At the generous suggestion of a sharp-eyed competitor who couldn’t stop gushing, I dropped in on Peter Johnson at his Pure Land Gallery on Canyon Rd.

I was there to see three black-and-white photographs by Linda Elvira Piedra that Johnson had recently hung. They were all lovely—contemplative, haunting even, and gorgeously printed.
But one was sensational. It pictured a light gray stone resting on a darker one in a river, its oval shadow carving a gilded black window in the water.

The rocks stood poised there, all on their own, alive.

Though it recalled Minor White, or Wynn Bullock, or Paul Caponigro, there was nothing derivative about it. Johnson then went to his “Piedra drawer.” He began placing unframed prints in a window alcove shaded from the sun.

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Piedra’s finest landscapes and portraits are distinguished by an insistent vigorous presence. Here was that rare thing—the real thing—photographs you would hang as soon as you got home and never take down.

“I want to make a loop,” Piedra says. “I want what I see to live in the
negative and come alive again in the print. If I can do that the viewer
might see why the picture matters to me.”

Richard Cravens—a writer who has contributed to the international photo-arts quarterly APERTURE for more than 25 years—commented: “What’s so striking about Piedra’s work is the very very deeply felt way she has engaged her subjects. There is a pure tradition starting with Alfred Stieglitz and runs through Minor White down to a tiny handful of others. It requires seeing into the heart of a subject, intuiting its energy, and bringing it to life. She has both that gift and that discipline.’

“Most important,” Craven says, “Her photos have a quality of beauty that is her own. The very best still pictures dance. Hers dance.”

Piedra is 32. After high school near Los Angeles, she began a low budget odyssey that took her to first to college in Santa Cruz, then to museums in Paris, temples in Tokyo, and a Kinko’s in Anchorage. She has studied Milton, French, film-making, book restoration and ballet. She became enthralled with photography in France where she first saw work by Atget and Brassai. (Her apartment looked down through skylights into Man Ray’s former studio.) She counts Egyptian hieroglyphs, Hans Holbein’s painting, and Armenian music
among her influences. She has worked as a gardener, a nanny, a cook, a bookbinder, and a telemarketer for the San Francisco Ballet “For some strange reason,” she laughs, “I was good at that.”

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She moved to El Rito in 1997, where she learned to make meticulous prints from her close friend and superb photographer, the late Walter Chappell. She has recently taken to cultivating Chinese tree peonies.

A show at Pure Land last summer brought good sales. She is now raising funds for her next project. She will take her 8x10 view camera to Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma.

“I can’t quite say why, but I’m drawn to Asia now,” Piedra says. “I’m
sure I’ll be photographing the landscape. I‘ll be making many portraits as well.

“I sense this will be an extraordinary experience. Our lives can have a
ceremonial aspect, invisible from outside. The weavers who make such
intricate textiles, for example, may realize something we don’t. What they understand may be very close to what matters most to me. For lack of better words I’d call it “the love in life.”

To purchase Linda's work, please contact the artist at pohaku_lindaelvira@mail2world.com.

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