Betsy Green

EXHIBITION: September - December 2025

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 explore, expand and deepen photography as an art form.

- Betsy Green

AMERICAN SUBLIME

It's not what it seems

This series not only shows a landscape of grand proportions but also hints at hidden underlying issues. Below is a selection from the series. To see more, visit the artists website, betsygreen.com.