Name: John Anderson, who captured the beauty of wild places, dies at 64 | Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber
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John Anderson, who captured the beauty of wild places, dies at 64 | Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber

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Skip to contentSign OutSign InSubscribeNewsletterContact UsSign OutSign In60°FJohn Anderson, acclaimed on Vashon and beyond as a landscape photographer, died on Sept. 4, at his home on Vashon. He was 64 years old.His death was caused by complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to his wife, Carolyn Anderson.Long before and after receiving that diagnosis in 2002, John’s crusade to capture the majesty of untamed places took him to wind-swept coastlines, high deserts, jagged mountaintops and primal forests.First using a large-format, 4×5 film camera, and later, a Hasselblad digital camera, he created photographs that were hailed for their painterly precision in presenting the epic scale and grandeur of places undisturbed by human life.Though best known for his black-and-white photographs, Anderson also created color photographs after he began to work with a digital camera.In Seattle, he was represented by the Linda Hodges Gallery, where his work received numerous solo exhibitions. His photographs were acquired by the Museum of Northwest Art, the Ansel Adams Gallery, public institutions and private collectors.John also regularly showed his work at Vashon Center for the Arts and other island venues.His longtime art dealer, Linda Hodges, described the vision, craft, patience and physical stamina that was the hallmark of John’s artistic life.“He went to herculean efforts to get the right perspective on many of his nature photographs,” she said.Mythologist and author Michael Meade, with whom John had a decades-long friendship on Vashon, described John’s photographic treks into the wilderness as a spiritual quest.“He was a person who found his calling and he lived it as a destiny,” Meade said. “…There is a saying — ‘the heart is a measureless territory’ — and John had a measureless heart. It was his heart that was connected to the landscapes. It’s not that he was seeing it — it was matching something in his heart.”Born in 1958 into a military family in the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco, California, John’s early life took him to Denver, Heidelberg and Landstuhl, Germany, and Joint Base Lewis-McChord, in Washington. The family finally settled in Steilacoom.In a 2012 video interview conducted by islander Rick Skillman, John said his ambition to become an artist was not instilled by his family.“They’d look at my report cards, and say, ‘You got an A in art, but that doesn’t count’ — they’d actually say that,” he said, with a laugh. “But what I got from my family was a love of the wilderness and a love of adventures. That was an incredible gift.”His appreciation for the drama and majesty of nature grew, he said, from his family’s hikes and backpacking in the Utah desert and mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest — places he later returned to throughout his life, with camera and tripod in hand.At Charles Wright Academy, where his mother taught German, John’s passion and talent for photography emerged. While still in high school, he exhibited his works in the Tacoma Art Museum.Recalling that time of his life in a 2008 Beachcomber interview, Anderson said that after his first high school class in photography, he would arrive an hour early to school every day, for two years, to develop prints.He counted his high school teacher, photographer Arthur Bacon, as a lifelong friend and inspiration.While still in his teens, he followed a connection to meet and study with the famed photographer Ansel Adams, in his house in Carmel Highlands, California — a gentle tutelage that John continued to regard as a pivotal experience for the rest of his life.“He was very friendly, and he would critique your work in such a way — telling stories about himself and so forth — that only later, you’d be driving home and realize, ‘Oh, my prints are too dark,’” John said.John’s artistic talents were further honed at Oakland’s California College of the Arts and at Bennington College, in Vermont.A dedicated scholar, deeply interested in the life of the mind, he also pursued graduate studies in mythology and language at Pacifica University, publishing works on these subjects in the University of Alabama Press.For a time in the 1980s and early 90s, Anderson also pursued a career as a filmmaker — writing, producing and directing several art house films, including a feature film, “Avalon,” that was distributed by Janus Films and shown at the Sundance Film Festival.During John’s time as a filmmaker, he courted another mentor — traveling to Germany to sit outside the office of filmmaker Werner Herzog, until the famed filmmaker agreed to meet him.The pilgrimage paid off: the pair formed a friendship and Herzog attended the premiere of another of John’s films at the Cannes Film Festival.However, making what he later called “pretentious art films” proved to be a financially frustrating detour in John’s artistic life, and he soon returned to the rigorous pursuit of landscape photography — an art form that, unlike his filmmaking, was immediately accessible to almost any viewer.In 2010, his work became the subject of an art book, “Landscape and Desire: Wilderness Photographs by John Anderson,” containing 65 printed color and black and white plates of his photography. A soaring introduction to the book was written by his longtime friend, Michael Meade.In an equally moving artist’s preface, John connected his photographs with the longings of the human race.“As animals, we need to experience a world that is greater than ourselves in order for our psyches to expand and develop,” he wrote. “Our senses evolved in such a world of primordial beauty and power, and without it, they can deaden and atrophy. My photographs are an attempt to point to such a world. An attempt to act as signposts pointing in the right direction.”The highest compliment he ever received as an artist, he said in the 2012 video interview, came from people who told him they felt as if they could “just walk right into” one of his photographs.John said that upon hearing that, he always knew he’d done something right.In 2014, John married his wife, Carolyn, after proposing to her at one of their favorite haunts, Seattle’s Frye Art Museum. Their marriage ceremony on Vashon was presided over by Meade and another close island friend, singer and songwriter Gregg Curry.Even as the progression of Parkinson’s continued to take its toll on John’s health and mobility, the couple traveled extensively — facilitating John’s continued wanderlust and the practice of his art form for as long as possible.Curry, who accompanied John and Carolyn on one memorable trip to Mt. Rainier, spoke of the fierce urgency with which John approached his work during this time in his life.“He walked right on the edge of life and death in the way that he did his art,” Curry said.John’s care, in the last months of his life, Carolyn said, was provided by skilled and compassionate registered nurses at Melody Comfort Adult Family Home in Tacoma — a place that provided him with dignity and comfort until she brought him home in his final week of life.John is survived by Carolyn, stepchildren Matt, Catherine and Peter Amick, his brother Richard Anderson, sister-in-law Dawn Anderson, nephews Basil, Charles and James Anderson, niece Janet Hall, cousins Peter and Edward Chatelain, and a wide and adoring circle of friends.A celebration of his life and retrospective exhibition will be held in March at Snapdragon Bakery &amp; Café, on Vashon. Donations may be made in John’s memory to the Vashon Care Network.Sign UpNewsPlease ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility

Skip to contentSign OutSign InSubscribeNewsletterContact UsSign OutSign In60°FJohn Anderson, acclaimed on Vashon and beyond as a landscape photographer, died on Sept. 4, at his home on Vashon. He was 64 years old.His death was caused by complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to his wife, Carolyn Anderson.Long before and after receiving that diagnosis in 2002, John’s crusade to capture the majesty of untamed places took him to wind-swept coastlines, high deserts, jagged mountaintops and primal forests.First using a large-format, 4×5 film camera, and later, a Hasselblad digital...

John Anderson, who captured the beauty of wild places, dies at 64 | Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber

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