Lawrence Manning

I consciously embrace wonder and awe when photographing the Palouse, a unique agricultural area in eastern Washington State. My depictions reveal beauty through structure, texture, color, and line. I transpose the physical and literal into ethereal, impressionistic representations.

My images do not carry explicit warnings of environmental concerns, or themes of empire dissolution. There is no social, cultural, or cathartic history in this work. These images are pure escapism. My personal history-my concerns, nightmares, and celebrations are found in my other photographic endeavors.

As I salute and honor the great artists who uplift us, my Palouse study imagines what painters like Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe might have envisioned as they composed their landscapes, abstracts of form, shadow, light, and nature. I reduce my images to represent vibrations and oscillations, creating a symphony rather than a personal essay.

As a lover of jazz, I sense the rhythms and harmonies of this world. I sense the melodies of Charlie Bird Parker, cascading in unique combinations of deeply felt, lyrical tones. I hear the profound, spiritual patterns of stacked devotional chords, echoing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Here and there, I tingle with the lyrical pianist Bill Evans tickling the ivories. This work represents jamming, improvising, and harmonizing. It contains no pedagogy, no lessons, no preaching. It simply is. Feel it, don’t analyze it. Relax.

Perceive my images as musical scores, rhythms, and melodies from my camera’s sensor to the creative representations and memories they now have become.

Through this project, I have thankfully grown as an artist, discovering beauty within the pixels of reality captured by my camera. It’s a liberation from control.

By presenting this work, I hope to overcome my feeling of vulnerability as an artist playing within the elements of nature rather than working to my old standards of documentary perfection.