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Raúl Gonzo looks out of place in his own living room. That is because, sitting there in his faded jeans and concert tee, holding a cup of coffee, his human form practically disappears against the super-saturated visual thrum of this parlor painted in shades of fuchsia, marigold, cyan and shamrock green.

But the mismatch isn’t just about color: It feels like the living room should be inside Gonzo’s head, instead of outside. In the hallway behind him, a table and chairs melt into the wall, as does a lamp and half a rotary dial telephone, while a bespectacled stag’s head smokes a pipe over a fireplace mantel that veers at a dizzying cant, on top of which a neon yellow blunderbuss waits for Elmer Fudd to come over for some Wabbit hunting with Hunter S. Thompson. It’s like the dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound  interpreted as a Looney Tune directed by Tim Burton—all influences on his work, according to Gonzo.

This vivid dreamworld instead lives inside a weathered Victorian-era duplex in West Sacramento’s Washington neighborhood, just across the river from the Crocker Art Museum, where Gonzo’s first solo museum show, Color Madness, opens June 30, with about two dozen of his elaborately staged photographs. The display features two pictures that were taken in this very room, including A Woman’s Den, in which a brunette model wearing 1950s lingerie and thigh-high velvet boots cradles the comical yellow gun in front of the tilty green fireplace, a dangerous, glamorous vamp plunked down smack in the middle of Toontown, unaware that the more seriously she takes herself the more hopelessly absurd she appears. Ah, isn’t that the human predicament?

The polychromatic living room of artist Raúl Gonzo’s West Sacramento home (Photo by Raúl Gonzo)

It feels significant that Gonzo inhabits this stage set, which blurs the lines between conscious and dream states, fiction and reality, 24/7. He’s a bit like Vincent van Gogh eating his pigments in a gut-level attempt at merging with them, except Gonzo is bathing in them instead.

Lanky, languid and affable, Gonzo is the spitting image of a young Jimmy Stewart playing opposite an invisible, 6-foot, 3-inch rabbit in Harvey as he describes the process through which he stages elaborate sets for his distinctive photographs. Then he stops, grins and says, “If this work was a relationship, it would probably sound kind of toxic.” He shakes off the notion. “No, no, no! I’m obsessed with it, and it’s obsessed with me. I’m sure it’s healthy.”

Gonzo started life as a Raúl, but with a different last name that he politely declines to share. He left it behind when he was christened “Gonzo” at age 20—not by his parents, and not by himself, but by his fellow art students at Yuba College in a bit of art-school cleverness. They were riffing off of two characters in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, author Hunter S. Thompson’s fictional alter ego Raoul Duke and his sidekick Dr. Gonzo. 

Namesakes aside, a better candidate for spirit guide might be Gonzo the Great, the quixotic Muppet prankster of uncertain species who gleefully ate a rubber tire on stage to the tune of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” on The Muppet Show  in 1976—a puppet striving to create performance art, or to parody performance art, or both. “I feel like I’m more like that Gonzo,” Raúl agrees, “who is called that just because he’s weird.” 

Francesca Wilmott, the Crocker’s curator of art who is staging the show, calls him a retrofuturist—and he thinks she’s nailed it. “That is one of my favorite words to say: retrofuturistic. It’s nostalgic. It sometimes feels romantic, or provocative,” he says, before dropping into a mischievous, conspiratorial whisper, to add: “But most of the time, it has to be funny. If it’s not funny, I’m not super interested.”

His images usually feature pinup-perfect, vaguely mid-century female figures, often captured in awkward stances or situations that are each a little tragicomic: tripping over a shopping cart in a market with no labels, driving while crying, watching an exploding TV set. They are all dreamily beautiful, and something about their brightly colored lives is always off. Retrofuturistically speaking, they’re reminiscent of a meme from a couple of years ago that George Jetson, everybody’s favorite ’60s dad from the future, was supposed to have been born in 2022. The anachronistic women in Gonzo’s images seem to be grappling with the realization that, to quote the little “g” gonzo philosopher Yogi Berra, the future ain’t what it used to be. And it’s hard to know whether to shout at them to wake up and smell the climate change, or give in and join them in their gorgeous, melancholy defeat.

Office Pool, 2022 (Courtesy of the artist and Crocker Art Museum)

In addition to the staged images, the Crocker show includes an immersive, experiential installation that puts museum visitors aboard a fanciful, fictional version of a pink-soaked Pan Am airliner. Museumgoers can sit in the seats for a one-way flight to Gonzoland, watching a video loop called Color Madness in Motion, composed of live-action video from Gonzo’s photo shoots, so that the images in the exhibit flutter to life.

Gonzo got a taste for the interactive installation piece when he participated in the Art Hotel project in 2016, when roughly 100 artists were invited to create work inside the rooms and hallways of a downtown Sacramento hotel slated for demolition. He placed a red bathtub in a red room and filled it with clouds and rain (a photograph of that design, Tea Time, Bath Time, Part I,  with a model in the tub holding a blue umbrella, is included in the Crocker exhibit). In the casual atmosphere of the Art Hotel, Gonzo was delighted to see visitors jumping into the bathtub to take selfies.

“He’s created his own dreamworld, and we’re hoping with the exhibition and with that immersive set that you’ll be able to actually step into that world,” Wilmott says. “You are transported—that’s the goal.”

