“A Walk Through the Range of Light is a photographic journey by photographer and master printer, Ben Dewell.  The exhibition features 55 silver gelatin prints ranging in size from 11”x14” to 30”x40”of the Sierra Nevada foothills to the remote and rarely seen regions of the High Sierra. 

Ben Dewell is an artist/actor presently residing in Southern California.  As a lifelong, native Californian, whose formative years were spent within mere miles of the Sierra Nevada – exploring by boot, rope, ski and kayak the farthest reaches of this incomparable mountain range – he has attained an appreciation and intimate knowledge of its secrets matched by few others.  Self-taught as a classical landscape photographer and supported by academic degrees in Biology from California State University and Meteorology from the University of California, Ben brings the wildest places of the Sierra and the most transcendent moments to these uniquely personal, yet universal, images.

Ben’s love of the Western Landscape and his passion for capturing the images he previously only recorded in his minds-eye fuels his trips back to the regions of the wilderness that he knows best.  With just one look at Ben’s stunningly beautiful photographs, you will know that he shoots with his heart and prints with his soul. 

Artist’s Statement—Ben Dewell

My sole focus as an artist is to produce the finest, most beautiful photographic prints possible. This process begins and ends with light - direct, indirect, reflected, refracted, or transmitted. The search for the intricate balance of light and form starts with exposing the film with the greatest degree of tonal values possible given individual scene constraints. This is true for the monochrome negative as well as the color positive films I use to record a scene.

Inherent in my approach is the personal vision shaped over many years within the steep ramparts of the Sierra Nevada Range of California - John Muir's Range of Light. By far and away the subjects I choose to photograph feature both literally and figuratively the range of light imbued in these magnificent escarpments - indeed, images of such searing beauty they cut like a hot knife straight to the heart of the Sierra. My appreciation of the Sierra came naturally through a succession of wilderness experiences beginning in my earliest years, from the Sierra's wildest summits, thundering storms and rivers to its most serenely sapphire lakes, verdant meadows and quieting brooks. Undoubtedly, my history in this most exquisite of mountain citadels shaped my understanding of the power and breadth of natural light and form.

The monochrome images I choose to print for classical gelatin silver prints not only convey a clear message of their subject matter through vast tonal range and color - the range of light - but also the synergistic effects of tone and form, resulting in "colors" of gray not interpreted by the eye alone, but ultimately by the experience held in the heart as well. Through the printing of a full tonal range spanning all the "grays" from deepest black to purest white, recently shed aspen leaves lying upon a weather-bleached log exhibit all the yellows and golds one remembers from the Indian Summer warmth of an early autumn sojourn. Freshly fallen snow holds not only the color of the photographic print's paper, but the winter chill one felt upon the crisp dawn of a hopeful New Year's Day. The inky blackness of stilled shore water may reflect the clarity of unencumbered thought while the silver scintillations of a high, wind-whipped lake, the cauldron of ideas yet resolved.

BEN DEWELL
Range of Light Photography, 2005