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BIO
I spent my childhood looking at the photographs in National Geographic, and both my love of photography and my love of travel came out of those pages. It took twenty years in IT and my father's sudden death before I finally stopped postponing the work I actually wanted to do. Photography is my real work now, and everything else I do supports it. I've chased stories through my lens alongside my wife and travel partner, Kris, across 37 countries and six continents, to a graffiti tunnel in London, a courtyard in Dresden where the drainpipes play music when it rains, and a house in the Emirates that the desert has been swallowing for decades. I live and work in Minneapolis, where a wet night on the Stone Arch Bridge is as good a subject as anywhere in the world.
What I'm after is rarely the postcard view. I'm drawn to the things most people walk past, the painted wall, the drainpipe, the tunnel everyone is hurrying through, and to color loud enough to make somebody stop. I show my work in a fine art booth at art fairs and in gallery exhibitions, I've received multiple Best in Show honors, most recently for “Sands of Time,” and my work is on long-term display at the Elliot Park Hotel in Minneapolis. When I'm not traveling I serve as Business of Art Director at the Maple Grove Art Center, connecting local artists with businesses willing to give their work a wall. My hope for any image I make is that it takes you somewhere, and better still, that it inspires you to get out there and travel.
Little About Mark
What’s something people don’t know about you, or would be surprised to learn about you?
For twenty years I worked in IT, and my day job is still technical. I'm a 3D capture artist, which means I spend my weekdays doing photogrammetry and building virtual production environments for a large retailer. The prints on this wall are my real work, and everything else I do just supports that.
What song/album/artist is currently on repeat in your studio?
Anything by Daft Punk, most likely Alive 2007, the deluxe edition. I love the energy, and it carries me through an edit that would otherwise take all night.
When is your favorite time to create?
Golden hour and blue hour. It's an awkward answer, because I am a horrible morning person and I know perfectly well I should be out there more often than I am if I want to beat the crowds.
What is your guilty pleasure tv show or movie?
It used to be science fiction or superheroes, but more and more I spend my time on documentaries and cooking shows. Right now it's Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars and British Baking Show.
What is an unusual skill you have outside of art?
My wife Kris and I are geocachers, which is a strange skill to admit to, but it has put us in more odd and worthwhile places than any guidebook ever has.
If you weren’t an artist, what would you love to be doing?
Teaching. I've been circling college-level teaching for a while now. I like the selling at an art fair, but what I like just as much is the storytelling, and photography is the visual part of telling a story.
What’s your biggest artistic obsession right now?
I love ceilings and domes, and that is a big part of my Look Up! series, but when we were in New York recently I was taken with all the fire escape stairways running up the sides of the buildings. Having said that, what I am really loving right now is my newNikon Zf and the 40mm I carry with me whenever I can. It has a dedicated black and white switch, and I am loving shooting black and white again.
What’s the most unexpected thing you’ve used in an artwork?
A turntable I designed and 3D-printed myself, built for one purpose, which is holding a camera pointed straight up at a ceiling without me lying on the floor of a cathedral.
What was your first creative memory, or a specific artistic moment that made you realize,“I really want to do this?”
My mom kept a file folder of every piece of art I made as a kid, and most of it was cars, because I loved drawing cars and trucks. In high school I was heavily involved in the graphic design program, but the photography moment came in a black and white class, when I drove up to the truck stop in Rogers late at night and photographed the semi rigs with their exhaust trailing off in a very cold January breeze. I still have that negative, and I'm having it scanned at high resolution so it can go into my portfolio.
Where were you born and where did you grow up?
I was born in Detroit, and we moved around the upper Midwest until I was nine, when we settled in Maple Grove. I went to Osseo High School and grew up here.
Who are your artistic influences or mentors?
Ansel Adams, Jim Brandenburg, and more National Geographic photographers than I could name, Steve McCurry among them. I spent my childhood looking at the photographs in National Geographic, and I'm certain that both my love of photography and my love of travel came out of those pages. The two who helped me most in person were my instructors at Minneapolis College, Jack Mader and Craig McNitt.
If your art had a personality, how would you describe it?
Curious and a little stubborn. It walks into a room everyone else is walking through, stops in the middle, lies down on the floor to shoot straight up, and holds up traffic.
How would you describe your style to someone unfamiliar with your work?
Travel photography that skips the postcard. I'm after the detail, the color, and the angle that the people around me walked past without seeing, and I would rather bring home one strange photograph of a famous place than the picture everybody already has.
What color do you use most, and why?
For years the answer would have been whichever color was loudest in the frame. Lately it's no color at all. I've come back to black and white, which is where I started in a high school darkroom, and I'm loving it.