Nine years ago, Gonzo stumbled upon the technique that would come to define this and perhaps the rest of his life’s work when he directed a video in 2015 for Texas-based singer-songwriter Victoria Celestine called “Wasted Tears,” in which his concept was to have the singer lying on a bed in a room where everything on the set is white. “That was so fun,” he says. “Then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I can paint things.’ ” Not just white, but any color. He had been looking for a way to respond to what he saw as an unwelcome shift in video and still photography toward CGI-generated inauthenticity. Where he’d loved the stop-motion and other tangible, real-life visual effects in early Tim Burton films like Pee Wee’s Big Adventure  and Beetlejuice, Gonzo found the digital manipulations of Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory  adaptation soulless. So almost as a cry of protest, he started creating his own real-life effects using paint. He painted things that by rights should not be painted, like a car—windows and all—a telephone, a TV set with no screen. To Gonzo, it felt transgressive. “No one’s going to knock on my door and be like, ‘Excuse me, sir, you can’t paint that,’ ” he says. “But it really felt like I found a loophole in the system.” He’s onto something: The perfect, digitally mastered images we see around us everywhere leave nowhere for our imaginations to flourish, while Gonzo’s stagecraft leads us dreamily by the hand into the potent land of make-believe.

This was the start of Gonzo’s Color Madness  series and his journey into fine art photography. “I was only going to do a couple, but then I fell in love,” he says.

This aha moment led to a focused body of work where “real” objects and people are colored as brightly as if they were animated, and some stunning effects are achieved using the simplest mechanical means. Consider one shoot where a model named Mosh (more on her later) appears in the middle of a bright yellow spotlight surrounded by darkness. Gonzo shared a post on Instagram showing how the effect came about: In the image, there appears to be a spotlight. In a short video panning around the meticulously created set, however, you can see that the circle of yellow light is painted across the objects, as is the black background.

Mosh X Dottie’s Delights  spotlights Gonzo’s frequent muse Mosh. (Courtesy of Raúl Gonzo)

Surprisingly, Color Madness  will be the first fine-art show of any kind for the 45-year-old artist from Yuba City, who is already a successful music video director—he’s made around 400 of them for clients as notable as the Goo Goo Dolls, Kat Von D, Grammy-winning British artist Jacob Collier and, locally, Deftones’ lead singer Chino Moreno. One music video he directed for a collaboration between MAX and Chromeo in 2019 has racked up nearly 7 million views on YouTube. Another for the Japanese band One Ok Rock has clocked over 21 million.

“I haven’t even had anything in a gallery yet, so I’m doing things backwards,” he says. “I’m pretty naive about how it works. I just appreciate being able to show while I’m alive. I know that sounds funny, but I’m serious.”

Gonzo was born in Artesia, near Anaheim—fourth-generation Mexican American on his father’s side, a “Caucasian mix” on his mother’s side. His parents divorced when he was just 3, and he grew up with a single dad, a carpenter who moved them around a lot, eventually settling in Wheatland when Gonzo was 13. As soon as he turned 17, he lit out for the big city—Yuba City, that is.

He took some art and videography classes at Yuba College—that was where fellow students took to calling him Gonzo—and bought a 35mm Pentax film camera to start shooting this and that, very much under the influence of Tim Burton and Wes Anderson, he says now. By 24, Gonzo had a job teaching film at the Marysville Charter Academy for the Arts, and was divorced with two children.

His world got bigger at age 27, when he found a mentor in Dean Tokuno, a fashion photographer with clients like Marshall Field’s and Filene’s who had semi-retired to take over his family’s Yuba County walnut farm. Tokuno had also shot advertising photography for David Lynch’s surreal and groundbreaking TV masterpiece Twin Peaks  in the ’90s. A mutual friend introduced them and they hit it off, first working together on a promo for a prune farming operation in Yuba City. Gonzo eventually asked Tokuno if he might be interested in lighting a music video for a local band.

“It was absolutely symbiotic,” Tokuno says. “I daresay I might have taught him a few things, but to be clear, he’s always had a vision. He’s like an iceberg: What you see on top doesn’t even scratch the surface of how deep he is.”

The collaboration gelled. Gonzo got an agent in 2010 and he and Tokuno have made nearly a hundred music videos together since. And in parallel, Gonzo began to develop his unique style as a fine art photographer. Tokuno compares Gonzo to another friend—the late, iconic German fashion photographer Helmut Newton, whose transgressive brand of stylized, fetish-chic noir was so widely imitated that he inspired as much fashion as he captured in images. Tokuno believes Gonzo is already influencing other artists like that. “I explained to him that it’s flattering,” he adds. “[He’s] inspired them. If you’re going to copy something that Raúl does, then you’re steps behind him, because he’s on to the next thing.” One of Gonzo’s prized possessions is a Rolleiflex camera that once belonged to Newton, gifted to him by Tokuno.

Parked Car for Dinner, Part 1  is one of the 25 works that will be on view at Gonzo’s new Color Madness  exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum. (Courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum, gift of the artist)

In 2014, shortly after the end of a long-term relationship and the birth of his third child, Gonzo lit out for the big city again—Sacramento this time. Today, Gonzo is in a new relationship with a grade-school teacher. His 24-year-old son Ashton hopes to enter the police academy soon, while daughter Piper turns 24 in July and is a real estate agent like her mom, and 14-year-old Dimitri splits his time between West Sacramento with his dad and Yuba City with his mom.

