A R T I S T

My Photography

I have long wondered what it would have been like to have lived in Europe's Age of Discovery or centuries and millennia earlier when people sailed from Scandinavia, or the Middle East or Asia, or walked across the Bering Strait. What were the first sightings of these early travelers as they came upon a new continent, another people? Trained as a social scientist, I understand how whether we come from the East or West, that wherever we might travel, we bring with us expectations and perceptions from our home cultures. And yet, for us as it must have been for travelers of the past, a "first contact" registers a deeply moving experience of the sublime. My wonderment with the earlier ages of exploration and the inspirational records of other people's first sightings of new lands has guided my journeys and photographs. As a photographer I try to compose images that may offer a sense of newly found worlds.

The primary feature of my photographs is that they express my response to what cannot be possessed by our usual symbolic interpretations. Whether it be my images of monastic and village life from the deserts of the Tibetan Plateau, my ice and waterscapes from the Arctic and Antarctica, my pictures of stone ruins from Easter Island, or what I call my "bush" photographs from southern Canada, my objective is the same. It is to find within the forms of people and of nature what cannot be claimed by our habitual ways of "seeing". This objective helps me to preserve the essence of an "unpossessed" presence in the subjects of my images. The further value of this objective, for me, is that it enables me to spare and to conserve what is before us by recognizing that people and things can exist "in" themselves and "for" themselves, independently from any identity or function that we may ascribe to them. It is my commitment to this objective, which through its evolution has led me to my concentrating on polar sites. Sometimes, I print with alternate processes (giclée, for example) and historical processes (platinum, palladium, for example) in order to allow a different surface tactility and "aura" to carry the image which has attracted me. Overall, I attempt to offer photographs that will allow viewers to recognize within themselves a heightened sense of the special value of any one "other" or any one "place".

Brief Biography

Ron Silvers is a fine art photographer of remote landscapes and cultural spaces. His documentary and landscape photographs have been presented in solo exhibitions in Ontario and Quebec. His photographs are held in government, university, and private collections. In 1988 he authored the book length photographic essay A Pause on the Path, a visual study that issued from three journeys through the Western Tibetan Plateau. In addition, his commentaries about photography and his photographs have appeared in Canadian journals.

In recognition of his work he was an invited artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has delivered invited addresses on the meanings and perceptive qualities of photographs at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Canadian Museum Association.

Ron has taught courses on photography and film in graduate studies programs at the University of Toronto and holds his Ph.D. from Princeton University. For his photographic projects, Ron has traveled to Ladakh [Western Tibet], Eastern Tibetan regions of China, Easter Island, Antarctica, the Yukon, Nunavut, northern Ontario, and Banff.

He is also Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto.