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Betsy Green

Betsy is an artist working with a camera. Examining her work from that perspective is essential. Her photographic, yet dissonant images carry distinctly the qualities of the lens and camera housing as if it were a theater for the viewer. The trees and landscapes, for which she has such affection, branch out to the edges of the film as if projected on the wall like a camera obscura. Her photographs are an invitation to take a ride in her nineteenth-century field camera and experience the magical sublime of nature as perceived by the artist. Betsy has experimented with analog film and traveled the world for more than thirty-years in search of her extraordinary subjects and processes.

Country
Netherlands / USA
Discipline
Photography

ARTIST STATEMENT

I question our relationship with nature and research our concept of landscape. I seek out places that are timeless and that are out of time. I explore, discover, and investigate the landscape on foot, as it exists now. My storytelling is achieved through the lens of a nineteenth-century plate camera to create large scale photographic works. The chosen landscapes that I portray have meanings of place, historic significance, and connection to a greater whole. My work shows nature as we will never experience. It is as if we re-discover a world that has been unveiled a long time ago and that remains at the end of days.

BETSY GREEN, A SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY

As an artist I use historical photographic technologies. My work explores landscape, particularly in remote areas of the world, and focused on my passion for exceptional trees and natural formations. 

I use a nineteenth century portable glass plate field camera to realize large-scale, cinematic format photographs. In a contemporary manner my large-scale pictures reflect on the nineteenth century romantic landscape tradition, and grand salon painting.

My interest in photography began while I was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I was taught by Henry Horenstein. The photographic departmentʼs legacy included Harry Callahan, Minor White, and Aaron Siskind; all forerunners in the struggle of photography to be accepted as art.

During my post-graduate degree at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands, I began combining my painting and photographic interests into one medium by researching the idea of transforming silver gelatin photographic images, using historical chemical recipes. I made my first camera obscura while studying at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel, Switzerland.

In the past 20 years, I have developed a singularly personal interpretation of landscape through experimenting with analog color negative film. By using reflection and absorption of light, and long exposures I influence the color dyes within film, creating an enhanced painterly language within the medium itself.

My work holds fast to the origins of photography and its materials. More than ever I feel the strength of my commitment to teach and to explore and extend photography as an art form.

- Betsy Green, September 2023