About
Overtop, Searsville Dam
I thrive at the nexus of humanity and nature and make art that reflects that. My art is a place where the resonance between our lives and the natural world is revealed, articulated, and given form. I work to gather the everyday dust of the natural world to revere, honor, and elevate it to its rightful place as the sole source of life.
Woodland Forest Floor
I am committed to developing photography's potential to shift our identification with our environment to transform the way we think, act, and engage the world around us. My work calls for a new relationship in which every person belongs to, and is connected to, life.
My Story
In 1973, after continuing my education at the University of Colorado towards becoming a professional pilot like my father, I was given a camera in lieu of the payment of a debt by a friend. I had never owned a camera, never taken a picture and had no interest in photography. On my drive from California to Colorado, I stopped to visit friends outside of Salt Lake City in Cottonwood Canyon, Utah. On that cold and snowy evening, I lifted that unwanted camera to my eye, and in a moment out of time I saw my life as a whole: everything I had ever been and everything I would become, there, in that moment, in that viewfinder. After that transformative moment, I chose to abandon my pursuit of flight to learn the craft of photography.
Cottonwood Canyon (1973)
I continued my formal education in photography by studying the foundational sciences behind the medium: physics to understand light, chemistry to understand film and print processing, and trigonometry to understand optics. Before I graduated, I was given a job behind the camera and in the darkroom where I began to hone my skills.
Twenty years later I would oversee the publication of the first of two monographs of my landscape photography, after which I began exploring cameraless imaging using high-voltage electricity and fiber-optically delivered light.
My work has enjoyed 68 solo exhibitions and been included in as many group exhibits as was appropriate. It hangs in hundreds of venues, and the promise of that moment in Cottonwood Canyon has been met.
It is my intention that my photographs are seen as a testament to our humanity and our obligation to the natural world as well as to our progeny.
My Art
My father was a Michigander and explorer who imbued me with his lifelong love of the natural world.
I learned early that there is something extraordinary about those times when our common senses fall silent in the presence of some expression of nature that moves us. It seems in those moments out of time that the wall between the observer and the observed falls, allowing us to be present to our connection with life itself. These are the occasions when I reach for my camera, to glean what I can from those remarkable moments.
Spent a great deal of time away from home photographing the landscape of the western United States. In 1999, I spent a month in Italy supervising the printing Eighteen Days in June and on on my return, set out for another search for the transformative moment.
Encamped in the Sonoran Desert a few miles north of Mexico, and sitting by the campfire late one evening, I saw that my future would look like my past if I continued on the path I was following. I imagined what images I might make if I gave myself the freedom to move away from the traditions of photography. Over the following nights I dreamed of color, brilliant color, and the direct imaging of living plants by means of fiber-optically delivered light and high-voltage Kirlian imaging. Before I returned home, I decided to surrender the use of cameras, lenses, black-and-white film, and computers to see what might lie beyond the tools of traditional analog photography. My “Energetic Photograms” are the result of this exploration.
Black Oak (2011)
The challenge of pursuing mastery in the making a fine black-and-white print in the darkroom continues to have its allure for this analog photographer. As for my color prints, the complexity and scale of the reproduction process for the pieces I make (many of which measure 96”) has long been too demanding for even the most sophisticated darkroom talent. So, I print my color work at a friend's photo lab, and I print black-and-white gelatin silver prints up to 40x50” in my darkroom here at the studio in Montara.
HIstory of Cameraless Imaging
I began to develop my technique in March of 1999, but its component parts have long and well-known histories. In the 1830’s English gentleman Henry Fox Talbot made his “Photogenic Drawings” by placing plants on light-sensitive silver-nitrate paper and leaving them in sunlight for exposure. Many consider this to be the birth of photography, to write with light, a term coined by Talbot’s friend John Herschel in 1839.
A few years later, Frenchman Daniel Colladon published his paper On the Reflections of a Ray of Light Inside a Parabolic Liquid Stream which signaled the beginnings of fiber optic technology in 1842. Without the development of fiber-optics the world as we know it today would not exist. The fiber probe I use to illuminate my cameraless subjects is just larger than the size of a human hair.
In 1939 Russian scientists Semyon and Valentina Kirlian were the first of many who would record high-voltage electrical discharges on film in search of the spirit or aura they believed surrounded all living things. These pioneers and their visionary work in “Kirlian Photography” as it came to be known, inspired me to make artwork that presents the beauty and wonder that animates life in all its forms.
Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2006)
By using hand-delivered fiber-optic illumination I have some degree of control in the delivery of exposure energy to the subject-film-diffusion matrix. Using neither camera nor lens nor computer, my technique has more in common with Chinese Brush Painting and improvisational jazz than it does with the current practices of photography. Each application of energy to the film, like every brush stroke or note played, is unrehearsed, and, once released, cannot be undone. These works are intended to be much more than a representation of the structure of the subject, they are an expression of life itself.
“Only those with no memory insist on their own originality” -Coco Chanel
Professional History
At Cristo’s Running Fence (1976)
I began my career in photography in 1975, shooting portraits by the hundreds for studios on the San Francisco Peninsula in 1975. It forever cured me of any lingering desire I had to photograph people. Shortly thereafter, I went to work for The Image Bank West in San Francisco’s famous Ice House, a franchise of the largest stock photography company in the world at the time, representing the brightest stars in the photographic universe and providing commercial prints to architects and interior designers.
