© Richard Boutwell, Still Small Voice Installation View, Dickinson College, Goodyear Gallery, 2025
October 1, 2025
Amie Potsic interviewed Philadelphia-based photographer and printmaker Richard Boutwell - whose work blends landscape photography with historical materials and technology to explore themes like spirituality, family history, and environmental issues in the desert Southwest.
“I see myself as mixture of documentarian, photographer, digital artist, and printmaker—intertwining my personal connection to the history of the American West and focusing on issues of land-use, recreation, conservation, and the confluence of the natural and human-impacted landscape.
Working with a camera as a way of exploring and documenting the world has always been a personally exciting experience. My creative process starts with a reaction to an idea or simply something seen in the world (which often involves seemingly chaotic aspects within the landscape). Then, through the camera, it transforms into an emotional interaction between myself and the subject. That interaction continues and evolves as I scan the film and work with the image on the computer. Once digitized, I work with image’s tonalities on a purely abstract level, exploring all the film has captured to create or intensify the movement and tension within the image. The final result, while still based on what was actually in front of the lens, becomes part document and part internal creation.
I have always felt that one of the most rewarding aspects of photography and printmaking is the handmade aspect of creating something with light, drawing from physical qualities of the interaction of light and metal salts that give the print an inherent potential to be a beautiful object—regardless of the subject that is actually photographed. I find the purely digital realization of the image ultimately unsatisfying, and output the digital file either as large-scale, immersive pure carbon inkjet prints, or as negatives to use with historic hand-coated photographic processes—effectively bridging the 19th and 21st centuries.”
- Richard Boutwell, Artist Statement
© Richard Boutwell. Image courtesy of the artist.
Richard Boutwell, originally from Joshua Tree, California, is a photographer and printmaker based near Philadelphia. His work explores themes of archaeology, family history, spirituality, and the impact of technology and social media on our relationship with the natural world—especially in the desert Southwest, focusing on water rights and recreational use.
In recent work, he combines landscape photography with 3D scans, found objects, historical materials, and scientific data. Boutwell began photographing in 2000 while studying music but soon shifted focus after discovering fine-art photography. Rather than pursue a formal degree, he apprenticed with photographers Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee from 2002–2008 and later ran the digital studio for their publishing company, Lodima Press, until 2015.
He now balances his art practice with teaching photography and fine-art printing at bwmastery.com. He also developed software tools used worldwide for digital black-and-white and historical-process printing.
His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in public and private collections. He has also lectured on landscape photography history at colleges in the mid-Atlantic.
© Richard Boutwell, March 17, 2018 and February 9, 2020, Install, 2025.
© Richard Boutwell, Still Small Voice.
© Richard Boutwell, Veil #1 - Marble Canyon, 2025.
Richard Boutwell: Still Small Voice
Location: Goodyear Gallery at Dickinson College, 28 N College St., Carlisle, PA 17013
Exhibition Dates: September 10 - October 4, 2025
“In early 2020, just a week after my father’s death and two years after the birth of my son, I began making regular trips to Death Valley and important places of my childhood in the Mojave Desert to reconnect with my initial creative impulses and to see what more I could discover photographing in those familiar places. The time photographing and camping alone in the backcountry gave me space to grieve, reflect on our relationship as fathers and sons, and create work that became a meditation on birth, death, creation myths, and the threshold between this world and the unknowable.
On that first trip in 2020 I didn’t have a clear goal or idea, but I gravitated toward an elongated frame using wide-angle lenses, and the abstracted forms of the canyon walls created a sense of not knowing where you are in space. The rock walls are imposing and seemingly chaotic, but by getting lost in the pictures you begin to see what I think of as the edge between chaos and cosmos—a passage that leads to some light at the center. I see that light as both in us and what we are on a lifelong journey to reach. That chaos is perfect, and the goal is to integrate yourself with that perfection.
I made a second short trip to Death Valley in January 2022 and 2025 to continue working on the nascent project, and found myself hiking back through the canyons where I was photographing well after dark. Without the aid of artificial light and only the moonlight to guide me, my pace slowed, and it created a sense of hyper-awareness and mental space that led me to think about photographing at night as a way to embrace and confront the unknown.”
Don't miss this magical meditation on the desert environment alongside love and loss. Boutwell presents new work that addresses the interior and exterior landscapes that shape our lives.
Boutwell will host an open studio for this work in December 2025.
© Richard Boutwell, Still Small Voice - Portals, Install, 2025.
To learn more about Richard Boutwell, visit: https://www.richardboutwell.com/
To learn more about Still Small Voice, visit: https://www.dickinson.edu/events/event/29785/
Banner Image: © Richard Boutwell, Still Small Voice.
