NEW MEXICO / SOUTHWEST — Landscape Dreams - A New Mexico Portrait - Craig Varjabedian

  Craig Varjabedian’s photographs of the American West would be the perfect illustrations to a Cormac McCarthy book. They have a surreal beauty and poetic emptiness that border on the fictional. It’s as if this isn’t the real West, but the West of tall tales and American dreams. — Claire O’Neille, NPR: The Picture Show [Craig Varjabedian] relies almost exclusively on a large-format Ebony field view camera, wet darkroom chemicals, and an array of handcrafted Carl Zeiss Protar lenses . . . that have bubbles visibly trapped inside the glass. Besides capturing an extreme degree of detail on his 5"x7" negatives, Varjabedian's equipment--particularly his seemingly imperfect lenses--enable him to translate onto silver-gelatin photographic paper the particular quality of the light in New Mexico. — Photo District News 2013 Best Art Book Award given to Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait — New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait presents a selection of Craig V