Marty Hulsebos
Fairfield, IA
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
My name is Marty Hulsebos, which is a Dutch name—my parent's are first generation immigrants from Holland.
I have photographed landscapes since the mid-1980's, including Iowa for the past 3 years. I am a regular contributor to Our Iowa Magazine, including their 2010 calendar. I enjoy the relaxed pace and friendliness of small-town Iowa living, and capturing the richness of the Iowa prairie landscape.
My photos have appeared in numerous publications—magazines, advertisements, promotional literature, and websites. They have been published in a coffee table photo book of the Blue Ridge Parkway and in a National Geographic maps publication. I have sold my photos through galleries in the Blue Ridge Mountains and Arizona, as well as through my websites. And several thousand enlargements hang in homes and offices around the country.
Having lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains and Arizona for a number of years in the past, I’ve generated an extensive portfolio covering these areas. I have also photographed in Holland, India, the Canadian Rockies and the Colorado Rockies. Even though my time in Iowa has covered just a few years, I have a growing collection of Iowa farms, prairies, lakes, and forests.
My involvement with photography began as a creative outlet and grew into a passion. I experimented extensively to learn the fine-art of getting an image to come out the way I experienced it as I saw it. I collected numerous books on photography, and read them avidly. Working in a darkroom developing and printing black and white photos taught me a great deal about how to control tones in an image.
Ansel Adams, whose work I admire, provided me with much inspiration and knowledge through his books. Film was my starting point, both black & white and color. I moved up to 6x7 cm medium format film in the mid-90's. Several years ago, I made a complete shift to digital, and now shoot with a high-megapixel digital single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera.
I print my own photos using archival inks and acid-free heavyweight fine-art paper with a large format printer. In the art world, this is called "giclee". My printer uses pigmented inks, which contain particles of very pure color that are highly resistant to fading, maintaining the lively, vibrant and natural beauty of the photographs year after year. These are museum quality prints, which will go 75 to 100 years before noticeable fading. My printer uses 10 different ink colors. These pure pigments give a wide and subtle range of colors, like the colors in nature.
It’s important to me to create a print that conveys my experience of being there in person. In high-contrast scenes, which are common in landscape photography, that’s a challenge. The taming of high contrast has, more than anything else, defined my photographic style.