Wave Music: Photographs by Clifford Ross - Tapa dura

Wave Music by photographer Clifford Ross, opens with explosive images of stormy seas and skies–photographs taken on the edge of hurricanes. This series presents gorgeous, formalist slices of nature at her most tempestuous and romantic. As Wave Music progresses, however, the focus tightens with increasing obsession on the processes and materials of the photographic medium. The “Hurricane” series is followed by “Horizons,” classically composed images of sky and quiet surf, and finally, by images of pure photographic grain. The “Grain” pictures are pure abstractions–tonal fields of grey. Each “Grain” image echoes the tones seen in the previous two series and addresses the very stuff of black-and-white photography itself. In Wave Music, Clifford Ross provides an incredible, heuristic journey, from the ecstatic formalism of ocean waves to the abstract sublime of pure light. Underlying each of the series and providing a unifying thread, are shifting elements of gesture, composition, and tone. Each of the images is exquisitely reproduced in tritone.

A Blind Spot Book published by Aperture

Clifford Ross was born in 1952. He began his career as a painter, graduating from Yale University with a BA in Art and Art History in 1974. His work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the International Center of Photography, among other institutions. His images are in numerous collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Ross is represented by the Sonnabend Gallery, New York.