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February 21 – March 31, 2002.
Open Wednesday - Sunday, Noon – 5pm and by appointment.
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Special installation by Bay Area conceptual artist David Ireland
Preview the art of Norman Locks >>
 Norman Locks, a distinguished California photographer, is an important contributor to landscape photography and widely recognized for his experimentation with Polaroids and digital processes. Like many photographers before him, Locks has become a respected teacher as well as artist. He has spent the last thirty years teaching photography in places such as the Ansel Adams Gallery, Yosemite and Friends of Photography, Carmel, California, while continuing to experiment and produce his own work. Locks' work has always received strong critical response. " Some of the most exciting work by a West Coast photographer that has emerged in recent years" Joan Murray, Artweek. A prolific artist, his latest bodies of work are autobiographical and exhibit his expert eye and mastery of the medium.
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"Wood And Cabin In Sun" - Norman Locks
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In his latest series, Trails and Paths between Urban and Wilderness Landscapes, Locks discovers a new method to visualize familiar and diverse landscapes by mounting together and juxtaposing wilderness and urban imagery. Locks' new work is a departure of size and scope from his groundbreaking Polaroid work, ranging from diptychs to triptychs to four photographs in one frame. But the sharpness of his eye, the attention to detail, rich colors and wry commentaries are recognizable in these large photo montages. Mounted together are dense wilderness scenes with trucks at a roadstop, San Francisco streets and motel parking lots. Viewed individually, the photographs in this series are formal and exquisitely ordered color images. In the wilderness imagery, Locks photographs the biodiversity of nature and masters a visual language for speaking about the wilderness. There is a democracy at work in Locks' imagery. Every leaf, rock, tree and blade of grass is deserving of attention. These works present the beauty of the ecosystems, the details, the enormity of the delicate enterprise of nature. They offer the viewer a powerful sense of belonging to nature and serve as an irrefutable call for stewardship and eco- sensitivity.
Matted together, Locks' images wrestle with more than aesthetic tension to offer a dialogue about man's relationship to his chosen environments. Many of the pieces are narrative, describing a specific journey Locks has taken from one landscape to another. Others explore more temporal issues, a combination of remnants and evidence of time passing from one environment to another. Many of the works investigate similitude, that there are common images in disparate environments. The works are arresting and make a lasting impression on how we view the environments we visit and choose to live in.
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"Skateboarder in Durango" - Norman Locks
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In the 1970s, Norman Locks' manipulated SX-70 Polaroid images garnered strong critical attention. Hand-working the surface of the picture, the result added a painterly touch which was intriguing and new to the history of photography. The work culminated with the publication of "Familiar Subjects" a book of photographs and essays published by the Headlands Press and Harper and Row.
In another recent series also on exhibit at Julie Baker Fine Art, Locks continues his love for the Polaroid and it's instant imagery and returns again to familiar subjects such as barbecues and birthday parties but this time armed with an I-Zone camera. With several thousand small images to choose from, Locks digitally produces dream-like, brilliant color photographs on archival paper. For Locks, a respected photography professor, allowing the instant point and shoot camera some control over his process is an idiosyncratic choice. An act of letting go and manipulation that the tripod and light meter of the 4 x 5's he normally shoots with, will not allow.
Norman Locks has studied and photographed along side may of the greatest influences of the 20th century including David Bohn, the great documentarian of the American wilderness, Robert Heinecken, the sharp witted critic of American politics and media, and the highly respected photographer Lewis Baltz. From 1973-77 he directed the photography workshop at the Ansel Adams Gallery, Yosemite. In 1976, he worked as an assistant to Ansel Adams during the printing of "Portfolio 7". Locks has shown at the Ebert Gallery in San Francisco and in galleries and museums around the world. Locks currently is chair of the University of California at Santa Cruz art department.
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