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Biography

Stephen Strom spent his professional career as an astronomer. Born in 1942 in New York City, he graduated from Harvard College in 1962 and, in 1964, he received his MA and PhD in astronomy from Harvard University. From 1964–68 he held appointments as lecturer in astronomy at Harvard and astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. After 4 years as coordinator of astronomy and astrophysics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in 1972 he accepted an appointment as chair of the galactic and extragalactic program at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, AZ. The following 15 years were spent at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst; from 1984–1997 he served as Chairman of the Five College Astronomy Department. In 1998 Strom returned to Tucson as a member of the scientific staff at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory where he carried out research into understanding the formation of stars and planetary systems and served as an associate director of the observatory. He retired from NOAO in May 2007.

Strom began photographing in 1978. He studied both the history of photography and silver and non-silver photography in studio courses with Keith McElroy, Todd Walker, and Harold Jones at the University of Arizona. His work, largely interpretations of landscapes, has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is held in several permanent collections including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the University of Oklahoma Art Museum, and the Mead Museum in Amherst, MA. His photography complements poems and essays in three books published by the University of Arizona Press: Secrets from the Center of the World (1989), a collaboration with Muscogee poet Joy Harjo; Sonoita Plain: Views of a Southwestern Grassland (2005), a collaboration with ecologists Jane and Carl Bock; Tseyi (Deep in the Rock): Reflections on Canyon de Chelly (2005), co-authored with Navajo poet Laura Tohe; as well as one published by the University of New Mexico Press: Otero Mesa: Preserving America’s Wildest Grassland (2008), with Gregory McNamee and Stephen Capra. A monograph comprising 43 images, Earth Forms, was published in 2009 by Dewi Lewis Publishing.

Artist Statement

During my four-decade research career, I searched out patterns encoded in the light from distant stars in the hope of understanding how our sun and solar system came to be. I have spent countless hours perched on remote mountaintops, looking upward mostly, but also contemplating the desert below during those precious moments of quiet and solitude before and after nights spent at the telescope.

During those times, I became drawn to, then seduced by, the changing patterns of desert lands sculpted by the glancing light of the rising and setting sun: light that reveals forms molded both by millennial forces and yesterday’s cloudburst into undulations of shapes and colors. In response, I began what has become a 30-year-long devotion to capturing in images those remarkable patterns and attempting to evoke in silver and ink the powerful emotional responses that desert lands elicit in me. My tools are simple—a 4x5 view camera or 35mm SLR, and long focal-length lenses whose power to compress space can create an illusion of intimacy, inviting viewers to look deeply into what light and earth form together.

During the past three decades, most of my work has centered on interpretations of the landscape itself. More recently, I have turned my attention from the macro- to microworld: choosing to image fragments of the desert and seaside beaches that express in their quiet, understated way the same powerful combinations of pattern, history, and emotion as the grander landscape. What I hope to express is what the late essayist Ellen Meloy called the "calm of water," the "spill of liquid silences," and a "quality of light and color that pierces the heart."