Photo Finish

Southwest Art - August 1994
Photography of Nicholas Trofimuk

By Jacqueline M. Pontello

A barbed-wire fence points to an infinite horizon, fence post after fence post playing lyrical counterpoint to the sheaf of clouds stacked overhead. In another of Nicholas Trofimuk's photographs, a thunderhead marches across the plain, its cover of darkness pierced by a single shaft of unearthly light. Skillfully balancing and interlacing elements of land and sky, Trofimuk invests his images with all the expansiveness and lucidity of New Mexico's high desert.

He often photographs in the Galisteo Basin, where this one-time oral surgeon from New Jersey has lived for nearly a decade. Trained as a studio painter, Trofimuk brings a remarkable eye for nuance in tone, shape and content to bear upon the juniper-studded grasslands, broad mesas and plunging arroyos. His admittedly “romanticized view of the land as untouched by sinister human forces” is expressed in technically perfect, deceptively simple compositions.

Trofimuk has the gift of investing common sights with a touch of uncommon magic, and he repeats the performance again and again in his book New Mexico, The Lonesome Landscape [1989 PHOTOGENESIS, SANTA FE, NM]. As art critic John Villani wrote of Trofimuk's “Forbidden Places” series, “There's a hypnotic clarity pervading Trofimuk's work, a sense that the mind and the eye can travel together across unlimited miles and through unhindered skies.”

Trofimuk embarks on this journey again in his book Seen Through the Heart due out in 1995.

“Landscape photography takes a great deal of mental awareness. Moving the tripod 3 feet changes the entire perspective.”
- Nicholas Trofimuk

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