johnreuter.com bio picture

  • John Reuter Biography

    JOHN REUTER has been a photographer since the early 1970s, majoring in Art while attending SUNY Geneseo. He continued his studies on the graduate level at the University of Iowa, receiving two master’s degrees. It was there that he began to specialize in Polaroid materials, most notably his SX-70 constructions, combining photography with painting and collage. Reuter joined Polaroid Corporation in 1978 as senior photographer and later Director of the legendary 20x24 Studio. His own work evolved through large scale Polacolor Image Transfers to digital imaging in the mid 1990’s. He has taught workshops in Photoshop, Lightroom, Polaroid materials and encaustic painting around the world. In recent years Reuter has moved into video and filmmaking and is currently working on a feature length documentary titled "Camera Ready: The Polaroid 20x24 Project".

    John is currently a part time faculty member at the University of Hartford in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Hartford Art School. He teaches courses in in analog and digital photography as well as cinema studies.

Posted in Reuter Images

During my Lightroom for Digital Photographers workshop at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre I had the great opportunity to photograph at the Wakodahatchee Wetlands preserve in DelRay Beach, Florida. Known primarily as a wildlife preserve with incredible species of birds, turtles and even alligators, it is also a compelling landscape. I photographed in color and Infrared. These images were made with a Canon 20D camera converted to shoot infrared only and a Canon 10-22 mm lens. Images were processed in Adobe Lightroom 2.0. The Florida landscape has always attracted me, primarily as a background element in my collage work. I am increasingly attracted to them as images unto themselves. My lecture on my work while teaching at Palm Beach spoke of my increasing interest as landscape as final image. This shooting session only strengthened that impulse.

Posted in Reuter Images

Posted in John Reuter News

Reinventing Yourself When you Least Suspect It, or How I Became a Landscape Photographer, by John Reuter

This lecture by John Reuter will focus on his use of the landscape in his work for over 30 years. The landscape has always been an important element in John’s work but often in a supporting role. The figure has often been predominant and combinations of imagery used the landscape as a stage for a narrative story. The more painterly compositions also drew on the landscape but again as a supportive element in a compositional whole. The lecture will detail increasing interest in the landscape as an end in itself, even while pursuing his original interests. From the Holga Polaroid images to an infrared Canon, John details the transformation of appreciating these images on their own and how he learned to make them as expressive as his painted compositions. The lecture will be at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre on February 24th at the 3rd Floor Palm Beach Library Auditorium, Clematis ST, West Palm Beach, Florida at 7:30. Photographer Rick Friedman will also be speaking.
Posted in John Reuter News

Posted in Reuter Images

Even though he began to run the 20×24 studio in 1980, John did not begin making image transfers on the camera until 1983.
It wasn’t though he did not try, the early attempts were failures, most of the dyes would not stick to the watercolor paper, it was difficult to control the large floppy negative, and delivery of the film was much slower with the 20×24 system than it was with 8×10. But every six months or so he kept trying, but still was unable to perfect the process to the level of what he could achieve with 8×10 film. It took a change of aesthetic approach to finally break through. Rather than fight the inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies of the process John decided to embrace them. Allowing the process to proceed in a “controlled failure” John sought out transfers that had peeling shadows and rough areas. These became starting points for substantial reworking with pastel, dry pigment, charcoal and graphite. Much of the pigment was ground in with sandpaper and the paper surface scratched with metal brushes, all to achieve an expressive blend of photographic image, collaged elements and the colored pigment. This body of work moved through the Androgyny series of 1987 to the Pere La Chaise series of 1988-92 and John’s first digital collage imagery of 1993-1997. Throughout it all the Image Transfer process provided a vehicle for painterly expression designed to augment the narrative of the images.

Posted in Reuter Images

Posted in Reuter Images

John Reuter was one of the earliest artists to utilize Polacolor Image Transfer. Taught the technique by artist and friend Rosamond Purcell in 1978, Reuter began shooting 8×10 in 1980. As he had with his SX-70 work Reuter used the Image Transfer process as a starting point of combining photography, painting and collage. For much of this series he made use of an airbrush to apply the paint, generally isolating the figure and changing the context of the original scene. The early images were photographed with a Deardorf camera and 300mm lens, but by the end of the series Reuter switched his image capture to a Panasonic VHS video camera. With this video system, Reuter would shoot a sequence of images and freeze playback. He would then render the image by photographing it off of the video monitor. In a sense this was his earliest digital imagery.

Posted in Reuter Images

Posted in Reuter Images

In 2003 I was asked to write a piece for Polaroid about the instant back they had developed for the venerable Holga camera. What began as intrigue soon blossomed into full fledge love and I photographed with it exclusively for a year. One small problem, I have never regarded myself as a landscape photographer and here I was confronted with images I liked just the way they were. Ok, I tweaked them in Photoshop and made them brown (I tried so hard to keep them gray) but for the first time I did not blend them into collages as I had always done with landscape images I took. The response was interesting, people responded very positively and it encouraged me to consider landscape imagery an essential part of my aesthetic. I haven’t turned away from my collage based painterly imagery but this work is now an essential part of my thought process.

Posted in Reuter Images

« Older posts Newer posts »