Richard Blair has been an independent photographer his entire adult life. He has always worked assignment to assignment and the for last few years, has supported himself on the sale of prints to collectors from his house. In 1999, he and his wife, Kathleen Goodwin, published “Point Reyes Visions”

This show at Barry Singer Gallery is very important for Richard as it is his introduction to the establishment art world. Barry Singer Gallery, while in the relatively small town of Petaluma, is a major player in the international photography fine art print world where photo dealers, museum curators and serious collectors determine the value and importance of photographic materials in the market place.

Richard has been working very hard throughout his career and has amassed a huge collection of works which have not been widely seen due to his need to be independent and not wanting to be compromised by doing work for a market. Now he has taken the plunge due to a positive response to his work. This is his first show with the art world as an outsider.

Richard started his career as a street shooter living in New York City. His subjects were the people on the street, the homeless, winos and the vulnerable. His work used juxtaposition of elements like a frightened old lady and impassive mannequins; lyricism, the sweet moments of life found as people interact, and tone poems of New York streetscapes.

In 1969 he moved to California, and brought his ability to quickly photograph people to Yosemite Valley where he worked on a series of people in Yosemite National Park. His work attracted the attention of park officials who wanted to document the rapid changes to the park and the young hippies who flocked there. Through Richard’s photos, the park could communicate back to these users, teaching them wilderness values. It was a time when parking lots were being torn up and the park service was taking a massive change from resort recreation to a more natural sanctuary.

Soon after the election of Nixon, park service priorities changed and Richard moved on to the bay area. He settled in Berkeley and began documenting the Berkeley counterculture. He traveled up and down the state using his fresh eye to try and make sense of amazing California, from redwoods and rednecks to LA smog and freeways, to desert solitude and Sierra alpine nirvana. This work is becoming a book of photo essays of California, drawing on thirty years of photographing the state. California with its restless population, huge economy and futuristic outlook is, for better and worse, a harbinger of the future for the rest of the world. California is the land of desire, and it creates its own attraction, like leaves being sucked behind a speeding truck.

He started to shoot on assignment for the Port of Oakland and was doing his graphic photographic style for all takers: freelance photography it is called, doing whatever comes along, from publicity, studio still life, food – whatever jobs he could get. Commercial photography is a difficult business, with many competitors and demanding clients. People demand perfection in advertising photography; on time with gourmet lunch included! His studio became one of the larger in the bay area, and it specialized in photographic techniques using a 3000 pound graphic arts camera to make duotone printing plates, before computers made it easy to do. It was a drag, but it’s how one learns technique and one can also afford the highest quality 4x5 and 8x10 cameras.

During this time, Richard and Kathleen also photographed throughout the west, including Baja. They became fascinated by the culture of Bali where they photographed extensively on four separate trips since 1987. Richard is considered to have one of the best contemporary collections of photographs on Bali.

By 1988, living and working in a studio warehouse, on Fourth street in Berkeley, was getting to them. No trees, and people broke into their cars twenty times over the years. They bought an acre of land in Inverness where they built a cabin and ultimately, after the Mount Vision fire in 1995, a house and studio. They designed the house after the warehouse space they were living in, big and open with high ceilings. They closed the Berkeley studio in 1998 to live and work full time in West Marin. Computers, digital cameras, and the internet have made it harder for photographers to prosper; people get their photos from huge corporate databases, designers shoot their own photos and the skill of studio photography can now be replaced with Photoshop, fixing flaws, cleaning backgrounds, piecing together a image from components assembled in the computer. After twenty years in the business, it was time for a change.

Point Reyes is the closest national park with trails and wilderness areas to the bay area, and Kathleen and Richard first dated there, and it had been their escape. Naturally over twenty years of hiking and exploring the area, mostly on one three day hiking and camping trips, Richard amassed a large collection of photographs. They decided to self publish a book on Point Reyes, both to afford to live there and as an antidote to all the assignments Richard had done. A person has a limit on how much “art direction” they can take, and he was burnt out. He went to work learning graphic design and using his graphic arts and park photographer background to produce a new kind of photography book. Hyper-saturated ink densities and shooting over two decades, with Kathleen’s writing, a combination of adventure stories, environmental articles, and community essays, made the book a rarity of self publishing; an instant best-seller. Richard and Kathleen did everything: designing, writing, scanning, platemaking, paying for the print run with a credit card, building a little building to house the books,and driving to book stores with the car loaded down with cartons of books. The book was number one on the best seller list for Marin County for two Christmases.

The last few years have been a time of consolidation for the couple: taming the huge collection of negatives and chromes from a lifetime of compulsive shooting and road trips; making sense of the California images to make a book that they hope will again set new publishing standards; working on the Bali book as well as a “hippyish” book on west coast national parks; making prints for galleries and hosting open studios in their home.

Biography