Harmonium Mountain II

In his original "Mountain" series, Clifford Ross created a 'you are there' experience of Colorado's Mount Sopris, using the R1 camera system which he invented using military aerial film and a unique digital post-production process. The resulting prints are among the highest resolution landscape images in the world. Ross's goal with this series was to push the 'reality quotient' in photography, creating images that encourage the scrutiny of the tiniest details in the vast landscape.

"Mountain Redux", Ross's next step in his exploration of the mountain, is a re-imagining of his experience of Mount Sopris in abstract terms. Inspired by the poetic truth he saw in paper negatives of the Taj Mahal made by British photographer John Murray in the 19th century, Ross began his recent body of work by draining the color from two of his mountain images and printing them on hand made Japanese paper. He then fractured the images into smaller elements and recombined them in a dazzling array of imagined structures with a rich and varied palette of colors.

"Mountain Redux is an attempt to depict my subjective reaction to the landscape of Mount Sopris — an attempt to reach a deeper truth," said Ross.

The exhibit begins with two of the original large-scale, highly realistic chromogenic "Mountain" photographs and then progresses through a series of increasingly deconstructed and re-imagined scenes which culminate in works of almost complete abstraction — dreamlike images built from ultra-refined elements of the earlier realistic images. —chelseaartgalleries.com