Winston Boyer

As a photographer I have always felt that a good photograph must transform the ordinary. An artist needs to shift the viewer’s reality in order to offer a new perspective on a reality. I have gravitated towards using a painter’s perspective to do this—in other words I have been drawn to images that are reminiscent of paintings, whether it was through lighting, perspective, composition, subject matter or some combination of all of those. In the final photograph, this creates a tension—an image that falls between the real and the surreal.  

Before the digital world, photographers were limited to the focal length of a lens as a perspective tool. With my new series “Views” I have used a new method: the ability to change the perspective after the photograph was taken. With this series I taken long panoramas and compressed the perspective. One of the strengths the result offers is that all the peripheral information is available in a format that can be absorbed at once.

This series also intrigues me, as it renders a Gothic and “other worldly” quality to the absolutely real information within the landscape.  It demonstrates the ability to capture a new perspective—a way to see and experience the world that could not be captured through a conventional photographic perspective.

Painters have always had compression as one of their “tools.”  Looking at a copy of Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” the other day, I realized that the background mountains were “distorted” in a way that was similar to what I had been playing with this newfound perspective.



Born:      June 25, 1954  Great Falls, Montana


Education:   Studied Cinematography and Art History:
Monterey Peninsula College
San Francisco State College
University of California at Santa Cruz


Biographical Notes:

In 1979 he traveled to Europe for three years as a sports photographer for European and American publications.  Boyer also compiled photographs of European landscapes, people, architecture, and had numerous exhibitions in both American and European galleries.

During the 80’s he traveled the U.S. compiling photographs for a book, American Roads, and is now compiling photographs for a future book project.

Winston Boyer currently lives with his wife in Big Sur, California working in both fine art and commercial photographer.  He considers color photography his medium and uses the Cibachrome printing process and Giclee Pigmented Prints for the production of his fine art prints.