystals first blew off the twigs, then the branches, then the limbs. Each gust created a burst of cascading snow, driven down in small avalanches. By late afternoon, it was over and the winter trees were once again black outlines against a grey sky.

Winter Trees IV
The fourth of an annual series, each with five images of winter trees

All five images in this folio were photographed in a single session the morning of February 23, 2011. I awoke at 5am to a dark, heavy rain. An hour later, the cold had descended. Snowflakes started piling up more rapidly than I'd ever seen in my life.

Photographing in Japan: Rikuzen Tomiyama
A short video made on location before the 2011 tsunami

The small oyster farming community of Rikuzen Tomiyama was one of those many place so devistated by the 2011 tsunami that struck the north coast of Japan. This video was recorded there just 9 months before the devestation as I photographed this quaint fishing village.

Uchiwa-e

The uchiwa, or rigid paper fan, is a practical device in the heat of Japan. Over the centuries, uchiwa have become an art form with a charm all their own. The paper prints that are used to make fans are called uchiwa-e, the suffix indicating the print itself.

In the fall of 2009, I traveled to Japan with an experiment in mind of making photographs for the uchiwa format. I now understand why this format suited the Japanese printmakers so well; everywhere I turned I found subjects ideally suited to the fan-shaped image. Details . . .

Tangerine Gifts

In 1990, David Grant Best and I photographed in the northern region of rural Japan known as Tohoku. From our experiences and photography during that trip, we produced in 1992 a handmade artist’s book called Tangerine Gifts.

Now, using recently rediscovered original letterpress text signatures, this LensWork Special Editions folio recreates Tangerine Gifts in the new “folio format.” As a folio, eighteen of the best images from this trip to Tohoku have been selected for this reissue, produced from new scans of the original negatives. Details. . .

The New 100 Prints Project

In 1986, I committed myself to a photography project I called The One Hundred Prints Project. This project —The New 100 Prints Project — was inspired by the first one. Again, it is a bit of a motivational construct. By committing myself to post a new image every third day for a year, I hoped to push myself to create 100 new images. "Artistic discipline" is a bit of an oxymoron, but being an artist and not producing work is just plain moronic. This project, completed in just 9 months, is a testament to what can accumulate if one does a small thing with regularity over time.

Winter Trees III
The third of an annual series, each with five images of winter trees

All five images in this folio were photographed in a single day following a heavy winter storm in December of 2008. A two week stretch of cold, arctic air covered our normally balmy corner of the Pacific Northwest, followed by a typical, wet southwester. Over a foot of snow fell in Anacortes! This is not a particularly unique weather event for so many regions, but here, where I live, it was almost unheard of.

Silva Lacrimosa

Out photographing with a friend, we stumbled into the remains of the fourth largest forest fire in the history of National Forests — the Thirty-Mile Fire in the Okanogan forest.

I found myself more and more saddened by the story I began to feel in the charred remains of the forest fire. I knew I was simply projecting my human emotions on the forest, a philosophical ﬂaw that is fallacy. Nonetheless, as I photographed a drip of sap on the sooted bark, I began to cry. The tears of the forest were ﬂowing through me. Details . . .

Winter Trees II
The second of an annual series, each with five images of winter trees

The images in this folio were photographed on a single, glorious day of sun and snow, in March of 2008. A bright, clear sun, perfectly muted by high thin clouds, a sparkling, snow-covered landscape, dry pavement, a warm breeze, and no schedule nor obligations. I poked along down Highway 395 from Pendleton, Oregon to Burns, Oregon and drank it in, a refreshment that only such light, landscape, and fresh desert and mountain air can provide.

Wakarimasen

For a few years in my youth, I studied Oriental calligraphy — Chinese and Japanese, in particular. I love the dance of the brush, the shapes that are both words and graphics that capture the motion of the master calligrapher's hand. These graffiti shapes on the wall of Fort Worden reminded me of the calligraphy I studied — and like the calligraphy, they seemed to be words that I could not read. Hence, wakarimasen — Japanese for "I don't understand." Details. . .

October Seas

This portfolio is the result of a few incredible winter days in late October 2005 from the rugged central Oregon coastline. I've tried for over 20 years to photograph that silvery light in the surf that bathes the ocean on stormy days, but I've never been successful. During these three glorious day, however, the light and sea, the clouds and even a flock of birds, smiled on me. The twelve images in this portfolio were photographed in the short span of one weekend. Details . . .

Hope Eternal

In North Dakota there is wind. On occasion, it stops blowing for a while, but not long. It blows day and night, spring and fall. It's a hard land to make a living on. This keeps many from trying, but not all. There are those who believe they are stronger than the wind, stronger than the winters, stronger than the elements that fight them day and night. To them, hope springs eternal.

Bass Mood

Near my home in Anacortes is the Padilla Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. Fancy name for a giant low-tide mud flat. It's a great place to be a bird or a mollusc. The mud is dark, wet, slippery, sloppy. In the rain at low tide, it's a droning bass tone . . . which inspired this short video. Runs 5:11.

Winter Trees I
The first of an annual series, each with five images of winter trees

This folio consists of five images — admittedly, some of the best images from years of photographing winter trees. I've "culled the archives" to start this series of folios with an opening crescendo.

Made of Steel

From my grandfather I learned to love the polish of long-used tools and the unmistakable aroma of oil and fresh metal filings. I can still smell his shop and hear his voice – thick with his old-world Armenian accent – echo in the tall ceilings. I guess he also taught me to love the stories and manners of old, greasy machine shop men. Details . . .

Welcome to my little corner of the web — and the world

Market Day, Baotou, China, January 2011 A video example using environmental audio

Suspended Without Wings from the Sketches series

On the White Wall from the Sketches series

Uncle Kenny from the Sketches series "Stories from My Ancestors"

Fog in the Hills and Aits from the Sketches series

Hilo Palms from the Sketches series