Trofimuk: Confessions of a Romantic

By Gusie Fauntleroy

Nicholas Trofimuk’s relationship with a camera began surreptitiously.

As a boy in a small New Jersey town, his Russian-immigrant parents liked to take family snapshots. They had a habit of leaving the camera around, so Trofimuk would sneak the camera outside and take one shot.

When the pictures came back from the drug store, there always was one in there that bewildered the Trofimuks. They’d say, “Where in the world did this come from?” and throw it away.

Trofimuk retrieved his photographs from the trash and still has some of them, he said recently in an interview from his Galisteo home.

“He’s come a long way from snapshots of a New Jersey back yard to expansive New Mexico landscapes.”

A selection of 15 of his most recent limited edition black and white prints are on exhibit today through June 30 at the Santa Fe Lightscource Gallery in La Fonda. The gallery is open from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Monday and closed Tuesday’s and Wednesdays.

Trofimuk calls the exhibit Romancing the Landscape.
“I admit to it, I’m a total romantic when it comes to photography,” he said. “I like to photograph things many times that are commonplace, and get the actual feel of it.

“If it’s rain, you feel the rain; if there are rays of light through a rainstorm, you feel the feeling of the power of nature. I want to make people fall in love with the land.”

His images embody the clarity of the vast New Mexico sky with its constantly changing procession of clouds.

Colla cactus or the line of a fence draws the eye through sweeping grasslands to an infinite horizon.

Trofimuk’s cameras that produce 4-by-5-inch or 8-by-10-inch negatives, his photographs are true to the expansive density of the high desert landscape.

He uses musical themes to name his photographs.

“I love classical music and listen to it constantly when I’m working in the studio,” he said. “Many photographers title their pieces Tree and Storm, or Clouds over Rock. I prefer my titles to lead someplace else. I use musical overtones to me.”

Examples: Symphony, for which he was standing in it, you could imagine in New Mexico.

Variation on a Theme featured an enormous summer thunderhead in the distance on windswept plains, surrounded by a clear sky. Cross Rhythm is a counterpart of reflections and small low clouds.

Trofimuk’s very encounters with his parents’ camera didn’t steer him directly into a professional photography profession.

“It took a photographer, of course, and I thought you were a little offbeat,” he said.

Photography looked like something you could do entirely by yourself, he said, not as part of a troupe or group.

A trip to the Museum of Modern Art revealed what can be done with photography, he said, “and that inspired me to go to the next level and the next.”

Trofimuk moved to New Mexico “on the East Coast six years ago and began his visual love affair with this land. At least one or two weeks he packs up his cameras and hits the road.

“I’ll be working in my studio and I’ll say, ‘This is the day,’ and off I go.”

Sometimes he heads for specific, remembered spots where he feels the conditions will be just right; other times, he just goes. He rarely needs to go farther than 30 miles from home to find what he’s looking for.

When I first came out here, I saw the land as very spectacular,” he said. “Then after a year or two, the spectacular less wore off, and I began to see it in a more subtle light.

“Each year that I see it, changes, and my photos change with it,” he said.

Once a year, though, he takes a couple of weeks off from New Mexico.

“I didn’t do that, after a while this beauty numbs the senses and you don’t see it well. So I go someplace totally different,” he said.

Last year it was France, a year earlier it was the Italian Riviera.

Romancing the Landscape includes a couple of non-New Mexico photographs. While the scene is drastically different, his eye still catches the magic of the landscape.

In Mont-Saint-Michel, a herd of cows grazes obliviously while the famed island castle rises ghost-like through morning mist in the distance.

“A lot of people say landscapes photography is easy. Trofimuk said, “I like to put the viewer there. It takes a great deal of mental awareness.

“Moving the tripod three feet changes the entire perspective,” he said. “For me, when I photograph I’m trying to get the actual feel of it.”

In the darkroom, he creates final large traditional silver gelatin prints.

“My main purpose is to show emotion, rather than change things through the printing process,” he said while his focus is on the range of the unspoiled land.

Trofimuk also is working on a series of hand-tinted black and white photographs he calls New Mexico Laments.

Trofimuk’s Galisteo Love Affair with Mesas, Plunging Arroyos

By John Villani

The love affair between photographer Nicholas Trofimuk and the landscape of the Galisteo Basin continues as hot and heavy as ever.

Except that every now and then, a sizzling new challenge will temporarily vie for his attention, only to fall by the wayside as Trofimuk returns to the clutches of his one and truly true tempest.

On his latest exhibition of 27-inch by 36-inch photographs, there’s evidence of both the artist’s infrequently wandering eye, and of the subject matter that has mystified, entranced, excited and satisfied nearly all of his urgings for the past seven years.

