John Lehet
Post Pond Mist after Sunset, 2016, Photograph
Photography
As a Dartmouth student in the late 70’s, John Lehet began using the college camera club darkroom and quickly moved from 35mm to large format sheet film, carrying big bellows cameras around the mountains, hills, and valleys of New Hampshire and Vermont. In love with this landscape and community, he put down roots and built darkrooms.
John Lehet sees his aesthetic roots as aligned with the compositional techniques of the “Floating World” Zen woodblock printers and his approach has been to appreciate a deep seeing: a motivation that the ordinary can reveal itself to be extraordinary, luminous, and resonant. A long-term meditation practice has dovetailed with a vision of a manifestation of space, in the Buddhist sense, in art. John sees his photographs as about a resonance of mind and emotion with our perceived landscape.
For John modern large format archival pigment printers and newer digital cameras provide better results than the film and silver gelatin of his earlier years. He sees his approach as continually developing, rooted in traditional photographic methods learned early, but evolving with newer digital technologies through a seeing and a feeling which shapes his work and pushes it forward.