Without any formal diagnosis, Gonzo suspects himself of being neuroatypical, and that tracks with the myriad minor obsessions that fill his days. “I’m a creature of habit,” he explains. “So there are 30 things I like to do every day.” He practices the keyboard. Then his languages—Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Ukrainian and American Sign Language. (“I love learning languages,” he says. “I’m just not good at any of them.”) Then he might take a Kenpo karate class, or go to the library, or sit and sketch with a hot chocolate at Old Soul Coffee at the Weatherstone on 21st Street, or take Dimitri to the roller rink, where they are learning to skate. “Roller skating is my thing now,” he says.

There’s also a half-time day job that pays the bills, at Moonracer Films, where he makes educational videos for entities like the Clean California campaign and the California Community College Chancellor’s Office. During the hiring process, he says, “They said, ‘This is not creative work, are you up for it?’ And I said, ‘Believe me, I need the balance.’ ”

Early on in the pandemic, Gonzo also branched out into stand-up comedy, taking classes from local comedians Melissa McGillicuddy and Johnny Taylor Jr. and attending open mic nights at Vince’s Ristorante in West Sacramento. “My initial impression was that his comedy was so different,” says Taylor, who appeared in the 2021 “California” music video that Gonzo directed for Saturday Night Live  alum Melissa Villaseñor. “I didn’t necessarily know if it was good or not, but I thought it was unique. There were a lot of ideas, and a lot of creativity; he’s one of the most creative people I’ve ever met.” One of Gonzo’s most successful bits was bringing an easel on stage and flipping through his photographs with a running commentary. “The through-line is his art,” Taylor says. “He’s a visual storyteller.”

On stage, Gonzo often wears his “skeleton suit”—a black business suit printed with a red skeleton. “I love that suit so much,” he says. “I definitely want to be buried in it. A comedy funeral would be really funny.”

Gonzo, who started performing stand-up comedy during the pandemic, wearing his go-to stage uniform, a beloved skeleton suit (Courtesy of Raúl Gonzo and the Crocker Art Museum)

That sense of humor crosses over into his visual art, which is part of what drew the attention of the Crocker’s chief curator Scott A. Shields. Gonzo was inspired to approach the museum after seeing the 2017 show Turn the Page: The First 10 Years of Hi-Fructose Magazine, featuring artists from the influential art periodical, including pop surrealists like Mark Ryden and Todd Schorr, along with an immersive installation by Mark Dean Veca where visitors could lounge in beanbag chairs surrounded by a riotous graphical colorscape. These artists were Gonzo’s people. It took a while, but in 2020, he put together a presentation deck—he knew how to sell an idea from building hundreds of concept presentations for music videos—and sent it to the museum.

Shields liked what he saw. “The work speaks for itself,” he says, adding that Gonzo continues a regional tradition of weaving humor into otherwise serious fine art, from Roy De Forest’s grinning, cartoonish wild dogs to Robert Arneson’s porcelain toilet sculptures (not to mention the Egghead  sculptures scattered about the UC Davis campus) and Mike Henderson’s watermelon-eating spin on The Last Supper. Indeed, when De Forest, Arneson, Henderson, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley joined the fledgling art department at UC Davis in the ’60s and early ’70s, they were starting with just a Quonset hut at an agricultural college—hence the style that Wiley dubbed “Dude Ranch Dada.” Shields notes this heritage in Gonzo’s take on the NorCal tradition. “There’s a lot of nostalgia about the images,” he says. “And a little bit of Stepford Wives,” referring to the campy 1975 horror film in which suburban housewives are replaced by perfect robots. “There’s also a strong ’80s MTV quality,” Shields adds. “Devo comes to mind.”

READ MORE: “By Any Means Necessary, I Will Keep Being an Artist.” – Mike Henderson reflects on his career and one of the greatest university art departments ever assembled

Francesca Wilmott, the Color Madness  curator, sees a show like Gonzo’s as critical to the Crocker’s mission. “The Crocker has always been a contemporary institution,” she says. “When the Crocker family started collecting in the mid-1800s, they were collecting the art of their time. Thomas Hill was acquired the year the work was painted, same for Charles Christian Nahl. They were taking risks. There are other [more contemporary] examples. Like in our Black Artists in America  show, we have a Betye Saar piece that was made in 1975 and acquired in 1975. So, what does that mean today? How can we carry forward that legacy?”

And as Shields points out, the Crocker gave a young Thiebaud his first solo museum show, too, in 1951—not all that long after the artist was selling his early paintings in a Safeway parking lot.

A few days after the tour of his house, Gonzo offers a tour of his professional photography studio in an industrial park near the Cal Expo-area Costco. This warren of studios, soundstages, dressing rooms, offices and prop rooms is where he shoots most of his photos and music videos—he is in demand enough that his collaborators, including the Goo Goo Dolls and Kat Von D, have come to Sacramento to work with him. Props from his old sets still sit piled on top of some cabinets in one storage room—there’s a gold-painted cello, a blue bird in a hot pink cage, a green bicycle with square yellow wheels. He points out a loft where he used to spend many hours immersing himself in sketching, creating and photographing almost daily, dashing down to set up shoots spontaneously. These days he only arranges shoots for his still photographs around twice a year, both because the elaborately staged images are so expensive to set up, and because 10 years in, he’s still increasing the complexity of each concept.

