PHOTOGRAPHS

An adventurous and idiosyncratic photographer, John Brook followed his own intuitions and ignored the fads or dogmatic proscriptions constraining many of his contemporaries. Even so, he bound himself with at least one rule: “I use whatever optical technique seems best suited to what I happen to be doing, but the character of the image is determined at the moment of exposure and not altered later in the darkroom.” His work with optical techniques began, as Jessica Roscio noted in her introduction to Return to Riverrun, with a “chance optical aberration in a portrait of a father and child [that] led to his experimentation with lenses, which he would often construct himself.”

For slide shows sampling the various modes and themes of John Brook's work, click on the links to the immediate right. To visit websites representing collections holding John Brook photographs, click on the museum names on the far right.