Fine art photographer shares experiences behind his work

Photographer Jeff Corwin is featured in a solo exhibit “Landscapes of the American West” at the Northwest Montana History Museum.

Corwin is a fine art photographer living in Bozeman. After 40 plus years as a successful award-winning commercial photographer, Corwin turned to working in fine art photography.

Corwin has done photo shoots in 41 countries and five continents. He has taken photos while hanging out of a helicopter over the Thames River and his clients have included portraits of famous people including Bill Gates and Cesar Chavez.

The exhibition is on display through April 30, 2023 at the museum, at 124 2nd Ave. E., Kalispell.

The Inter Lake recently spoke with Corwin about his experiences as a photographer and his exhibition.

Q: You’ve been a photographer for over 40 years and how did you first become interested in photography?

A: So I’m from Los Angeles and I started there. I assisted a commercial photographer when I was about 23 or 24. Loved that aspect of commercial photography, so my career started doing commercial advertising and I did that up until like two years ago. When I decided to stop doing that it led to me really concentrating more on my fine arts and at that time I had moved to Montana and started shooting this part of the world. I think my true love for photography came from my father. He wasn’t a professional photographer but he always had a nice camera and eventually he got another one and gave me his original one. So that helped a lot, kind of being encouraged by my parents.

Q: Can you tell me more about that?

A:Yeah, I mean they did a lot for me when I was really young. We lived in a very tiny, tiny, little house in Los Angeles and when I started to show more interest, my father actually took the one bathroom that we had and turned it into a darkroom. Well — it didn’t last long, my mom was encouraging but she needed a bathroom. So he built me another dark room out in the garage. He actually plumbed it and built light-proof walls. So, you know, there was a lot of support from both of them and I was exposed to, they always had subscriptions to Life magazine and Look magazine — great photography in both of those and I started paying attention to Ansel Adams work and then ironically, my parents moved to a small town just outside of Yosemite.

Q: How does your earliest personal work compare with your fine arts photography now? Do you see any similarities or differences there?

A: I don’t think my work today has much to do with anything that I was doing back then. I think the work that I’m doing today is more related, oddly enough, to the commercial work that I did. Even though it doesn’t look like commercial photography, and it’s not, but how I develop my scene for commercial photography and the look that I’ve developed over all those years I’ve just translated into the landscape work that I do and then another project that I worked on for the last 10 years on gun violence. So, you know, all of that is informed by my commercial work.

Q: On a more personal note, what drew you to Montana?

A: So I moved from LA to Seattle and I lived in Seattle for a really long time, 28 years. My wife and I at the time, we decided that we would look for something different. We had been on vacation in Montana, we had gotten married in Montana and so we moved to Montana in 2017 and I just really love this area. Two years ago, I moved to Santa Fe thinking that might be an alternative but it wasn’t and I ended up coming back.

Q: In terms of your work, is there a particular part of Montana that you find yourself drawn to more than others?

A: So the parts of Montana that I like best are very similar to where I started really concentrating on landscape work and that was in the Eastern part of Washington state. Which is very empty (Jeff laughs). What I gravitate towards here aren’t the forests, I like the eastern part of the state. I’m down in Cardwell now, not Bozeman and I like the area because the landscape is really simple, that’s where I find my challenge.

Q: That’s great and I really see that in your work. Going back to your new exhibit, what does the title, “Landscapes of the American West” mean to you?

A: I don’t know if this is correct but going back again to growing up, my father loved old Westerns. And so I grew up watching those and there’s something about the empty landscape of this part of the West, that vastness and emptiness that I like. It just reminds me of old John Ford movies that he shot in New Mexico. Have you been to Paradise Valley? Oh, it’s amazing. I drive through it all the time and I don’t think I’ve stopped — maybe a handful of times — to take pictures there. The grandness of the landscape, the epic quality of that area is really beautiful. And I’ll stop and look at it, appreciate it but it’s not something that I’m drawn to photograph. What I end up shooting doesn’t really represent an area. I don't think people would look at my work, 95 % of it and think, “Oh, that looks like Montana or Washington state!” I’m drawn to things that aren't grand and monumental.

Q: In terms of the simplicity of the landscape, the starkness, what sort of emotions does that invoke in you?

A: You know, what I’m drawn to and what I end up photographing is a reflection of me and what’s inside of me. Sometimes people ask me, why is everything so empty, why are there no people, etc.? And it’s not like that’s how I feel but that’s how I feel comfortable, is in those environments. I love getting in the car, putting the dog and all my gear in the back and we’ll just go. I find myself back on dirt roads, where there's absolutely nothing and no one and that’s where I feel great so that’s how I respond to the landscape.

Q: I’d love to learn more about your life here in Montana? Any favorite adventures?

A: I think the part about Montana that I like, not only photographing, visually but that I like experiencing, physically is this time of year. I love being out when it’s like 10 degrees. I was just on the Jefferson River a couple of days ago and it was so cold. I don't know — there’s just something about surviving, not literally, but just being out in that kind of weather and still being able to perform, take photographs, and I love how it looks here in the winter. When there’s snow on the ground or ice in the river, everything just becomes more simple than it would normally be and the shapes kind of stand out more to me.