Clothbound
$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
ISBN: 978–1–938086–13–7
Casebound
$75.00 U.S. (short discount)
(Signed and numbered edition of 100)
ISBN: 978–938086–15–1
110 pages
12.0″ x 10.0″
48 duotone photographs, including three foldouts
Published in October 2013
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
Events and Exhibitions
June 9, 2018
Buffalo Peaks Ranch Workshop
Finding the Cosmos in the Bramble: A Photographic Study of Seeds, Stars and Sedges
June 24 – Sept. 16, 2018
Three photos from Firmament will be in New Territory: Landscape Photography Today
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
November 6, 2015 – January 16, 2016
Center for Fine Art Photography, Ft. Collins, CO
Firmament: An Incalculable Distance
January 10–February 22, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, January 10th, Goodwin Fine Art, Denver, CO
Andrew Beckham: Firmament
Saturday, December 14, 2013 at 2pm
Book signing and conversation
Off the Beaten Path Bookstore, Steamboat Springs, CO
Saturday, December 7, 2013 at 2pm
Author talk and book signing
Tattered Cover Bookstore, Historic LoDo location, Denver, CO
Saturday, November 16, 2013 at 2pm
Artist’s talk and book signing, with Andrew Beckham and Chief Curator, Blake Milteer
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO
August 24–December 1, 2013
Andrew Beckham: Firmament
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO
by Andrew Beckham
with an introduction by Blake L. Milteer
Won the 2014 Colorado Book Award in the Pictorial category.
Book nominated for a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award.
The transient nature of our place in the world has long been an abiding artistic concern of Andrew Beckham. Whether he stands firmly on the ground or star-gazes into the heavens, Beckham, through the frame of his camera, tries to answer questions that have accompanied human life over the millennia: How do we know where and when we fit in the scheme of Life? How do we find a meaningful place for ourselves within Nature? Is one place more or less important than another for contemplating the eternal questions of “Who am I?” and “What am I doing here?”
In constructing “visual poems” that include single images as well as visual montages of sequenced photographs, Beckham tries to reconcile these questions by focusing on the synchronicity between the mundane and the infinite. By presenting these images as a new kind of “visual storytelling,” Beckham juxtaposes the varying scales of photographic inquiry, from the private spaces near our homes to the expanding and unknowable universe.
Firmament is a meditation on place unlike any other. In Portfolio I, Beckham discovers a unique stretch of land, one square-mile in Bear Creek Canyon near his home, where a curious sense of visual order is achieved amongst the chaos of impenetrable bramble and thick woods. For the artist, this is ground incarnate. In Portfolio II, Beckham explores a landscape so wide and vast that space can hardly be contained within the frame of his camera. Here, in the 20,000 square miles known as the Sand Hills, Beckham discovers a place where land and sky meet and often merge within a virtual sea of rolling prairie grassland. In Portfolio III, Beckham turns to the “incalculable distance” between the heavens and Earth, between grounded experience and infinite space. Here, Beckham’s artistry is revealed in a visual assemblage of his own photographic work merged with the cosmologies of centuries-old star charts.
In viewing Andrew Beckham’s work, we see depth and beauty, serenity and enlightenment, and we gain a certain reassurance that there is something greater than ourselves when we contemplate the universe with a sense of reverence and even awe. We also come to realize that we have a sacred duty to understand and respect our individual place within the world, so that we may take better care of that which we have come to know, no matter how small or large the scale.
About
About the Author
Andrew Beckham is a photographer from Denver and Chairman of the Visual Arts Department at St. Mary’s Academy in nearby Englewood. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, MacArthur Foundation, Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at St. Louis University, Portland Art Museum in Oregon, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, among others, and his artist’s books are in the special collections of the University of Denver’s Penrose Library and the University of Colorado’s Norlin Library. A Fulbright Fellow in Photography, Beckham has also been an invited artist-in-residence at the Anderson Ranch Art Center, Center for the Study of Place, and Rocky Mountain National Park. His first book, The Lost Christmas Gift, was published to widespread critical acclaim by Princeton Architectural Press in 2012. www.andrewbeckham.com
About the Essayist
Blake L. Milteer is Museum Director and Curator of American Art at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, where he oversees the museum’s American art collection. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including, in 2012, a major installation of the work of James Turrell.
Slide Show
Praise
“A trio of photos by Andrew Beckham that depict views within one square mile of Bear Creek Canyon are luxuriously dense, with pictorial elements filling the frames from edge to edge.”
—Michael Paglia, Westword, read the full exhibit review here
“Andrew Beckham is a lot of things, but I consider him a ‘visual poet,’ using language both written and visual to construct nuanced work that is compelling, fragile, and poignant. He is the Joseph Cornell of the photo world, combining photographic memory with objects imbued with ideas and meaning.”