Standing on an empty soundstage between a green screen and a cornerless white backdrop, he shows a sketch for an image he’ll shoot in July. It’s a diorama mashing up figures with furniture—kind of like the anthropomorphized furniture in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, but with a surreal, sinister streak. A model with a set of dresser drawers for a body is looking down into an open top drawer at a pair of balloons nestled inside. The balloons could be breasts (the joke might be a “chest” of drawers), and the model’s hand is poised to pop them with a pin. It could easily be a scene out of Luis Buñuel’s seminal Un Chien Andalou—the 1929 surrealist short film co-written by Salvador Dali, based largely on fragments of the two artists’ dreams.

Needless to say, it takes a special kind of model for a Gonzo shoot. One such model, Mosh—a mononymous former gymnast turned burlesque star—acts as muse for her frequent collaborator. “He hired me for a music video, had me put my finger on a record player like I was a Victrola machine, and we’ve been friends ever since,” she says on a call from Los Angeles, where she lives.

Mosh appearing in Gonzo’s Mars Vixen  (Courtesy of the Raúl Gonzo)

Mosh has her own theory as to why Gonzo’s superficially cartoonish work has so much soul. “Some photographers really objectify their models, not in a derogatory or malicious sense,” she says. “It’s just that they kind of use them as a tool and an extension of themselves, rather than seeing them as individuals. I’ve never once felt like Raúl just wanted me to do something because I was the mannequin of the day. He has respect for who he’s photographing, that they’re a living, breathing, organic life form. Raúl utilizes that to his advantage, immersing the model in his world—and then he gets these results.”

When you see Mosh in the photograph titled Mars Vixen, wearing a red patent leather catsuit and brandishing a ray gun à la Jane Fonda in Barbarella, she’s very much the subject of the image, not the object. Gonzo may have painstakingly created the world for the image, but he also created it for her to inhabit wholly, so there’s a lot going on behind those perfectly made-up eyes when the shutter snaps.

In the foreword to Gonzo’s 2021 coffee table book for his Color Madness series, television writer and producer Andy Reaser (Grey’s Anatomy  and Pretty Little Liars) wrote of these female figures, “While in some images they seem to play up to expectations of their lives, in others we almost sense them planning an escape, working out the complexities of seeing the artifice in their lives. This makes the people living in this dream incredibly human to me. There are realities we could never bear without building ways to process and cope with them. We add color, we add chaos, we do whatever we can to distract from the fact that we want what we resent, we fear what we love….”

Favorite Show Canceled (2015), also part of the Color Madness  series (Courtesy of Raúl Gonzo and the Crocker Art Museum)

Wilmott compares Gonzo to the photographer Cindy Sherman, whose body of work consists entirely of self-portraits in costume as various personae—some beautiful, some grotesque, ranging from a 1960s Italian movie star to a dewy schoolgirl to a circus clown to a corpse. What makes them so compelling aren’t the costumes and set pieces, but how the artist inhabits them, as if each were a privileged glimpse into her inner life, the self the world never sees. Gonzo’s work shares that quality of using outward spectacle as a window into a rich inner landscape—because that is, after all, what art does best.

Luis Buñuel once said, “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other 22 in dreams—provided I can remember them.” With an idea between his teeth, Gonzo would probably also spend 22 hours a day in Dreamland if he could—the twist being that most of his real-life activity unfolds as if in a dream.

“I just became obsessed with this,” he says, gesturing to the empty stage where the sketch on his phone will soon burst forth into full, flagrant reality. “I’m so excited to do it. When I have an idea, it’s the thing that gets me up in the morning like a kid on Christmas Day.”

Landscape photography can be tough. You’ve got the gear, the location, and the vision, but somehow, things don’t always click. This struggle is familiar to many, and understanding why it happens can be the first step to overcoming it.

Coming to you from Alister Benn, this insightful video explores why landscape photography is so challenging. Benn starts by highlighting a simple truth: despite the vast landscapes and expensive equipment, success isn’t guaranteed. The process seems straightforward, but the reality is different. The belief that it should be easy makes the inevitable difficulties more frustrating.

The second point Benn makes is about moving targets. As you grow and learn new techniques, the standards you set for yourself keep rising. You master a new skill or acquire better equipment, only to find new barriers in your way. This constant shift can make you feel like you’re never quite good enough, which is a common struggle.

The third challenge is more psychological. Benn explains how expectations can trip you up. You might think that being experienced should mean you can always produce great photos, but that’s not true. Even seasoned photographers have off days. This inconsistency can be discouraging, especially when your expectations are high.

Benn also discusses solutions, starting with a simple but powerful suggestion: get out there. Take your camera, go somewhere local, and just start shooting. The act of getting out and taking photos can break the cycle of doubt and inaction. It’s about building momentum and rediscovering the joy of photography.

The second piece of advice is to slow down. Don’t rush to capture the perfect shot. Instead, take your time to explore and experiment. This approach reduces pressure and opens you up to new possibilities. By slowing down, you can see more and create better.

That’s just the beginning, so check out the video above for the full rundown from Benn.

And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, “Photographing the World: Japan With Elia Locardi!” 

