Bob Kolbrener: Sky Country

In my opinion, Bob Kolbrener is the most brilliant California landscape photographer since Ansel Adams.  Gary F. Kurutz, Curator Emeritus of Special Collections, California State Library Our second monograph on the work of Bob Kolbrener presents a selection of his large-scale black and white photographs of the American West. A companion book to his critically acclaimed monograph California published by Nazraeli Press in 2021, Sky Country comprises over 50 of Kolbrener’s most powerful works, many published here for the first time. An established US photographic artist, Bob Kolbrener (b.1942) was inspired, then protégé, then a colleague to the great landscape maestro Ansel Adams, and is himself now one of the USA's most distinguished contemporary black and white photographers of its incredible vistas. His work shows the essence of the Great American West, the cathedral-like Yosemite National park, and seascapes of California's churning Pacific coastline. Printed in duotone on special matte-coated art paper, and bound in linen with a tipped-in cover plate, Sky Country opens with an introduction by Ann Jastrab. It is published on the occasion of Kolbrener’s solo exhibition at Center for Photographic Art, Carmel opening in February, 2025. There’s a moment, when you have a choice, to look back or go forward, and you take a step away from the familiar, towards the edge, to the wide open space, clouds among clouds among clouds. And at first, it’s like an Alfred Steiglitz sky and then it’s something grander, like a Thomas Cole painting, but then, no, it’s not the East anymore. It’s the wide open expanse of the West. A sky that is something Larry McMurtry’s characters only dreamed of seeing when they were crossing the parched land of West Texas. Clouds of vastness, plains of dreams, hills like stories, really, like a story from Wright Morris when he put down his camera and picked up his pen and described what he saw and what couldn’t be seen. Bob Kolbrener is from a similar part of the country, Missouri, much like the canvas of Nebraska, of the plains, of the fields. It’s not just Wright Morris, but it’s Willa Cather’s voice I hear across the distance, calling. Maybe Kolbrener read their passages too, saw the weather coming from the West, grew restless waiting for its arrival while standing beneath the Gateway to the West in his hometown of St. Louis. The wind couldn’t bring him the clouds fast enough and he had to go. He was ready, his camera was ready, sublime film negatives printed as breathtaking silver prints. And though photographers before him documented the land, for him it was the sky. For Bob Kolbrener’s West is not anyone else’s West. I imagine him, miles from anyone, no lights in the distance, no light anywhere save what he is letting in through his lens. — From the Introduction by Ann Jastrab, Executive Director, Center for Photographic Art, Carmel. Read more