Like many art forms, photography can be very subjective. Should the photographer edit a photo a lot, a little, or not at all? Is the goal to show a picture exactly as it looked, or create something more dynamic? What kind of message is the photographer trying to tell? Tim Lamey is an Upper Midwest based landscape photographer and one of his significant projects was highlighting oil development in Western North Dakota’s Bakken region.
Lamey represents Tim Lamey Studios. He describes his style of landscape photography as fine art, and that there are very few images of people in it.
“The last couple years I’ve been focusing on a series of work out in the Bakken,” Lamey says. “There are other photographers working in the Bakken that are looking at the cultural and historical impact of oil development out there. I’m actually physically looking at the development impacts on the landscape itself, by the physical rigs, the tanks, the roads.”
While Lamey has a studio gallery in downtown Fargo and does this full time, it’s not his first professional career.
“I have a background, a Ph.D. in zoology and so I have always had an interest in environmental issues.”
So which is he? Is he an artist taking an environmental stance, or an environmentalist channeling his activism through art?
“I’ve always had this environmental bent but in many respects the art came first,” he says.
Lamey shows off some recent work done in the Bakken oil boom region at his studio. “A mix of images that look essentially like snapshots of the unaltered landscape juxtaposed with shots that definitely include oil development,” Lamey says.
People may think the photos of an undeveloped landscape represent a lack of change while the photos with oil development represent change. But Lamey has a different view.
“It’s important to realize that the landscape itself is always changing through normal geological and climate based processes,” he says. “Some of these images are to acknowledge that the processes which are occurring all the time, and that that’s in contrast to cases where the human alteration is occurring because of oil development.”
Other photo compositions that stand out for Lamey include work in Montana’s Glacier National Park, the Falkland Islands in South America, and from Ireland.
Even though studio crawlers won’t have an opportunity to watch how Lamey captures his photos, they will get to see the final results of what he does.
“So in many respects it will be a gallery experience, there’s gonna be a lot of stuff on the wall," he says. “I’ll provide perhaps some wall text that will help explain it, and I will be here to explain it. But I prefer to let the viewer spend time with the work and decide for themselves what it means, what they get from it.”
Tim Lamey has combined his passion for photography and the environment to create art that represents nature that is both developed upon and undeveloped. Visitors to Lamey’s studio will have the opportunity to observe and learn about the places he has been.
This story has been part of a preview for the 2016 Studio Crawl put on by the Fargo-Moorhead Visual Artists. Tim Lamey and other artists will open their studios to the public on October 1st and 2nd to showcase their art and how they create it.