Florida Landscape

by Clyde Butcher

A photographic display of some of Florida's distinctive landscapes from the lens of photographer Clyde Butcher. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967584248
• ISBN13: 9780967584249
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Big Cypress Gallery
• Length: 60 Pages
• Weight: 1.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 9.8" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Florida Landscape by Clyde Butcher

Clyde Butcher is one of a small group of large format landscape photographers who keep their lenses focused on the diverse beauty surrounding us in this expansive country. This is beauty that only a few will ever witness firsthand out in the wild. He is certainly one of the very few large format black and white photographers to make Florida his primary subject. It is the real Florida that this artist wants to record, the Florida of the Everglades and Big Cypress National Parks. We should all be grateful, because this photographer set out on this journey by way of the tragedy of the death of his teenage son from an auto accident; and this father's sleepless nights led him out into the wee hours and for days to the last remaining protected wilderness so that he could be alone with his camera and his thoughts. His images are stunning for the range of grayscale tones that he is able to capture, as well as for the their composition and detail and pinpoint clarity from foreground to background. Only the large format view camera with its 8 by 10 negative can make such a record. You see every facet of bark, every leaf, every ripple of sand and shimmer of water surface and tangle of mangrove. Butcher loves the skies and the endless cloud formations that loom like mountains on the Florida horizon. He carefully executes his shots waiting for the precise right moment to capture the subtle changes in daylight from early morning to late afternoon. How he is able to venture waist deep into the waters of the Everglades or the Loxahatchee to get a shot is daunting to say the least. He doesn't shy away from snakes or alligators. This is a photographer who will risk danger for the sake of his art. The book contains some of his best work and it has some of my favorite images like his photographs of the lesser known and undeveloped Florida Keys. It is this very urgency that you feel when looking at his photographs, that this was the way Florida once appeared when Ponce de Leon set foot here in 1513. His photographs, like the one used for the book jacket cover, have a deep focal point and he uses perspective the way a painter might, to draw the viewer inside. He balances with visual weight, the darker tones of a palm tree forest with the lighter tones of clouds and midtones of sky and juxtaposes these against an angle of beach running along an edge of water. It feels as if you could run naked through this picture splashing water down these empty beaches and jumping over piles of drifwood. What Butcher has accomplished has been to bring this beauty out of the mangrove swamps and away from the desolate and remote beaches and onto the walls of galleries and into this book so that we can appreciate this precious resource. And just maybe it will help in the effort to preserve what remains of what is perilously in danger of vanishing.