"Sand and Stone"

gelatin silver print

Introduction
Resurgence, a new folio of silver-gelatin photographs by Michelle Magdalena Maddox, offers an intimate participation with the landscape and life of Big Sur, in places otherwise unknown, untraveled. Technical brilliance opens into wild presence. Sand pours through hands like light. A woman holds a dried sunflower like the wheeling cosmos. A body curves like lava. The ocean is white clouds above a gleaming figure against black rock. In these very different yet interconnected photographs, natural forms are as animate as the human body –– fern, redwood, hair, face, granite, skin. The sensory field is alive, creating a pictorial equivalent of biodiversity through astonishing tonal complexities. This work is both devotional and divinatory, opening into a world we have never seen before.
(Meredith Stricker, author of Tenderness Shore, winner of the National Poetry Series Award)

Foreword
When looking at someone else’s work and my own I look for 3 things, truth, honesty and clarity. Truth: To be true to your vision and yourself. Michelle has achieved this in her new body of work. She has handled this wonderfully because without the first building block the other two become less relevant. One must look at one’s work and ask why am I taking this photograph? This is a conversation only between the artist and their vision. Clarity: A honest understanding how one fills the frame is so important, it defines our vision. Its the foundation of an image, its our voice. We all see uniquely different, with command of your voice or language we stand alone and Michelle has done this with great skill. Honesty: When one opens one’s self up to the world by showing their images and how one handles this exchange is so important. Michelle is wonderfully confident but not overly self assured. Humble, proud, her reverence to her work and respect for it was truly refreshing. She has it all truth, clarity and honesty.
(Kim Weston)