Mary Randlett: Slide Show and Lecture

Mary Randlett has been photographing the Northwest for more than fifty-five years.  She is considered one of the major figures in Northwest art. Her works are held in at least forty permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.  Born in 1924, Mary’s career in photography has spanned a period of sixty-five years.  At the age of ninety-two Mary can still be found spending long days in the dark room.

“Mary Randlett’s photographic vision of the Northwest is big-hearted, intricate, tender, and fully inhabited by the animals, tides, forests, mountains, and spirits that dwell there.  What others may take for granted, Randlett sees as quintessential: overcast days with endless and often exquisite variations of gray clouds, raindrops on puddles, dripping branches, and distant shafts of sunlight breaking through the cloud cover.  She is steeped in the history of the Northwest and its many art forms.

Mary’s images are a visual record of the Northwest at its most pristine and poetic.  During her many years of finely tuned observation, Randlett has learned to take the time to ponder the essences of what she sees—the curl of a bird’s drifting feather, a water strider not quite breaking the surface of the water, fog ascending a hillside, the moment a pond’s surface turns to ice.”

-Excerpt from Mary Randlett: Landscapes, inside cover jacket, University of Washington Press, 2007.