Artist Statement
I am drawn to what remains when color is gone: form, light, texture, scale, and the relationship between what we build and the world that surrounds it.
My photographs are made in many places, but they are not intended as records of travel. I am less interested in documenting where I have been than in discovering what makes me stop and look—a solitary tree, the geometry of a building, the movement of land and ice, or the traces we leave behind.
Black and white allows me to strip away the familiar and concentrate on structure. Landscape can become abstraction. Architecture can become rhythm. Something ordinary can become monumental.
Somewhere in Monochrome is an ongoing exploration of those moments—when looking becomes seeing, and a place becomes something more than its name.
Biography
Don Scott Carpenter is a San Francisco–based artist whose creative life has long centered on the relationship between structure, expression, and interpretation.
Best known professionally as a conductor, organist, composer, and arts leader, Carpenter brings many of the same instincts that shape his musical work to photography: an awareness of proportion and rhythm, tension and release, density and silence.
Photography developed alongside his travels, but gradually became less about documenting destinations and more about discovering relationships of form, light, architecture, landscape, and human presence. Working primarily in black and white, Carpenter is drawn to images in which familiar subjects become less literal—where buildings become geometry, landscapes approach abstraction, and scale alters the way an object or place is perceived.
His ongoing photographic work, Somewhere in Monochrome, brings these images together as an exploration of seeing: not simply where we are, but what causes us to stop and look again.
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