Pork, Laughter and Red Wine. That’s how Castilian-Leonese photographer Virginia Morán wanted to title the snapshot that has been proclaimed the winner of the ‘Food at the table’ category in the Pink Lady Food Photographer of The Year 2024, a contest that annually awards the best gastronomic photographs in the world.

In the picture, Chef Antón bids farewell to his beloved restaurant located in a small village in León, after 30 years of service, inviting his closest family and friends to a simple banquet. The main dish comes from a pig slaughter: liver with onions, served with sourdough bread and a good Rioja wine. A touching farewell to a culinary era filled with laughter, joy, and good red wine.

Morán’s photograph is a moving farewell to a culinary era full of laughter, joy, and good red wine

Morán says she took this photograph while preparing a report for a book that collects recipes related to the slaughter. “Suddenly I found myself in this natural, spontaneous moment of celebration with food as the protagonist and culmination of a whole professional life. It was a moment of relaxation and enjoyment, so I climbed onto a chair with my camera and didn’t hesitate,” explained the photographer after discovering that her image emerged as the winner after submitting it several times to the contest.

It is not only the Spanish who have managed to become finalists in some category this 2024; Jullianne Medeiros Domingos, Juan Miguel Ortuño, Nando Esteva, and Sylvie Pabion Martín have also achieved this.

Red Bean Paste Balls by Yang Zhonghua, an image depicting residents from a rural area of Xiangshan preparing for the Spring Festival by cooking rice cakes and other traditional delicacies from the region, has been declared the absolute winner of the thirteenth edition of this international competition.

This year’s global jury, tasked with evaluating the thousands of photographs submitted from over 65 countries, has been chaired by the legendary food photographer David Loftus. Alongside him were Clare Reichenbach, CEO of the James Beard Foundation; Tom Athron, CEO of Fortnum & Mason; Asma Khan, host of Chef’s Table, cookbook author, and founder of Darjeeling Express; Fiona Shields, Head of Photography at Guardian News & Media; and Rein Skullerud, Chief Photographer and Photo Editor of the United Nations World Food Programme.

Winners in other categories

Breakfast with the Brokpas, by Debdatta Chakraborty (India), was the winner of the Pink Lady® Moments of Joy category, which rewards images that reflect the joy that food brings and the happiness of moments spent cooking or enjoying a meal together. This image captures two people having breakfast who belong to the brokpas, a small ethnic group mainly living in the region of Ladakh (India). Traditionally, the brokpas claim to be descendants of Alexander the Great’s lost army. The brokpas’ diet is based on locally grown barley and wheat, mainly prepared as tsampa (roasted flour) and Gur-Gur Cha, a black tea infusion with butter and salt.

Another one of the most relevant categories in the competition is Tenderstem® Bring Home the Harvest, whose winner is Natnattcha Chaturapitamorn (Thailand) with her image A Day in the Field, capturing a young farmer transporting a rack of rice shoots through a rice field in Sakon Nakhon (Thailand). This year, the category dedicated to Claire Aho, one of Finland’s most renowned photographers, has been awarded for the fourth time. It is the Claire Aho Award for Female Photographers, won by Delaney McQuown (United States) with B.L.T. Contemplation. You can check the rest of the winners and finalists here.

Ascending to godly heights in a doorless helicopter, Donn Delson captures the world from a perspective few ever experience. For many, the chance to join him in his airborne studio, feeling the rush of wind and the thrill of heights, is a dream realised. For Delson, it is a practice steeped in artistry. As he buckles into the mechanical Dragonfly and the powerful rotors, begin their rhythmic spin, the ground beneath relinquishes its claim and a journey to explore the uncharted begins.

I aim to share the sense of immersion and wonder I feel by creating large-scale prints that draw viewers into the scene, almost as if they are flying alongside me

Donn Delson

Soaring up to 10,000 feet and embracing the euphoria of the moment, Delson leans out of the doorless helicopter, maintaining composure to capture brief moments of magnificence through fortuitous encounters. Through his lens, these unexpected moments transform into something entirely new.

Each capture is christened with a name that whispers what might be seen from the heavens and masks its true essence. The helicopter’s agility allows Delson to rest in a state of vigilant suspension and swoop in for more intricate compositions, offering fluid exploration of the earth’s vertical and horizontal dimensions. Each movement provides Delson with a constant flow of opportunities to frame split-second happenings as masterpieces of photography.

With a keen eye for symmetry and patterns, Delson turns these unexpected moments into abstract art, making us reconsider the familiar from a fresh perspective. An exceptional example is Delson’s “Xylophones” from his Points of View Collection, captured in 2016 as he flew over the Port of Los Angeles. The image depicts a parking area filled with horizontal rows of colourful containers that, to Delson, resembled the musical bars on a xylophone.

Delson has dedicated more than 300 hours to observing the world from a bird’ s-eye perspective. His passion for aerial views has led him to witness stunning landscapes and cityscapes from across the globe. Among many once-in-a-lifetime moments, he found himself in the middle of a rare double circular rainbow while flying over the Hawaiian Islands, a moment that went viral.

Flying along with Delson, there is an immediacy to the sights and sounds; the landscape we witness is not just viewed but felt, the wind’s whisper and the rotor’s hum creating an exhilarating and meditative soundtrack. The entire sequence, from takeoff to flight to hovering, makes you both an observer and a participant in the unfolding spectacle of Delson’s practice and invites deep introspection on our existence.

