Charles Grogg is a fine art photographer who specializes in botanical, natural imagery, and still life images. His work has been in a number of shows in California and New York City.

Charles has been teaching college-level writing and literature courses for 17 years. A resourceful master teacher and an art lover, he taught himself to develop his first roll of film in his tiny apartment bathroom using Internet documents as a guide. His first images highlighted the curvilinear plant life around his home, a subject he would return to with an increased intensity a decade later. Though an autodidact by orientation, two colleagues taught him the interrelationships of the arts: Norman Mallory, a poet, musician, and painter; and Bill Hendricks, a commercial and fine art photographer.

The highly accessible images in his portfolio belie the imaginative work that serves as the foundation for his vision. Botanicals and other natural imagery, antique tools, and books are often isolated from environmental backgrounds both to draw attention to their inherently sensual details and to make their implausible disconnect from the natural and vital world a cause for further investigation.

Charles makes his botanical images using a Canham 4x5” large format camera and Polaroid type 55 P/N film. The luxurious tonal midrange of this increasingly expensive film, in a format that captures even the subtlest subject detail with vivacity, best brings his images to life.

 

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