Beyond the Object
Two Artists -- Two Pathways -- A Shared Vision
Displayed at the Ordover Gallery at the San Diego Museum of Natural History
May 17 through August 11, 2008

This show is a dialog between two new friends who have traveled very different roads
yet have ended up meeting in a shared territory: They both take us
past the boundary lines we use to identify the visual world into a place
beyond the object where we can regard the world around us with new eyes.

In this day and age of sharp divisions it is unlikely that Richard Garrod and
Robert Walter, born a generation apart, would find such strong common ground.

Richard Garrod shoots with large format film cameras and develops his pictures
in a traditional darkroom while Robert Walter works in a digital darkroom and
his camera is a flatbed scanner.

Richard has been a photographer for over sixty years and is one of the
last trees standing in that legendary group of Monterey area photographers
that includes Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Imogen Cunningham
and Wynn Bullock. Robert Walter's artistic career spans several decades,
but only the last five years have been devoted to creating his hidden world images.

Richard Garrod photographs larger scenes which he prints small, mainly in
black and white while Robert Walter's images begin as tiny artifacts of nature
that he prints large and mostly in color.

Despite these differences, the two men have formed a quick bond of
mutual appreciation where the discussion is not about the merits of
traditional versus digital photography but rather whether images possess
emotion and beauty and mystery.

Richard Garrod, a very down to earth person, titled his first book Visual Prayers,
because when he is shooting, his involvement with his subject is so strong
that the rest of the world recedes and he enters a state that feels like a form of
meditation or prayer. The images that result are the culmination of that prayer --
the part that remains for all to see.

Most people walk past the pebbles and rocks, the small shards of driftwood,
leaves, bark and seedpods that contain the worlds revealed in Robert Walter's
images. For him, finding these hidden places underfoot is an affirmation of how
deep nature's beauty goes and a metaphor for how easy it is to miss as we
rush through life.

Beyond the Object is an invitation from Richard Garrod and Robert Walter
to look deeper into the world around us starting with this small sampling
of the discoveries they have made.

NOTE: ALL BLACK AND WHITE IMAGES IN THIS GALLERY ARE BY RICHARD GARROD