The unparalleled agility and control of the doorless chopper as it manoeuvres through the air with effortless precision, making sharp turns and sudden stops that seem to defy the laws of physics blend beauty with human ingenuity in a way that captivates.

Seeing the world from up there is just different. Delson’s work prompts reflections on our environment, urbanization, and the delicate balance between nature and human activity. Delson’s images, with their immense beauty and scale, can be humbling, inspiring appreciation for the planet’s grandeur. After witnessing him capture London from divine heights, we had the opportunity to catch up with Delson to learn more about his practice, inspiration, and more.

Hi Donn, thank you for speaking with us. Please introduce yourself to those who might need to become more familiar with your work.

Donn Delson: I’m Donn Delson, a fine art aerial photographer. My work seeks to capture the world from a bird’s-eye view, revealing unique patterns, symmetry, and textures that aren’t visible from the ground. My photography seeks to transform natural and urban landscapes into abstract works of art, photographic homages, as you will, inspired by the styles of artists like Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Mark Rothko, and Annie Albers.

I’m intrigued with how looking at things from different perspectives and angles often yields an entirely different impression, in essence appearance versus reality. What I hope to accomplish in my aerial photography is to give the viewer the opportunity to see things through a different lens.

Donn, we’re interested in hearing about some specific early moments from your journey into the arts. Could you share a couple of these moments and what motivated you to pursue a career in this field?

Donn Delson: My journey into the arts began at a young age. I held my first Brownie box camera when I was ten years old and was instantly captivated by the ability to capture moments. In high school, I graduated to a Rolleiflex film camera and took sports action shots for the school newspaper.

However, it wasn’t until I retired in 2010 that I had the time to fully immerse myself in photography. My first focus was on landscape, industrial laser, and long-exposure photography. A significant turning point came in 2015, during a trip to New Zealand, where I had the chance to shoot from an open-door helicopter.

The experience of seeing the world from above, combined with the creative challenges it presented, inspired me to pursue aerial photography. The ability to blend my passion for photography with the hunt for abstract patterns and forms, often titled for what they look like from above, has been a driving force in my work for the past nine years.

Your approach to photography is intriguing. You’ve mentioned that many of your images are serendipitous sightings rather than planned captures. Could you elaborate on how you balance the spontaneity of these moments with the need for technical precision and composition?

Donn Delson: Balancing spontaneity with technical precision is a delicate dance. While I briefly use tools like Google Maps and satellite imagery for initial planning, relatively close-up scanning across wide stretches of land doesn’t usually offer me, except from the broadest standpoint, the ability to see something I know will result in an image that excites me. The most captivating shots are usually discovered in the moment. Once in the air, I rely on my instincts and experience to spot intriguing compositions.

However, capturing these moments flying in a “doorless helicopter with the wind rushing in and the inherent vibration from the rotors and turbulence requires meticulous attention to technical details—shutter speed, aperture, and stabilization techniques are crucial to overcoming the challenges of capturing tack sharp images that can be enlarged to as much as twelve by eighteen feet. My smallest size limited-edition piece is 32”x48” (81cm x 121 cm) and the average piece size is 48” x 72” (121 cm x 183 cm)

An example of a serendipitous sighting would be when I was in Japan in 2018 to shoot the cherry blossoms over the mountains east of Kyoto. I’d always seen lots of pictures of cherry blossoms from the ground, but never from above. We were returning to the helicopter base having had a successful flight, when in the distance, I spotted a little tiny rectangular purple patch.

We flew over and discovered the most beautifully manicured, strategically planted rows of blossoming cherry trees in various stages of growth. As I looked down from about 3500 feet, the image below could only be that of the rows of beads on an abacus, and hence it was aptly named.

Donn, your unique perspective of viewing the world from a bird’s-eye view provides an immersive experience for you as an artist. How do you aim to convey this sense of immersion and wonder to your audience through your photography, and what kind of impact do you hope it has on them?

Donn Delson: There are few things I’ve done in my life that I’ve found to be more inspirational than looking out and down on the beauty of our world from a “doorless” helicopter with no window to encumber or distort the view. I aim to share the sense of immersion and wonder I feel by creating large-scale prints that draw viewers into the scene, almost as if they are flying alongside me.

The detail and scale of my shipping container artwork, with a reverent nod to Mark Rothko, invites viewers to wander through the blocks of color. My solo show in Phoenix next January will be completely focused on container art. I hope my photographs inspire people to see the world from new perspectives, to appreciate the beauty of our world from above, and to be open to rethinking their assumptions about what they are seeing.

How does the aerial perspective change the way you perceive and capture symmetry, patterns, and textures? Can you discuss a particular instance where this perspective revealed something unexpected or transformative?

Donn Delson: As I mentioned, things look very different from above relative to what they may be in reality on the ground. With respect to things built by man, I’m fairly certain the original architects had no idea, nor did they likely plan for, what things would look like from above. The aerial perspective dramatically alters how I perceive symmetry, patterns, and textures. Everyday scenes can transform into abstract compositions.

One instance in 2016, was when I flew over a series of freight containers at the Port of LA. I was excited to spot six symmetrically positioned horizontal rows of shipping containers that looked like the tonal bars on a musical xylophone. My excitement increased as a single, white semi-tractor-trailer began driving from the right between the rows.  Getting the pilot to quickly maneuver me around to take the shot, I accomplished it no more than three or four seconds before it drove out of the frame. Xylophones in my Points of View collection has become one of my favorite images. People first seeing it often mistake it for a xylophone or bookshelves until they see the truck.

