I stopped into Marty Knapp’s gallery on the main street of Point Reyes Station recently to see his exhibition of new photographs, created in the past year. Marty’s iconic black and white landscapes of West Marin have been favorites among visitors and collectors for nearly 30 years. But this new work progresses in a unique direction: the images capture infrared light, creating glowing, dream-like scenes.
For Marty, as for most photographers, capturing light is an essential part of his art; he has characterized light and its reflection as “an inspiration for our human spirit.” However, for the photographs now on display, Marty used a digital camera modified to filter out most visible light; instead, he recorded infrared light, the part of the spectrum just beyond what we can see with our naked eyes. Visually, the result is what Marty describes as “radiating light,” in which blue skies appear very dark while the green leaves show up as very light, creating a vivid contrast.
All but one of the eight photographs in the exhibition were taken this past spring, as new leaves emerged on grand oak trees, allowing us to see the structure of the trees’ branches and leaves. “Oak Circle, Mt. Burdell, Novato” shows four oaks that appear to be dancing gracefully on the crest of a hill. The image effectively contrasts the dark trunks with the crown of young, spring leaves that have been captured as pure, white light. “Stout Oak, Mt. Burdell” also plays with these elements, drawing our attention to the strong vertical structure of the trunk of one magnificent oak tree against a background of lacy, white leaves. There is a surprising, otherworldly quality to these infrared photographs, which Marty describes as “almost what I imagine heaven could be like.”
Since childhood, Marty has been fascinated with the sparkling light of a chrome bike, stars glimpsed through binoculars or light reflecting off water. As a photographer, he has had an enduring fascination with cross-light and back-light that make a two-dimensional image look more three dimensional—an interest that has informed his interpretation of West Marin since he started photographing the local landscape in 1986. His 2007 book, “Point Reyes: 20 Years” and his ongoing, online blog feature essays telling the stories behind his quest for his most memorable shots, which provide his followers with a satisfying level of intimacy with both his subject and his process.
When I visited Marty’s tiny gallery on my first visit to Point Reyes in 2012, I was immediately captivated by the depth of his black and white images of this remarkable landscape, which reminded me so much of the work of the great nature photographer Ansel Adams. Since I moved to this community in 2013, I have often stopped into the gallery to chat with Marty and his wife Jean about favorite views or new work. It was during such a visit early last summer when I first saw the infrared images on his computer screen. Having followed his recent experiments depicting glass objects in the studio, I was fascinated to see the same interest in light and form appear in the oak groves of nearby Novato and Petaluma.
It is fairly unusual for Marty to include animals in his landscape scenes, but he reported that the most popular image in the new show is “Dinner Time, Point Reyes Mesa,” which focuses on a pair of horses and several sheep gathered around a wooden feeding trough at the end of the day. Those animals are known to many of us in this community who pass by their pasture on Mesa Road. This familiarity with Marty’s subjects, combined with his eye for detail and composition, is what I find most compelling about his work.
Susan Page Tillett lives in Inverness. She is the executive director of the Mesa Refuge, a writers’ retreat in Point Reyes. She moved to West Marin in 2013 after 30 years of supporting the work of writers and artists in Chicago.
Marty Knapp’s exhibit, “New Photographs 2015,” is on display at his gallery in Point Reyes Station, at 11245 Highway 1. The exhibit began Nov. 27 and runs through Jan. 3.