About

David Stroud was born in Berkeley, California, and spent his early childhood years in the rural Napa Valley of the 1950s. His interest in photography began as a young teenager with a photo kit for making small black and white contact prints. In his high school years, he discovered Aperture magazine and the work of famous photographers.

David spent his first college semester aboard the Chapman University World Campus Afloat, visiting countries such as Japan, Thailand, India, Kenya, Senegal, and Spain. He went on to study English Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz in addition to art history under Mary Holmes and Rosalind Wholden. After graduate work at the University of Kent in the U.K., David traveled to Rome, Paris, London, Amsterdam, and other centers of European history and art. 

Back in the U.S., he established a darkroom in Los Angeles, photographing mostly urban subjects in black and white, and, after moving to Carmel, California, he began work at Photography West Gallery, which focused on large format West Coast photography. He became involved in the vibrant Carmel photography scene of the time, where acclaimed artists such as Ansel Adams, Brett and Cole Weston, Morley Baer, and younger photographers came together to exhibit and meet socially.

In Carmel, David took classes in the tradition of Edward Weston at the Friends of Photography and at Monterey Peninsula College, where he was also inspired by the courses of Claudette Dibert, who introduced him to the color darkroom and 35mm technique. These influences later expanded to include John B. Greene (who explored working with paper negatives), Eugene Atget, Josef Sudek, Roy deCavara, as well as the color work of photographers known principally for their black and white images, especially Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Andre Kertesz, and Vivian Maier. 

During these Carmel years, David also embarked on a series of studio painting and drawing classes that has continued into the present, informed by a deep interest in art history and contemporary art. Though drawn to many painters of different eras, he is particularly interested in meditative work such as the late paintings of Monet, the drawings of Seurat, and the still-lifes of Giorgio Morandi, and to the emotional artwork of Rembrandt, Daumier, Edvard Munch, David Park, and others.

After moving to San Francisco in 1987, David began work as the in-house photographer at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco and New York, where he documented exhibitions by noted American and international artists, including Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, William Wiley, and Jim Campbell.

He also provided photographic services for a variety of art-related commercial clients in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Misako Mitsui Fine Arts, Minnesota Street Projects, and the Mary Holmes Estate, as well as international art fairs held in San Francisco such as Untitled; Art Market; and Fog, Art and Design.

He has written extensively on photography, notably in monographs on Brett Weston, Paul Caponigro, Huntington Witherill, Roman Loranc, and others. He has exhibited regionally and self-published numerous online photography books. His work is in private and corporate collections.

Over the years, his personal work has taken numerous directions, including extended explorations of the landscape and natural details, intimate photographs of people, still-lifes in the home, and several long-term series focused on water, objects through windows, objects made of paper, and other topics. A continuing thread of painterly awareness, intimate attention, and personal connection underlies these different directions.

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I make photographs when I’m called visually by something inspirational, harmonious, or revealing that is somehow on my wavelength, recognizing that what moves me to take photographs may not always be what moves others, and vice versa. I use a handful of digital cameras of different sizes and generally make chemical not inkjet prints, attracted by their greater subtlety. I make few changes to my images on the computer since my goal is to share my original sensations and motivation in the print.  

When I made the first small contact prints in my home darkroom, I realized that some went beyond capturing a slice of the outside world and had a life of their own as independent artworks. Today, some of my camera exposures grow into works of art, grounded in the original subject but also inhabiting a universal world of form and imagination. I do not consciously attempt to emulate the look of painting, but the history of traditional and modern painting and their language of deep visual thinking live in the back of my mind.

I feel that the artist’s job is not only to share her heightened sense of visual experience, but also to invite the viewer beyond received ideas of the tree, the chair, or the man walking, into the mystery of a more primal form of perception and experience. Photographic prints can be deceptively simple. Although they may look straightforward, they can invoke layers of consideration that are not exhausted by repeated viewing.

Ambiguity and suggestion are important. Are those overlapping near and far objects part of one thing? Can two unlike entities be connected through rhyming form? Are we looking at something concrete or sensing independent expressive relations of colors? As viewers we empathize with shapes, lines, and colors as much as with the subject matter. Compositions indefinably radiating structure or beauty can coax us into sensations of a deeper order of the world while connecting us to the content of an image.

Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth, and I believe art can also be a dream that takes us into reality. We experience a sense of relief when we become free of ourselves temporarily in art, only to return with a greater understanding of ourselves than before.   

“Contemplating Awareness: David Stroud’s photographs are moments of perception. Their beauty arrests our eyes, and time stands still. We are surprised into a state of contemplation. His sense of the flatness of the physical print and the framing of its rectangular shape creates a paradoxical experience—the intimacy of distance. We are sustained by wonder.”

—Rosalind G. Wholden, Lecturer, UC Santa Cruz, College of Creative Studies, UCSB. Writer, Art Forum, Arts Magazine, Psychological Perspectives

“In your work you reach that place of quiet in us, in the landscape, in the placement of objects, that people seldom see or experience.  It stays with us because of its beauty but also because we all need quiet in our lives, even if we are not aware of it.”

--Carole Austin, Head Curator, Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco

David Stroud Photography                                                                                                                                                                                     1750 31st Avenue                                                                                                                                                                                                  San Francisco, CA 94122

415-728-3524 david@davidstroudphotography.com