Your travels have taken you from Japan to The Netherlands, England to Israel, and the United States. How do different cultures and landscapes influence your work, and do you have a favourite location that continually inspires you?

Donn Delson: Traveling exposes me to diverse landscapes and cultural aesthetics, each offering unique visual elements. In Japan, the delicate beauty of cherry blossoms and the serene landscapes are in stark contrast to the urban density of cities like Tokyo.

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The Netherlands, with its meticulously planned tulip and agricultural fields and canals, presents a fascinating interplay of human intervention and nature. England’s blend of historic and contemporary architecture is endlessly inspiring, especially London’s skyline. While it’s hard to pick a favorite, I find myself continually inspired by the dynamic contrasts in cities like New York and London, where the past and present coexist in a constantly evolving urban tapestry.

The story of capturing a double circular rainbow over Molokai is fascinating. How do you prepare yourself to seize such rare and fleeting moments, and what do you feel when you manage to capture them?

Donn Delson: Capturing rare moments like flying into a double circular rainbow requires a mix of preparation and readiness to seize the unexpected. I always ensure my equipment is in top condition and my settings are optimized for quick adjustments.

It was about 8 o’clock in the morning, and we were flying at about 3000 feet when we were surprised by a sunshower. As we flew through the downspray, I suddenly found myself physically entering into a double circular rainbow, the first I had ever seen. I’ve been told that we don’t normally see them because, on land, we are only able to see 180° due to the horizon.

Luckily, my photographer friend in the front seat was able to turn around and capture a quick video and shot of me shooting through the double circular rainbow. That video has now been seen across social platforms by more than five million viewers. Again, it’s a gift when these serendipitous moments present themselves. It might be akin to the thrill an artist feels feel when a spontaneous brushstroke perfectly completes a canvas. These fleeting moments remind me of the magic and unpredictability of nature and the privilege of being able to capture and share them.

Your tools of choice include an open-door helicopter and the Fuji GFX 100 camera, which has high-resolution capabilities that are crucial for your practice. How do you stay updated with the latest photographic technology, and what role does it play in pushing the boundaries of your expression?

Donn Delson: My go-to cameras are the Fuji GFX 100 and the Nikon D850. The Fuji’s 100+ megapixels allow for incredible detail and large-scale prints, while the Nikon D850 is a powerhouse for low-light conditions. I use a variety of lenses, stabilizers, and filters to ensure I’m able to enlarge and offer the highest-quality images. Shooting in raw gives me the flexibility to fine-tune details in post-production to make the image most like I am viewing it.

Advances in AI now allow me to remove a lot of the noise and artifacts from low-light images that would previously have made some images incapable of proper enlargement. As camera companies continue to evolve their equipment, staying updated with the latest photographic technology is essential. There are new bodies and/or model updates for some of what I use. I regularly follow industry news, attend photography expos, and engage with other professionals to stay informed about new advancements.

With a diverse and loyal base of private, corporate, and commercial collectors worldwide, how do you view your legacy as an aerial fine art photographer? What impact do you hope your work will have on future generations of artists and viewers?

Donn Delson: I hope my legacy as an aerial fine art photographer will inspire others to see the world from new perspectives, knowing that everything may not always be as it seems at first glance. I hope my work encourages artists to explore the intersection of art and technology, push boundaries, find beauty in unexpected places, and appreciate the complexity and interconnectedness of our world.

Lastly, could you share your philosophy of photography? How do you describe and understand the core importance of art in your life and career?

Donn Delson: My philosophy of photography centers around the idea of seeing the world from different perspectives and finding beauty in the unexpected. Art, for me, is about exploration and expression. It’s a way to communicate emotions, ideas, and perceptions that words may fail to properly convey. Large-scale photography, by its scope, hopefully allows me to share my vision in a way that connects with others.

At seventy-five, the importance of art in my life lies in its ability to inspire, challenge, and transform the artist and the viewer. Annie Albers once said, “You know it’s great art, if it makes you breathe differently.” I know I’ve found a magical shot when it makes me catch my breath, and then I’m inspired to be able to share it.

https://www.instagram.com/donndelson/

©2024 Donn Delson

Len is a curator and a contributing writer at Art Plugged, a platform for contemporary art; he also engages in web development, design, and marketing.

John Kleinhans has been photographing the creative people he has known in Woodstock – many of them painters and sculptors – for 40 years. Of the more than 80,000 images he has produced over the four decades, a carefully selected 94 are currently on exhibit at the Historical Society of Woodstock’s facility at 20 Comeau Drive on weekend afternoons from one to five p.m.

These are digital snapshots, not carefully staged studio portraits, “Records of unplanned encounters with friends, co-workers and casual acquaintances,” as Kleinhans puts it in the foreword of the exquisitely produced catalog entitled “Woodstock Personalities.” The expansive circle of Kleinhans’ friends and acquaintances know that he and his camera are virtually inseparable. His friends are used to him moving around or making a quick suggestion before snapping one or several shots. The result can be an extraordinary display of the social intimacy among old friends – creative Woodstock at its best. 

For the creative people of Woodstock, life is a labor of love – and a bunch of other feelings as well.

