May 2014
Artist’s Statement
This suite of Cyanotype prints started with a phone call from my friend Diana, inviting me to come along on one of the excursion trips she runs from Cedar Key to Suwannee, Florida. Diana is a 6th generation Cedar Key native, and over the years has let me accompany her often as she works the waters off Cedar Key tending her clamming lease. Watching her navigate her boat swiftly and surely among the shallows off our coast and pull heavy bags full of clams off the bottom heaving them into her boat, always fills me with admiration and awe. After she got her commercial pilot’s license a few years ago, she also earned a Coast Guard Master’s license and, in addition to flying her airplanes, now captains her Down Home Adventure Trips and Tours out of Cedar Key.
Coming back from the trip with Diana last month, I decided that some of the photos I had made would work well as Cyanotype prints along with some of the other North Florida landscapes I had, documenting this often stark and at the same time lush landscape that I continuously find so fascinating.
Biography
I am a Southern photographer living on a small key off Florida’s northern Gulf Coast. Using film and digital photography I document the goings-on around me, delighting in recording and highlighting the work and courageous lives of the fishermen, waterwomen, and clam farmers who make their living through hard work on the Gulf of Mexico.
I started photographing as a teenager with my Agfa Box camera. And of course worked on the high school annual and newspaper as a photographer. However, it was not until long after I retired from the Marine Corps that I went to Florida State University to spend a couple of years immersing myself in photography and printmaking, receiving an MFA in Studio Art in the process. Subsequently I occasionally taught art and photography at FSU, both in Tallahassee and Florence, Italy, and for a while managed the darkroom at the university.
http://christianharkness.tripod.com/
