Robert Buelteman

Background

About Robert Buelteman

Robert Buelteman is a widely-collected fine art photographer whose works connect audience to subject in an emotionally transcendent manner, consistent with the traditions of eastern wisdom and western revelation. Whether examining the grand landscape or inquiring into the design of plants, his prints are a powerful extraction of beauty and substance revealing unrecognized dimensions in the commonplace. Mr. Buelteman discovered his love of the land as a child growing up in the small town of Woodside on the peninsula south of the city of San Francisco. From his family home, he looked out on the Santa Cruz Mountains, whose deep canyons, redwood groves, and daily tides of ocean-borne fog inspired the veneration of life and light that appear in his work today. He has published 17 photographic portfolios over his 4+ decades in photography, and three of these, The Unseen Peninsula (1994), Eighteen Days in June and Signs of Life (2009) were published as award-winning monographs. In Buelteman left photographic tradition behind by creating Through the Green Fuse, a portfolio of unique photograms made without cameras, lenses, or computers. This work serves as a window into the mystery that life is, and has been compared by critics with pictures of our universe made by the Hubble Telescope. As a result of the success of this new work, Mr. Buelteman was Artist-in-Residence at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico in 2003. In 2006 Buelteman completed work on two new portfolios, Sangre de Cristo, the flora of Santa Fe, and Rancho Corral de Tierra, the flora of his hometown of Montara located on the North coast of California. In 2007 Mr. Buelteman became disabled with neurologic Lyme Disease, and after eighteen years, he has returned to exhibiting his work and accepting commissions. His most recent portfolio of cameraless images, Life and Shadow, reflects a newfound freedom acquired through hardship and loss.