Selected works from two of Trofimuk’s ongoing projects, Forbidden Places and Americana will be shown at the O’Connor Gallery in an exhibition that starts today and continues through Feb. 28.

Forbidden Places is a title that refers both to the reverence Trofimuk has for his subject matter and to the slightly novel approach he has toward capturing his images.

Not exclusively in the Galisteo environs, a place the photographer considers to be something close to heaven on earth, these works have been accumulated mostly on private ranches and other places to which the public is barred from access.

“I’ve found helpful to ranchers know when you’re asking for permission to enter their land that you’re not a smoker and that you don’t intend to come out to their land with a kennel full of pets,” he said.

Once you get past their misgivings and can establish some rapport, these are wonderful people to deal with. And I always leave them with a token of my appreciation.”

The sights that hold Trofimuk’s attention are the broad mesas, plunging arroyos and juniper-speckled landscapes those of us fortunate enough to be living in Northern New Mexico seem to frequently take for granted.

His landscapes vision untouched by sinister human forces, a place where peace and solitude have reigned supreme for thousands of years.

There’s a hypnotic quality of clarity pervading Trofimuk’s work, a sense that the mind and the eye can travel together across unlimited miles and through unhindered skies.

His vision of Northern New Mexico isn’t romantic. Rather, these are simple, yet technically perfect compositions that act as testimonial verifications of the natural power and irreplaceable beauty surrounding us.

Americana is a series of landscape portraits that serves to connect Trofimuk to his previous life as a professional living in the Northeast.

He described these works as having a deeply personal meaning, one he was reluctant to discuss in public.

The Americana photographs take the journeys Trofimuk has made to a variety of locales, from small villages to sprawling metropolises.

He recently returned from a mid-December trip to Chicago, where he spent several evenings with his equipment set-up on the upper floors of parking garages.

From those vantage points ...

Trofimuk’s Romantic Compositions of High Desert

By Kathleen Sandrin

A straggly bond and black cattle crossing the prairie may inspire a few rounds of Home on the Range, but for photographer Nicholas Trofimuk, who listens to classical music while working in the darkroom, the movement of light and dark is symphonic.

In his latest book, Romancing the Landscape, clouds and prairie rather than strings and brass, combine into visual music.

In Musical Notes, the dense, dark cattle dot the open prairie like black keys on a piano.

“There is an abstract quality to the photograph. The cattle performed right in front of me, going by in rhythmical waves,” said Trofimuk from Photogenesis Gallery inside La Fonda Hotel, where he will sign copies of his new book from 4 to 6 p.m. today.

Clouds are the mainstay of Trofimuk’s orchestra, their solo performances supported by the New Mexico’s barren landscape.

Thunderous Ovation, Prelude to a Storm, Counterpoint, Evening Serenade, Crescendo and Three Part Harmony are but a few of Trofimuk’s romantic compositions of the high desert terrain.

Also in the book are photographs of European hedgerows, stone barns, vineyards, castles and villages - landscapes refined by hands, intimate rather than awesome.

“No matter how much I see of the sick and sordid in photography, I know that it is my calling to reveal the beauty and romantic side of the landscape.”

“I like to correlate man’s hand and nature into a romantic setting,” said Trofimuk, who lives in Galisteo. Many of the photographs were taken within 20 miles of his home, on surrounding ranches and roadside stretches that captivated his eye.

“I came out here 10 years ago and stayed at the Galisteo Inn. I bought a house the next week. There is no place like it,” said Trofimuk, who no longer titles his photographs by location, in the hope of protecting the area from overexposure.

“Most of the photographs are taken from ordinary scenes and are not identifiable. The light, topography and clouds create the romantic mood rather than a direct knowledge of the place,” Trofimuk said.

When he first moved to Galisteo after living for years on the East Coast, he viewed landscape as somewhat lonesome.

Now the photographer sees the landscape as awe-inspiring and distant. Out of his initial impressions came the book, The Lonesome Landscape, a series of photographs composed from the same geography as the latest series, but taken with the cool observation of a newcomer.

The landscape has not altered Trofimuk’s perception has. His eye has awakened to the nuances, tempo and rhythm of the light and shadow that compels so many artists to live here.

It is a relationship built over time, each photograph a patient tribute to the place he loves.

Rather than shoot rolls of film hoping to land one photograph, Trofimuk courts the image he prefers. He sets up and waits for the right moment.

“I know where I am going, and with intuition and guidance I hopefully come up with the romantic mood in the photograph,” said Trofimuk. “Sometimes he must be very, very patient.”

“I’ve Been Drawn to Reflections Because They Make You Look Twice.”

