Cheryl Medow
TIFA 2024 Cheryl Medow – Artist Statement
1st Place winner in Special, Professional, “For The Love of Nature”
In my ongoing series, Envisioning Habitat: An Altered Reality (2006 – present), my fantasies become a new reality when I look beyond the everyday world and envision the exquisite beauty in nature.
All the images in this series were photographed in the wild, in-camera and without the use of AI. Each of my final compositions may include as many as 10 of my photographs; masking the subject out of its natural environment, sometimes pixel by pixel, I place them in newly created scenes fabricated from both real and imagined landscapes.
Snowy Egret in the Bayou, the Special award-winning image at TIFA for 2024 was photographed at Lake St. Catherine in Louisiana. A short story about this image:
Across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans is Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge. Typically, there are lots of birds along the Bayou, but the morning we arrived, we saw very few. I met another photographer in the area who shared his sighting of hundreds of Snowy Egrets fishing just up the road at Lake St. Catherine. Sure enough, six miles further, on busy Highway 90, there they were! The high winds and the massive trucks going by shaking the road made for a challenging shoot, but I kept on and was rewarded for my persistence.
It was an amazing sight, what every bird photographer hopes for – action! My subject seemed to be holding onto that tree branch as tightly as I was holding onto my tripod, Nikon camera and lens.
Returning to my studio in Santa Barbara, California, I placed him in a scene I captured while boating in the bayous of Louisiana. Lastly, I added a sense of drama with the third and final element of this composition: storm clouds captured on a different day.
My technique is to weave a visual narrative inspired by the Hudson River School’s approach, blending multiple scenes from field notes and memory into a cohesive final work. Much like these historic artists, I create complex compositions that merge real birds with fantastical landscapes, resulting in a unique and imaginative vision that transcends the specific environment from which they originated.
From a young age, I was aware of the beauty of the world around me. I was fascinated by small animals, butterflies and birds that visited our backyard, and would search the skies for shapes of animals in the clouds passing overhead.
Upon having the opportunity to photograph animals and birds in their natural habitats, my early interest in photographing flowers transitioned to focusing on these amazing creatures. I never gave up the wonder of clouds, lily ponds, mountains, sky, sunrise and sunsets – celebrating ALL of nature is my passion. By watching birds, I found that they are a harbinger of nature that is in good health: “canaries in the coal mine” for the planet.
I graduated from UCLA with BA in Art and continued my art education at Chouinard Art Institute and beyond, taking classes in ceramics, photography, printmaking and figure drawing.
When digital cameras and Photoshop came into being, I was hooked. I could photograph the world and immediately see results. When I arrived back to my studio, I could combine the beauty I captured into each of my final compositions.
When I traveled to Kenya for the first time, I was working with a Nikon D3 with a 70-200 lens. I was particularly delighted by the native birds. They were large and colorful – more so than I had ever seen. When I saw my first secretarybird standing up from its nest, I was astonished by its size and grandeur. That photograph of this magnificent bird became the focus of a larger composition depicting it in a fantastical landscape; thus began my ongoing series Envisioning Habitat: An Altered Reality. I now shoot with a Nikon Z9 Mirrorless camera and a variety of lenses from 12mm to 600mm.
Passion, preservation and a life in harmony with nature are some of the reasons I am a photographer. It is my hope that viewers will connect with those ideals through my images, and both respect and protect the fragility and beauty of all that makes up the natural world.
