Wild Altered Blue Yonder

Veteran aerial photographer Bill Dewey, who takes to the air for professional and aesthetic reasons, brings a special vantage point to his fine art photography. With his incisive eye for forms and textures found in the land below, Dewey has honed sensibilities as both an environmentalist — documenting fragile terra firma — and an almost-accidental abstractionist. Serendipity and experience-deepened visual instincts meet in his land (and water) chronicles.

We’ve seen Dewey’s unique vision focused on specific terrains, with their underlying points of ecological change and volatility, in such previous series as his photo essays on the vast arid wonderland of the Carrizo Plain and its adjacent, topography-shifting San Andreas Fault. Dewey heads outta the county and tracks down the Colorado River in the new series, Delta, at the Marcia Burtt Gallery, long an embracing venue home for his work.

Beyond the visual fruits of his work in the show is an abiding and underscoring concern and advocacy for planetary woes and the already-visible effects of climate change, stateside. Having flown over the famed river’s terrain for three decades, Dewey has had a long-view perspective of the river’s change of course, stymied in its traditional flow to the Sea of Cortez in Baja California because of the nature-altering effects of dams, drought, and other factors. 

But the exhibition Delta is not a conventional naturalist documentation project. In a conscious move away from the more pragmatic and illustrative emphases of much nature-focused photography, Dewey’s imagery doesn’t always show its hand or cleanly explain the whereabouts or very nature of what we’re seeing. The gliding hand from realism and found abstraction is most evident in pieces such as “Baja Blue and White Tidal Flats,” which, despite the clarity of its title, is primarily a study in washes of blue and white. Abstraction takes over the picture plane more explicitly in “DSC 2438” (most of Dewey’s titles are untitled, essentially numeric identifiers): Rugged, craggy patches of orange, ochre, and green vegetation converge to create a vivid, changing, and hard-to-define visual entity.

Elsewhere in the show, the virtually narrative character of the images tells the story of the metamorphosing life of a major river, and the land it slices and meanders through. In “DSC 0119,” a pale blue expanse with green watery rivulets in the upper right corner hosts a spidery system of veins that break up the scene’s fluidity. The image “9053” is large and dreamy, with the sinuously wending waterway flowing through barren earthen stretches, in varied brownish hues. Humming in the distance is a lyrical backdrop and repository of light-blue seawater and gently cloud-pocked sky.

In yet another natural vision embedded with a poetic artistic scheme, a broad, restlessly bending fragment of the river in “3688” suggests a giant inverted question mark, with a dark-blue oblong water patch serving as the dot beneath the inquiring curlicue.

Or maybe this implied punctuation reference is just the beholder’s fantasy, having been led down the path of looking past the obvious interpretation in Dewey’s work. Delta offers further proof of the altered states of nature photography achieved via Dewey’s clear-eyed yet also sly, expressive imagination, busily at work behind his airplane-perspective camera.