Frank Reiter, Fine Art Photographer

I've been in love with photography since I was just a boy, when I purchased a very simple, very old camera for ten cents at a flea market. By my teens I was shooting a 35mm SLR, and photography had become one of my primary sources of pleasure.

From the beginning my photography was a way to explore the things that filled me with wonder. For a long time that was almost exclusively nature. I spent endless hours shooting mountains, flowers, insects, and much more. Each new subject delighted me, and photography was how I expressed that delight, and shared it with others.

Later in life I became more interested in the relationships between things. I began to keep honeybees, and my bees lead me to learn many new things. I became fascinated by the way that nature moves as one, with every part of it connected directly or indirectly to every other part.

I began to question the notion that what is human is unnatural, and what is non-human is natural, and I became interested in the ways that humans shape, interact with, and depend on the “Natural” world. Much of my recent work is an exploration of that theme.

I also became very interested in the lifecycle of things, and the way that all creation is built on the destruction of what was before. Ultimately, I came to see that there is no creation or destruction, only a continuous rearrangement of the atoms and molecules that were once the stuff of stars. Science calls this the law of conservation of mass. I call it magical and wonderful.

With every photograph I try to capture that sense of wonder, so that I can share it. I often return to the same subject again and again, making hundreds of photographs until I get one that really expresses how I feel.

A sense of wonder is nourishing to us. I hope that some of my photographs will be, for you, truly wonderful.

Frank.