About the Artist
My passion for photographing the wilderness landscape
Wolfgang Glowacki is a landscape photographer based in Hobart, Tasmania. The visual drama and artistry of his photographs are born of a keen eye for the many moods of Nature and a life-long passion for the wilderness. This passion shines throughout Wolfgang’s work and has attracted a wide audience around the world.
Wolfgang’s style is unmistakable. His talent for rare captures of amazing light and fleeting atmosphere imbue his portfolio with a sense of the epic, majestic and the bold. His success derives from patient single-minded pursuit of all the unique moments that generate the magic and energy of the wilderness, often spending extended periods immersing him in the landscape he shoots despite the rigors of season and weather.
Wolfgang’s photographs have been published extensively in a large variety of media ranging from calendars, books, advertising and the publications of Australian Geographic, Wild magazine, 40 Degree South and many more. Wolfgang has been acclaimed as one of the most talented photographic artists of his generation.
Artist Statement
Welcome, and thank you for having a look at my photographic art. I’d like to introduce you to the natural world I know. Come follow along on my journey. Explore, consider, and take something with you. This is nature through my eyes. These photographs do not arise from any particular desire to see the world through a lens, but rather from my deep passion for this land we call wilderness. It has shaped every aspect of my life. I wish to show you the amazing, beautiful and powerful forces that have created the Earth we live on.
Through these photographs I express my feelings for the locations I visit and the wonders of nature that I encounter along the way. With these photographs I attempt to bring my experiences in wild Earth to the viewer.
We are well into a new and exciting generation of photography that is incredibly more limitless than ever before. I embrace this new generation. The digital age allows us to overcome many of the technical challenges that confounded ways of communicating such experiences to you by photographers in the past. It is an exciting time to be landscape artist. It is a time that enables my creativity and my ability to express my experiences in nature to you more deeply than ever before.
Even in the hands of a master, a camera alone will never capture Nature as we can observe it with all of our senses. My goal is to illustrate the rich experiences I have had in this multi- dimensional world as best as I can within the limits of this two-dimensional medium. Although I generally don't add or remove anything significant from my images, there is never an absolute definition of what I saw in the image to begin with. How we see is a very personal thing. To this point, I believe a great photograph is not merely documenting the scene at hand; rather it is about fusing the essential vision of the artist with the landscape.
I believe the most important quality of a photograph, as in all of art, is to evoke an emotional response. While everything in nature does this for me, selecting just the right places and moments to make a photograph that conveys those emotions is far more difficult. My camera is one of the tools I use to achieve my final results, the images you see here. No one tool is perfect, however, and no one tool can make a great artist. My processes involve meticulous attention to detail in my field technique, along with work in today’s digital darkroom to fine tune, optimize and adjust contrasts, colours, tonalities, luminosity, etc. in an attempt to better present to you the experience I felt in being there myself.
It is an exciting process, and above all, a way for me to do what I love most, exploring wilderness and capturing it for you to see. Without wilderness, I would never have begun taking pictures.
I want you to know just how undeniably precious these lands are in their preservation. We NEED wilderness; now more than ever. The wilderness experience becomes ever more important to balance our lives as we become more industrialized and therefore bound within our own creations. This is because there exists within it a deep connection unlike anything that can be found in today’s intense world of instantly manufactured gratification. There is a certain freedom that comes only when we are immersed in the natural world. I come to the wilderness to experience something much greater than ourselves, and I hope you will too.
Never forget any of those that came before you. Never be afraid to explore, to wander, and to find a new direction. Share the beauty of this wonderful life and this wonderful Earth so they may be here forever.
Thank you for taking this journey with me today.
