David LaBella in his studio Whether executed on an epic or intimate scale, in soft or harsh style, landscape photography, at its best, reveals new ways of seeing what has been in front of us all along. Often this genre privileges wide-open vistas of inaccessible wonders, but in Connecticut-born and based photographer David LaBella’s work, beautiful revelations occur on the smallest of scales. Mindful of both the American landscape tradition and its evolution in seemingly limitless space, and the more restrained scope of European landscape art, LaBella synthesizes the two tendencies eloquently.

As he puts it, his photographs feature “painstakingly rendered, visually balanced and composed images of details and large-scale scenes drawn from the natural landscape.” That relationship between vast landscapes and their lush details, between the immense forest and its layered carpet of fallen leaves, lends LaBella’s crisp photographs degrees of texture and subtlety that portrayals of nature unfortunately often lack. He lets us imagine, feel and create the larger environment based on small, gentle snippets of its intimate details. Whether his colorful compositions portray the surfaces and tones of gleaming rocks and shells on a beach, the lush petals of a flower, or the moist leaves yellowing on a trail, he gives us perfectly executed details from which we’re invited to extrapolate the surrounding landscape.

In addition to the incredible agency he offers viewers in imagining the scene outside his frame, LaBella confidently eschews markers of depth and proportion.

In many pieces his diligently crafted shots verge on abstraction. More than the outline of a curling leaf or smoothed rock, his photographs foreground the formal beauty of nature’s colors, patterns, rhythms and compositions. In this respect, David LaBella’s landscape photography has as much in common with the Abstract Expressionist painters of the 50’s and 60’s as it does with the pioneering American landscape photographers of the 19th century. Rather than emphasize one of these scales of vision over the other, he balances the sweeping with the specific, the intangible with the tactile and the local with the universal.

www.labellaphotographic.com

www.Agora-Gallery.com/ArtistPage/David_LaBella.aspx