Clifford Ross Photography: Outside Realism

Clifford Ross Photography: Outside Realism preview reception is tomorrow night at the Austin Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. The exhibition officially opens to the public on Saturday, Feb. 21. Ross will be giving an artist talk Saturday in the galleries at 3pm.

This is the first significant museum exhibition of Ross's work. The show includes 21 black and white and color photographs ranging in scale from billboard to notebook size images depicting waves and mountains.

Ross photographs scenes from over 7 miles away and is able to produce tack sharp images and clarity not previously achieved. He provides an immerse, you-are-there experience with 10 foot digital panoramic reproductions of the Rocky Mountains.



An artist and businessman, he recently became an inventor - of a camera unusual enough to capture the attention of serious scientists, including the kinds who work for the government, experimenting with nuclear fusion, space travel and spy systems. What grabbed them were photographs Mr. Ross took that allowed them to see with astonishing clarity a tiny footpath on the top of a Colorado mountain seven miles from the camera.

But with this camera that he concocted out of 60-year-old camera parts, mirrors, a microscope and other items - none of them digital - Mr. Ross has taken photographs on 9-by-18-inch negatives that when slowly processed by hand and digitally scanned contain 100 times as much data as the average professional digital camera.

The scientists studied blowups of these photographs, hanging on the walls of Mr. Ross's studio. "This is a different way of interacting with image, moving in until your nose is quite close," said Mr. Diegert, who demonstrated by doing just that.

Excerpt taken from a New York Times article written by Julie Salamon titled, "Tom Swift's New Camera, Ready for Space and Spies: Artist Turns Inventor".