By Lisa Bensley

There’s an otherworldliness to the photographs of Nicholas Trofimuk, a sense that these places exist but not in any familiar dimension.

Landscapes are highlighted by a stillness and a richness of detail that generally shades our fleeting glances. Tricks of shadow and invented contrast stop the eye. Imagery pushed into abstraction tweaks have with reality.

All the techniques are there - the details, the contrast, the remarkable composition - but these are just Trofimuk’s tools. What he is after is interpretation, never representation.

“For me, a picture should be something likable, joyous and pretty - yes, pretty. There are enough ugly things in life for us not to add to them.”

Trofimuk said recently, sitting in his studio in Galisteo.

Especially here, I won’t take a photograph unless I can come with the light and atmospheric conditions are just right.”

Trofimuk mounted atop barrels of nuclear waste in Los Alamos to catch the sky just as a storm cloud moved into position.

He watched the sky for two hours before he took the photograph.

The final image transformed an ordinary industrial setting into an almost surreal vista.

“I’m always looking,” he said. “There’s no end to good scenery.”

The imagery that captivates Trofimuk these days is reflections - mirrors, windows, car surfaces, water - subject matter he is compiling for a book.

“I’ve been drawn to reflections,” he said. “And I realized that wherever I’ve gone, I’ve been drawn to reflections because you look twice. They distort the world, but in a mysterious way.”

Through it all was a passion, Trofimuk said, for photographing full-time while he moved to Galisteo from New Jersey eight years ago.

“I knew I was driven purely by intuition. I knew I wanted to get out of New Jersey. I issued myself a challenge. The rest seemed a logical move here.”

In the beginning, Trofimuk said, he photographed only for the love of the art form, but with the insistence of making a living at it.

Then, two years later, he signed up to participate in the first annual Galisteo Studio Tour.

“That’s what got it going,” he said. “I sold over 25 prints in one day. I couldn’t believe people were buying the work.”

Trofimuk Looks for Scenes That Hit Him in Heart

By Craig Smith

For more than a quarter of a century, Nicholas Trofimuk has sought to unlock the mystery of the landscape.

Whether on city streets or in wild country, he looks for patterns of power.

But his search always is concerned with beauty, too.

“I wanted to be an artist when I was a child - I had an aunt who was an artist,” the lanky, affable photographer said in a recent interview at Photogenesis Gallery.

“I respect all aspects of photography. But basically, my thrust has become to take photographs of something, whatever it may be, and make it look - not painterly, but very romantic and very beautiful.”

In following this goal, Trofimuk acknowledges his adherence to Renoir’s famous statement:

“For me, a picture should be something likable, joyous and pretty - yes, pretty. There are enough ugly things in life for us not to add to them.”

Trofimuk will show the fruit of four years of work in The Spice of Life, an exhibit opening today at Photogenesis.

“I like to take things that are common in nature, isolate them and show they are beautiful.”

“For example,” he said, pointing to one of his landscapes, “if you were to go out there today, it’s absolutely just boring. With the set of circumstances and a lot of work in the darkroom, you can make it look very exciting, very beautiful. I use camera and paper rather than paint.”

“That’s why the show is called The Spice of Life. Almost anything interests me with reason.”

In fact, almost everything has been subject to Trofimuk’s creative eye.

He will show series of flowers, cityscapes, Joshua Tree National Monument, the Great Sand Dunes and the California community of Mendocino.

“I have always found fascinating almost anything that appeals to my emotional side. I always allow my mind to be open.”

“We’ve gone to things that are bizarre in photography,” he said. “Everybody seems to be looking for an idea that’s a little different. Some of it’s macabre, some of it’s bizarre, some of it’s dream. They’re cutting and pasting. So it takes a lot of nerve to put things that are traditional out there in photographic work.”

“But when I see something that I like, it hits me here,” he said, striking his chest.

Galisteo Studio Tour

 

Black-and-white photographer Nicholas Trofimuk first put a face on the Galisteo tour when he added one of his luminous landscape photographs to the official poster 14 years ago to promote its second year.

Now, pilgrims head to this charming artist colony southeast of Santa Fe every year just to stop at Trofimuk’s idyllic studio in the old schoolhouse.

So many fans were regularly pilfering posters that tour organizers began selling them at tour stops. They print hundreds each year and usually sell out.

“That’s our theme - this lovely image of Galisteo,” said Joette O’Connor, owner-director of Santa Fe’s Photogenesis Gallery and tour coordinator.

“Through Nicholas is beyond now, he continues (with the tour) because this is where he got his start.”

O’Connor calls the weekend a true down-home community event and social gathering - a cohesive force for Galisteo.

“This is the one thing everyone agrees on. It’s kind of nice.”

Many visitors return year after year.

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