John Simmons - Biography

Biography

His interest in photography began with summer employment at Eastman Kodak where they kindly lent him a camera, all the black and white film he could use, and the use of a darkroom where he learned to develop and print his photographs. During a 40-year career of chemical and aerospace engineering his photography was limited to photos of family and friends with an occasional landscape. After retirement in 1996, he returned to serious photography, joined a local camera club and purchased his first digital camera in 2007.  His photographs have been collected by individuals and exhibited in galleries and art venues in New Mexico and elsewhere.

For three years preceding the Covid endemic he was a member of the Albuquerque Photographer’s Gallery, selling his photographs to local collectors and the many tourists.  His photographs have been exhibited in the New York Center 4 Photographic Art (juried show 2017, 3^rd place prize), the Rhode Island Center For Photographic Art (invited show 2024) and at The New Mexico Art League (juried show 2024). Since their inception, he has exhibited photographs every year in two juried shows: Annual New Mexico Photographic Art Show (begun 2009) and Shades of Grey (begun 2017). In 2020 he authored an article about Photographing Chijuilla Mesa in New Mexico which appeared in the July 2021 issue of the Journal of the Photographic Society of America. His current interest is finishing a book of photographs rendering the beauty and mystery of the Rio Grande and its Bosque in the vicinity of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Artist Statement

Born a mid-westerner in a small city in eastern Iowa, I became a student of the natural world.  My two best friends lived at the semi-rural edge of that city, and we spent a vast number of hours together hunting small game, fishing, ice-skating on the local streams, and assisting in the farm work of one of those friends. I became at various times an avid bird watcher, collector of insects for mounting and display, collector of rocks and fossils, hunter, fly fisherman, amateur gardener, and botanist. All of this was encouraged and abetted by my mother who had majored in zoology in college and aspired to become a doctor.

There is much I see in the Southwest. At times of sunrise and sunset the riverine cottonwood tree forests (locally called the Bosque) are filled with a glowing luminosity. The branching patterns of a grove of cottonwoods give a Baroque or Gothic feeling. Often, branches of two neighboring cottonwood trees seem to reach out towards one another for a loving embrace. On a cold morning, rime outlines the edges of leaves with bright white needles. On the tops of mountains, wind-driven rime and snow weld the leaves of pines into fearsome clumps giving the trees the character of heroes. The wind-driven waves of sand dunes provide an infinite variety of abstract paintings of light and shadow. Shapes of eroded sandstone resemble fearsome creatures.  The variety I see and photograph is endless, wondrous, mysterious and captivating.