—Aline Smithson, read the full exhibition review on LENSCRATCH
“His new book, Firmament, released by George F. Thompson Publishing, includes photographs and essays by the photographer, with a forward by Blake Milteer, Museum Director and Chief Curator of the Taylor Art Museum/Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. His beautifully executed black-and-white photographs are an expression of his concerns as an artist and human being and are about trying to make sense of our place in the universe.”
—Aline Smithson, read the full book review here on LENSCRATCH
“Firmament: A Meditation on Place in Three Parts is a 112-page compendium showcasing the black-and-white photography of Andrew Beckham. This coffee table art book offers an impressive series of images that lead to contemplation and imaginative interpretation as the reader browses each ‘picture portrait’ photograph of nature’s forms from the small and complex to the sweeping and expansive. Firmament: A Meditation on Place in Three Parts documents Andrew Beckham as a photographer with an artist’s eye for form. Highly recommended, especially for students of the photographic arts, Firmament: A Meditation on Place in Three Parts would make an especially welcome and impressive community library Memorial Fund acquisition.”
—James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Midwest Book Review
“Three linked portfolios make up this book of black-and-white art photographs. The first is landscape images of wooded thickets from one square mile of Bear Creek Canyon. The second is landscape images of twenty thousand square miles of open prairie in the Sandhills of western Nebraska. The third is digital composites linking very large and very small scales through formal concern with circular arcs; the large images are from historical celestial maps, and the small ones are mostly grass, twigs, flowers, and seeds. Some of the images were made with film, and others with digital cameras. In both cases the artist prints his own work with tight attention to the print process, so that images which might be pedestrian with less careful exposure and printing become detailed in high contrast and connected in the overall series of juxtapositions which forms the book.”
—Eithne O’Leyne, Editor, ProtoView, Ringgold, Inc.
PRAISE FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHER
“Andrew Beckham delivers us to the realm of the marvelous.”
—Barry Lopez
“Andrew Beckham continues a vital reconnaissance, searching for places where the truth seems secure and, like life itself, is resonant with an inexplicable poignancy. He also confronts a kind of paradoxical truth: that great beauty can dwell in the darkness and in the apparent chaos of emerging forms. Recalling the words of Robert Adams, in the redemptive nature of light, Beckham finds grace and the rekindling of an affection for living.”
—Terry Toedtemeier, Curator of Photography, Portland Art Museum, 1985–2008
My Place
I’ve lived in Denver for most of my adult life. I was drawn to the Mountain West intuitively and emotionally after my first childhood visit and settled in the Mile High City with my then-girlfriend (now wife) when we were very young. We did not have “real” jobs and had not yet discovered the professional track of our lives. Our decision to move west from Houston, where we were raised, was influenced by profound experiences in the formative years of young adulthood. For Carol, it was undergraduate studies at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, that jewel of a town in the high desert of northern New Mexico. For me, it was summer trips out to Colorado to hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. Later, as a college student in Portland, Oregon, I knew without a doubt that the intersection of land and home and art and wilderness had to be connected in some fundamental way.
That is not to say it was easy. Carol and I struggled to find meaningful work in those first years, but we kept with it. And what kept us grounded was the place itself: the high prairie of the Great Plains rising up to meet the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the granite peaks of the Front Range always visible on the horizon. The geographical intersection alone was, and continues to be, a magical confluence of horizontal and vertical views that can leave one speechless on any given day.
Our eventual graduate work directed us both to careers that we loved, work that could sustain us. And with that came, perhaps, the most intimate expression of personal place: buying a home. A 1916 classic Denver bungalow, with a basement large enough for a studio and library and a main level just big enough to raise a small family, we fell in love with the house and live in it still.
The result of growing up in 1970s suburban developments might have led us instinctively to an older home; so we followed our desire for a sense of history and story and place as expressed in the idiosyncratic quirks of an old house.
Some of my most vivid and impactful dreams over the years have been about old houses. I’ve woken from them with a sense of rich possibility: a place almost magically well suited to making art, to discovery. And often that sense of discovery was expressed within the dream as a hidden staircase, an undiscovered room, or a passage that revealed a profoundly important part of my own understanding of self. Of course, this revelation was lost upon waking, but the impression stayed, and so old homes have always been, both at the conscious and unconscious level, a profound part of my sense of place.
Carol has a passion for gardening, and our large double-lot has been an ongoing project, a reflection of our values, hopes, and dreams. Our values: to grow and harvest as much of our own produce as possible, without the use of chemicals. Our hopes: to see a weed-filled lot slowly be transformed into a sanctuary for us and for the diversity of wildlife that a city garden can accommodate. Our dreams are still unfolding, as our son, Alden, grows up in a space we have built for and with him.
From our home outward, Denver is a place of profound intersection. We live near the confluence of two rivers, the Platte and Cherry Creek, which intersect one another near the heart of the city. As the cultural vibrancy of Denver has grown, this confluence seems an apt metaphor for the city and the geography it occupies. Here, the arts—visual and performing and literary and culinary—have all grown up together amidst the confluence of water and land, prairie and mountain, earth and sky.
Copyright © 2013. Andrew Beckham. All rights reserved.