Anne W. Rosenfeld

My photographs are a formal inquiry into the ephemeral visual relationships around us.

Visual perception operates on many planes. We always see more — not necessarily through, but in conjunction with, what we're focused on. While you're looking at something, you're aware of something else — perhaps in your peripheral vision, perhaps in your visual memory, perhaps in a physical sensation that seems to have nothing to do with vision at all. You won't look at the leaf without being aware of the mountain, even if the mountain is behind you.

The central focus of an earlier body of work includes photographs taken along many coastlines in California, Washington and Alaska where the intertidal zone is particularly rich and diverse. These images aim to fuse art and science. Many were taken for three books, one published by the Sierra Club, the other two by the Univer-sity of California Press. The first book and its revision, The Intertidal Wilderness, focus on ecological processes; the third, Wave-Swept Shore: the Rigors of Life on a Rocky Coast, looks at intertidal organisms and draws on insights from the new fields of biomechanics and biophysics to explain the way intertidal organisms survive in their environment.

My current body of work includes many photographic mosaics, in which I blend aspects of the visual world and visual thinking. The attributes of each "tile" or photograph element — its color, form, texture, scale and origin — are integral to each mosaic. The imagery is painterly, with a mathematical sense of architectonics and a strong awareness of spatial relationships.