You are a competent landscape photographer, but you feel overwhelmed by the number of really good landscapes that are available (on Instagram, for example) at low prices, or for free!
You would love to find a new source of originality, a new way to express yourself photographing the wilderness environments that you love.
If you’re searching for
🡢 Check out Joel Simpson’s FACES IN THE ROCKS: Beyond Landscape to Psycho-Geological Photography…
… It is a book of ground-breaking nature photography based on rock and ice formations by Joel Simpson. His images regularly appear in juried on-line exhibitions (six+ times per month), and frequently in physical shows (CV on request).
In this book Joel takes you on a journey, starting with landscapes (based on a sense of place), then takes you progressively farther from place into realms of the imagination—to dronescapes, abstractions, figurations (the faces) and finally fictions (imaginary astroids, etc.), all depicting literal framings of rocks and ice (no image combining or AI), strategically edited to bring out his vision.
At the end he offers advice on his editing techniques and shows you color scenes of six of the sites that provided the images in the book.
His method shows you how to create astonishing images, beyond the limits of your own imagination by combining the your mentally stored images with the provocative chaos of the mineral and ice environment. The originality of your images if properly edited will virtually guarantee the acceptance of many of them in juried shows.
We can go beyond landscapes by going within them. All of us have a “mental image bank” stored mostly in our unconscious, the accumulation of a lifetime of consuming images. By letting particular features, configurations, and textures in the lithic (rock) and glacial (ice) environment draw out visual associations stored there, we can discover compositions that speak to our deepest selves, our forgotten dreams and memories, our most profound desires and fears. They are often ironic, incongruous, and phantasmagorical.
Capturing those images, we can skillfully edit them to create works of photographic art that actually exceed our own powers of imagination. This point deserves emphasis: the images we capture and edit are collaborations between the perceived “chaos” of the rocks or ice and our unconscious image memories. No one has ever seen them before; they are absolutely original—unlike most landscapes—and viewers will notice this, too.
This is psycho-geological photography!
Buy Now View Book– 196 pages
– 212 images by Joel Simpson
– ca. 28,000 words of explanation, history and analysis
– Essay by A. D. Coleman
– How-to Section on Editing
– Best places to find Psycho-Geological subjects (illustrated)
– Bibliography
– Site List…and more
Want to know more? Check out the SAMPLE (33%) the book as a flipbook: https://online2stflip.com/dzoq/3rnj
Want to see more? check out the galleries on this website
Faces in the Rock is available in soft cover, hard cover and as an eBook at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble (bandn.com), or your favorite print-on-demand platform.
“Joel Simpson demonstrates that we shape and are shaped by land outside and inside. Ranging from abstraction to surrealism, through associative explorations that render the unconscious conscious, he invites us on fantastic journeys, offering us stimulating perspectives and tools designed to enrich ourrelationships with land/ourselves.”
“Playgrounds for the Mind reveals Joel Simpson as part genius, part crazy man with his intense passion for what he calls geological art photography in near and far world locations. The images are gorgeous, strangely compelling beauties rooted in Surrealism. They beckon me to their sites which I know I could never find; Simpson has saved me the trouble and makes them even more beautiful than they probably are.”
“Nature, at its most non-human magnificence, isnot malevolent, it is indifferent. In Joel Simpson’s view it is also a place where the human can interact with the great inhuman forces by offering imagination a playground....Simpson travels all over the earth to find the most extraordinary and bizarre geological sites, then to photograph their most complex rocks. With help from Carl Jung, André Breton, or your own dreams, you can find—at some unconscious or conscious depth—familiar déjà-vus from the history of art or the nightmares of your tribe.”
“Simpson claims a Surrealist pedigree to his current work that may reveal mysterious figures in rock formations, but whether they’re there or not, the work is striking.”
“Playgrounds for the Mind is a terrific mind-opening (and eye-opening) work. Congratulations.[Simpson has] invented a whole new way of seeing.”
Joel Simpson demonstrates that we shape and are shaped by land outside and inside. Ranging from abstraction to surrealism, through associative explorations that render the unconscious conscious, he invites us on fantastic journeys, offering us stimulating perspectives and tools designed to enrich our relationships with land/ourselves.
Simpson's breathtaking images-manifesting 'psycho-geological photography'-stand as a testament to the profound imprint the earth leaves on the human mind and the power of photography to reveal such truths. It is the rocks that man has found universal forms and faces. In fact, the human psyche itself mirrors the layers and crust-from the conscious surface to its enigmatic core. To witness these photographic revelations is nothing short of groundbreaking.