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Landscapes
The subject matter of my work has grown out of an obsession with the natural world. Natural elements, be they a copse of trees, or a curve of hill, often fade to the expected idyllic scene, a common and overwrought image, if left to their own devices. To transcend an otherwise predictable experience, I rely on deliberately formal composition and bold visuals.

I am strongly attracted to the use of color. Rather than fight a losing battle (in trying to tone this down to ‘normal’ proportions), I have chosen to embrace this tendency and instead work with it. I crank up the polarizing filter to maximize the contrast of a bright sunny day. I also try to isolate particular details, and heighten their importance through reduction of other distracting elements.

When photographing, I wander and let the landscape speak. Shape, composition, and color are the underlying elements of my photographs. Complexity is built by layering these three, yet simplicity is achieved through a balance of each. My work is as much about enhancing the detail within an image as it is about distilling it to its simplest, purest form.

Memories
This series is a response to my love of vernacular architectural forms and intense house envy with a smidgeon of voyeurism thrown into the mix. For several years I’ve been moving in and around various Seattle neighborhoods, and have fallen in love with the charm of houses I wish I owned, over and over again.

Most photographers at some point photograph their environments, and I am no exception. Taking center stage in importance are the houses and places I see and desire on a regular basis, during each daily dog walk. Yet instead of a more traditional documentary approach, I wanted to suggest the purity of what these places represent: not just home, hearth, and shelter, but their specific impact on me: an ideal, a dream, a goal, and as a perpetual renter, one not yet achieved.

By keeping the subject unfocused, this allows the reading of each ‘memory’ to be less precise. These are anonymous places – fine details, which are unimportant, have been left out to make the images more generic and open to interpretation. The bright candy-like colors, the newness of a flowering tree, they are symbols of unattainable perfection. It’s not about recognition of a location, but of a feeling. These images are a direct result of my suppressed nesting instinct.

Shoreline
This new series of work explores the area joining ocean and shore throughout the Pacific Northwest. With a minimalist approach, I focus on the vanishing point between water, sky, and earth, portraying them as anonymous locations without specific reference points.

Beaches have always been an integral part of my external landscape, from my formative years growing up on the rocky and protected north shore of Long Island, NY, until my current residence in Seattle. With their unpredictable weather and rugged coastlines, I find west coast beaches to have a more varied personality than their eastern cousins. The same spot can yield vastly different images, depending on the direction the camera is pointed, or even the time of day. These are portraits, in a way, evoking the changeable nature of these wild spaces. I hope you find them as fascinating and alluring to experience.

Tara McDermott