Deborah Samuel
Canadian Photographic artist Deborah Samuel’s extraordinary and evocative portraits of celebrities, musicians, and dignitaries began her career; her photographs filled the pages of Esquire, Spin, GQ, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and iconic music Album covers, amongst many. Professional opportunities required time spent in London, New York, and Los Angeles before settling in New Mexico, where she resided for 17 years.
In 2000, she turned away the commercial world to concentrate on her personal work. This evolved into formal portrait studies of her passions, animals, and nature. Elementals, her ode to the enduring beauty of nature’s splendors, is her long-awaited fourth book following, The Extraordinary Beauty of Birds, Pup, and Dog.
To read more about Deborah Samuel, visit: https://www.deborahsamuel.com.
Prologue
From ELEMENTALS
By Deborah Samuel
“There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You, as an artist, create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none, to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event.”
Ansel Adams
What began as an exploration of iPhone technology in recording imagery, set sail an odyssey in my wandering to find home.
I love to drive and have traveled hundreds and thousands of miles through countless landscapes. I have seen this planet’s rare beauty in all its plenitude and diversity. I saw how we build our homes to protect us from climatic conditions, how the elements affect our daily existence, and how our roads drive us forward and shape not only our lives but our appreciation of our world.
A decade of travel from Africa to the USA and Canada to mysterious Ireland gave rise to Elementals, an intimate look at our world’s fundamental gravity. It is also a reflection on the wonders of life’s fragility, transience, and persistence of beauty.
Over time, Elementals became a free-form poem to the enduring beauty of the elements everywhere — earth, air, fire, and water and the transforming power of light. It is an ode to the solitude of wide-open spaces, the fluidity of shifting winds, and the monsoons’ breathtaking phenomena — environmental, atmospheric, and climatic. These elements are not just material substances, they are fundamental spiritual essence, bringing meaning and illumination to life.
The photographs of Elementals show the essence of beauty alive in the natural elements of this world. It is an essence that sustains.
Elementals’ saturated colours — sometimes muted and pensive, occasionally extravagant — are compelling, complex, and support the elusive abstraction inherent in nature. Only the viewer has the privileged eye for this sublime moment with the elements.
After ten years, I did indeed find home — everywhere. Elementals’ photographs are my tangible memory of something too precious to ignore and too perfect to forget.
“The question is not what you look at but what you see.”
Henry David Thoreau