Artist Detail

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Joe Decker

Visual Artist

About the artist: Joe Decker remembers the day he first "saw the light" and began his pursuit of fine art photography--it was New Years Day, 1991--he woke at dawn to see the mile-high face of El Capitan glowing gold through a faint mist, and he was profoundly affected not only by the beauty of the scene but also by its spiritual quality. Joe's desire to capture and communicate such experiences inspired his study into photography.

Born in 1961 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Joe had received a B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, which in turn led to a successful and diverse career in the technology industry. His work in visual perception during that time provided a foundation for his understanding of the color and how people "see photographs."

Self-taught early in his photographic career, Joe began studying with other photographic masters in the late 1990s, including Galen Rowell, Richard Knepp, and Bill Atkinson. In 1999, Joe published his award-winning body of work October, entirely taken from images created during a particular month in the Eastern Sierra.

Joe's work is a descendent of the West Coast school of landscape photography, showing influences by such artists as Galen Rowell. Color, often intensely (but still accurately) saturated, is often a forward element of his work, while composition is often used to signify deeper, more personal levels of the captured experience.

To create his fine art prints, Joe uses a combination of classical and digital technologies, capturing images on film, bringing them into the digital domain for color and tonal control, then uses a digital enlarger to create the final image using archival photographic paper and chemistry. This technique, while technically demanding, allows Joe to produce prints which have the detail and integrity of color of the original image without losing the longevity of traditional archival photographic prints.