Alain Briot Rock Art Perspectives Show

[Alain Briot]

Rock Art Perspectives Show

Five of my large format rock art fine art prints are featured in the show Rock Art Perspectives: Pictographs and Petroglyphs at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon.

Three photographers are featured in this show: Alain Briot, David Muench and Michael Frye.

The show runs until May 31st, 2009.

The official reception is on April 2nd.

I just posted some photographs of the show at this link:

http://beautiful-landscape.com/Portfolio-Rock-art-show.html

Here's two of them, more images are available at the link above:

 

[Asher Kelman]

Congrats,

I wish you a great success. I will visit your link and see the pictures, at least via the web!

Asher

 

[Ken Tanaka]

It looks like an unusual and beautiful exhibit, Alain.

I've only encountered rock art once, in British Columbia. It wasn't in a cave but rather in a canyon. It was a very memorable, almost mystical, experience. But I recall wondering why it wasn't more protected. It was just...there, relatively open to the elements and to drunken kids.

 

[Alain Briot]

It looks like an unusual and beautiful exhibit, Alain.

I've only encountered rock art once, in British Columbia. It wasn't in a cave but rather in a canyon. It was a very memorable, almost mystical, experience. But I recall wondering why it wasn't more protected. It was just...there, relatively open to the elements and to drunken kids.

Ken,

Thank you. I think the exhibit is very well done. They put a lot of work into it.

I've photographed rock art for a very long time. I received the ARARA award for excellence in photography in 1998 (ARARA= American Rock Art Research Assotiation). It's a national award given once a year, but not every year.

Rock art is often best protected by keeping locations secret, or at least not publicly available. Often protection is very difficult, it not outright impossible, due to the nature of the locations where it is found (in the middle of nowhere)!

If you happen on a site, leave it as you found it. It's been there for 100's or 1000's of year and you can do more damage in a few minutes than nature did since it was created.

Some sites , close to cities and roads, are unfortunately more exposed to vandals than remote sites.

 

[Ken Tanaka]

Alain; Judging by the photo in the exhibit I would say that you HAVE been doing this for a while. <G>

Indeed, the B.C. site I mentioned is only accessible via a long and moderately difficult hike. It's also frequently visited by a group that looks after such sites. So it's not too vulnerable to destruction.

I meant to remark that your wonderful photography of these sites and scenes really enables people to see these artifacts in ways that would otherwise be impossible for in-person visitors. By printing at life-size, or even larger, and by adjusting colors and contrasts your imagery can exhibit and illustrate this art rather like the restoration of a painting.

 

[Alain Briot]

Ken,

I agree. Eventually, education is the best approach once secrecy no longer works. Many visitors don't know how old rock art is, or how much damage touching it can cause due to the transfer of skin oils to the panels, or that writing on a rock art panel means defacing it, and so on.

Your point on the photographs being valuable aides for research and enjoyment is well taken. It is actually one of the requirements for the Oliver Award (ARARA's yearly award for excellence in Rock Art Photography which I received as I mentioned before in 1998), that the photographs cater to both art and science. In my award-winning entry in 1998 I submitted both a portfolio of 12 fine art prints matted to 16x20 and a CD with the full size scanned and optimized digital photographs (the originals were film). The prints were there for artistic enjoyment, the digital files were there for scientific study.

That year I won the award unanimously. The portfolio set the bar so high that the award was not given for the next several years due to lack of entries meeting the required guidelines (not my say, theirs. My apologies if I appear to be bragging -- I am just stating the facts).