About the Artist

Artist Statement

Landscape photography has been a wonderful excuse for me to spend much time in nature – to get up early to experience the world joyously waking up to a new day, to stay out later to experience the peace of evening.  Landscape photography has taught me to once again approach nature the way I did as a child – with wonder and delight in the mysteries she reveals.  It has taught me to wait, quietly, for an invitation into a landscape, intimate or grand, so that I am open to its innermost beauty – at these moments I feel as though I am in touch with the totality of our being, with the sacred.  It is a homecoming of sorts. 

While this experience certainly cannot be recorded on film, the taking of a photograph is often my outer response to these moments.  It is part of what I can share with others.  It is a way of giving back.

I hope my images reflect the spirit of a place in a way that conveys to others the sense of wonder, the sense of joy, the sense of peace and gratitude I have experienced in nature.  I hope they promote a feeling of oneness that encourages caring for nature.

 

Biography

Peter Haigh was born in Columbia, Missouri in 1943 and has lived there all but five years of his life.  As a lad his love of nature developed as he roamed the bluffs of the Missouri River and the woods that were close to his home.

After graduate school, where he trained as a quantitative economist, his feelings for nature reasserted themselves and he began to focus his attention on environmental economics and deep ecology.  During this time, the landscape images in Sierra Club calendars inspired him to begin taking extensive trips to the American Southwest where he rediscovered the intimate relation with nature he had enjoyed as a boy.  Recognizing the power of landscape photography to promote a sense of inner peace and a love for the environment, he bought a camera in 1991 with the goal of sharing the sense of connectedness he feels in nature..

Although primarily photographing with a Pentax 67 medium format film camera system, Haigh then scans his film transparencies and follows a digital workflow to the final print.  He feels the digital realm offers a level of creative control and spontaneity that allows him to better reveal the sense of the landscape he experienced in the field.  He also prefers the more painterly look he is able to achieve with inkjet prints.  That these prints now are at least as archival as traditional photographic processes and much friendlier to the environment is a bonus.

Peter Haigh Landscape Photography