Mark Paulda

Mark Paulda is a multifaceted photographer who known for his dark and visually elusive, yet intensely illuminated and inspirational photographs. His work represents profound observations into the nature of the world and humanity that surrounds him. Utilizing his intuitive skill with the camera, Paulda’s work takes everyday scenes and environments around him and creates abstracted forms and shapes that illuminate, evolve, and coagulate before the viewer. Much more than a travel photographer, he creates a sense of sensuality that is evocative of a Renaissance painting. Trusting in his intuition, his practice is a mystical and enigmatic expression of his own subtle and sensitive perceptions of the world around him. Letting the work guide him as he goes, there is something deeply intense and critical in his personal sensibilities and modalities of expression. He is incessantly searching for meaning and answers behind the camera lens. A keen observer of human behavior, he translates his experiences into concrete material production that can be experienced viscerally and intuitively by his audiences.While his work may at first appear ominous and foreboding, his entire oeuvre reveals profound insights into the paradoxes of life. He presents us with a reality that can be seen only indistinctly, as if through the fog of a surreal dream. As if in flux, these transient images appear experimental and vigorous.

Paulda effortlessly convinces the viewer that he has not only perfected his craft, but that he has an impeccable instinct for the emotionally evocative power of color, movement, texture, and shape. His works evoke a sense of abundance; swirling arabesques of color, in brilliant and translucent shades of red, blue, yellow, and green, are rich, luxurious, sensuous, fluid, and overflowing. Embodying an intense and energetic physicality, an exuberant expression of pleasure and vitality, the magic in Paulda’s art emerges in the tension between control and spontaneity, and the result is invariably surprising, poetic, and spiritual.

Mark Paulda is not only an observer of life, but also has a passion for traveling to foreign lands challenging that which he is most familiar. His aesthetic is simultaneously lyrical and mysterious, jubilant yet pensive. Employing these paradoxes, he skillfully captures empty, sparse environments that create a sense of memory and longing for faraway people and places. An award winning travel photographer and best-selling author, his books including “Celebrating El Paso,” “Edge of the Southwest”, and his new book “London After Hours”. His work will feature in his upcoming Power of Perception publication and exhibition in New York City, 2013.

Browse all Mark Paulda’s contributions in Light & Composition