The affable Kleinhans, gifted with an ability to intuit the narratives that connect people, has a doctorate in experimental psychology from Rutgers University, where he taught as a professor for a dozen years. But as he wrote, “Photography eventually triumphed over psychology.” 

in Woodstock, Kleinhans also worked for several years at Garry and Diane Kvistaad’s Woodstock Percussion, Woodstock art historian Bruce Weber has contributed informative single-paragraph texts of explanation that accompany each photograph,

“Woodstock Personalities,” curated by Letititia Smith, closes on July 28. The sumptuous 68-page catalog will remain.

The recently released feature film ‘The Bikeriders’ is an American crime-drama story, inspired by the 1967 photobook of the same name by photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon.

The film depicts the lives of the Vandals MC, a fictional version of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, founded in 1935.  

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, actor Mike Faist, who plays Lyon in the show, explained he took inspiration from his previous co-star in ‘Challengers’ Zendaya’s habit of taking photographs of the sets she works on. 

Speaking to the publication Faist said:

“Toward the tail end of Challengers, Zendaya got me into photography. She had her cameras on set and was always playing around with them and whatnot. So I got interested and played around [with them], and I ordered a camera of my own. 

“So, when Jeff called and said, ‘Hey, do you want to play a photographer in a movie I’m doing?’ I figured that was a sign that I should go ahead and take on this job.”

According to the club’s website, the group was founded in 1935 as The McCook Outlaws Motorcycle Club, out of Matilda’s Bar on Route 66 in McCook, Illinois. It is the oldest outlaw biker club in the world, with a membership of over 3,000, and is the third largest in the world, behind the Hells Angels, and the Bandidos. 

Lyon spent four years riding with the Outlaws, beginning in 1963, and became a fully fledged member of the club in “an attempt to record and glorify the life of the American bike rider.”

The series of photographs became incredibly popular, and by 1967, Lyon was invited to join Magnum Photos, the international photography cooperative. 

In an interview with Bomb magazine, Lyon described how, in the beginning, he a “funky old Leica M2 that scratched every picture.”

Eventually, the Nikon F would become his “real workhorse.”

“It was a Nikon Reflex, that early, single-lens Reflex. It was such a fabulous camera with a prism on it—no light meter. I had a 2 1/4 inch for The Bikeriders also. When I got to Manhattan in 1967 and realized what I was getting into, making architectural pictures, I went to Olden’s on Broadway and 43rd Street and got the cheapest view camera you could get—a Calumet.”

Before portraying Lyon in the film, Faist was lucky enough to spend time with the man himself at his cabin in Maine.

“We spent the weekend shooting photography and fishing, and he actually introduced me to a friend of his who showed me his studio. So then we developed film, and we went through some of Danny’s old works.”

Speaking about his time as an Outlaws member, Lyon said: “I was kind of horrified by the end. I remember I had a big disagreement with this guy who rolled out a huge Nazi flag as a picnic rug to put our beers on. By then I had realised that some of these guys were not so romantic after all”.

Take a look at the best Leica cameras, and the best Nikon cameras. 

We’ve also got guides to the best film cameras, and the best retro cameras. 

The University of Southern California has opened an art show entitled “No Content Warning” by “queer and disabled photographer,” Robert Andy Coombs, according to the university’s website.

The opening reception for Coombs’ show was on June 14 and is scheduled to last until Sept. 14. The exhibit was introduced by the archives curator, Alexis Bard Johnson, and art historian Cyle Metzger.

“The nine erotic and sultry photographs on view unapologetically present the vision of artist and often subject, Robert Andy Coombs,” an advertisement for the art show explains.

[RELATED: Confused students panic over imaginary removal of LGBT resources]

The works are taken from what is called Coombs’ “CripFag” series. 

“Coombs’s photography explores the intersections of disability and sexuality,” USC’s website explains. “Themes of relationships, caregiving, fetish, and sex are depicted and explored throughout.”

“These nine works, selected from his CripFag series, invite the viewer into Coombs’s world: a world where disability and sex are not at odds,” USC’s website continues. “The photographs, luxuriously printed on metallic paper at a large scale, simultaneously convey compassion for the subjects while they demand the viewer’s attention.”

“Many works chosen for this exhibition were censored from other institutions,” the website states.

Coombs’ exhibit is not the only one at USC to feature LGBT art. The ONE Archives at USC’s Libraries claim to be the “largest repository of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) materials in the world.”

“Founded in 1952, ONE Archives houses millions of archival items including periodicals, books, films, videos, audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records, and personal papers,” the ONE Archives’ page on USC’s website explains. “ONE Archives has been a part of the University of Southern California Libraries since 2010.”

[RELATED: Northwestern student govt calls for segregated ‘Pride House’ for LGBT-identifying students]

An organization connected to the ONE Archives at USC, the One Institute, has promoted LGBT issues much more widely than just art projects like that of Coombs.

“Our one-of-a-kind exhibitions and public programs connect LGBTQ+ history and contemporary culture to effect social change,” the One Institute—formerly called the ONE Archives Foundation—explains on its website. “As the independent community partner of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, we promote the largest collection of LGBTQ+ materials in the world.”

“Out of our commitment to social equity and justice, we tell the stories of the LGBTQ community and its history,” the website states.

Campus Reform has contacted the University of Southern California, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, and Cyle Metzger for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.