Eventually I started my own business commissioning the production of large-scale photographic murals on a wide variety of materials including traditional photographic media, ceramic tile, vinyl, and fabric. Below is my 8 x 40 foot reproduction from the original negative of the construction of the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge on cotton fabric, stretch-framed and installed at the world headquarters of the Bechtel Corporation in 1979.
After partnering with competitors in the photo-mural business, I learned that my place was behind the camera, and so, in 1983, I accepted an invitation to move into the studio of celebrated photographer Fred Lyon in San Francisco’s South-of-Market neighborhood. Under his mentorship, I grew over the next 15 years as I shot annual reports, table-top and product photography. But it also became clear that my passion was found in working in the field for environmental organizations and pursuing my black-and-white landscape studies. I left the studio in 1998, having decided to commit myself to the exploration of photography as an art form. I built the last darkroom of my life adjacent to my home in Montara, and never looked back.
At work in the darkroom. photograph by Kainaz Amaria
Exhibitions and Collectors
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2021 every thing shines, Shari Brownfield Fine Art, Jackson, Wyoming
Robert Buelteman: Chasing the Light at Stanford's Jasper Ridge, Art Ventures Gallery, Menlo Park, California
2020 Robert Buelteman, Slate Art Gallery, Oakland, California
2019 Robert Buelteman, Markham Gallery, St. Helena, California
Biophilia, Art Ventures Gallery, Menlo Park, California
2018 Radical Botanical, 101 Second Street Gallery, San Francisco, California
2016 Who Speaks for the Land? – Robert Buelteman’s Peninsula, San Mateo County History Museum, Redwood City, California
Botanica, Stanford Art Spaces, Packard Electrical Engineering Building, Stanford University, California
2015 At the Still Point of the Turning World, Adler & Company Gallery, San Francisco, California
Signs of Life, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
2014 Signs of Life: Photograms by Robert Buelteman, Denver Botanic Museum, Denver, Colorado
Chasing the Light: Morning at Jasper Ridge, San Francisco International Airport Museum, San Francisco, California
2013 Signs of Life, PHOTO Oakland Gallery, Oakland, California
2012 Signs of Life, Sanchez Art Center Gallery, Pacifica, California
2011 Signs of Life, Mumm Napa Gallery, Rutherford, California
2010 Robert Buelteman, Duncan Miller Gallery, Los Angeles, California
Robert Buelteman, Moscone Convention Center, Roche/Genetech International Conclave, San Francisco, California
2009 Signs of Life, Artists Circle Fine Art, North Potomac, Maryland
Preserving Open Space, Photography and Philanthropy Working Together, The Seed Gallery at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability, San Francisco, California
2008 Flux, Bobbi Walker Fine Art, Denver, Colorado
A Matter of Scale, Spur Projects, Portola Valley, California
2007 Robert Buelteman, New Works, Gallery Jones, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Robert Buelteman, Road to Santa Fe, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Robert Buelteman Through the Green Fuse, Ira Wolk Gallery St. Helena, California
2006 Robert Buelteman, Rosenbaum Contemporary, Boca Raton, Florida
Robert Buelteman, Anne Reed Gallery, Sun Valley, Idaho
Plants and Insects, Art and Science, San Francisco Presidio, San Francisco, California
2005 Works by Robert Buelteman, Spur Projects Gallery, Portola Valley, California
Sangre de Cristo, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Through the Green Fuse, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Through the Green Fuse, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Robert Buelteman, Photographs, Gallery Jones, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2004 Through the Green Fuse, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
2003 Through the Green Fuse, Silicon Valley Art Museum, Belmont, California
Through the Green Fuse, Susan Spiritus Gallery, Newport Beach, California
2002 Through the Green Fuse, The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering, Newport Beach, California
Through the Green Fuse, Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Through the Green Fuse, Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Palm Desert, California
The Unseen Peninsula, San Mateo County Historical Museum, Redwood City, California
2001 Eighteen Days in June, The Photographer’s Gallery, Palo Alto, California
2000 The Unseen Peninsula, The Golden State Museum, Sacramento, California
Visions and Interpretations, Gensler Associates, San Francisco, California
1998 Eighteen Days in June, Villa Montalvo Gallery, Saratoga, California
East of the Sierra, The Ansel Adams Gallery, Lee Vining, California
1997 Robert Buelteman’s Unseen Peninsula, Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco, California
1996 The Art of Robert Buelteman, Xerox Corporation, Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, California
1995 Robert Buelteman: The Unseen Peninsula, Vision North Gallery, San Francisco, California
1994 The Unseen Peninsula: Photographs by Robert Buelteman, San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco, California
1993 Robert Buelteman: Photographer, Coyote Point Museum, San Mateo, California
1992 A Place in the Heart: The Phleger Estate, The Bay Area Ridge Trail Council, San Francisco, California
Interpretations of the Natural Scene, Vision Gallery, San Francisco, California
1991 The Unseen Peninsula, Tavern on the Green, New York, New York
The Unseen Peninsula, Hewlett-Packard Company World Headquarters, Palo Alto and USA Headquarters, Cupertino, California
1990 The Unseen Peninsula, Peninsula Open Space Trust, Menlo Park, California
1986 Portfolio One: 1974-1984, J. Walter Thompson Company, San Francisco, California
1981 Experimental Work, American President Lines, Oakland, California
1979 Experimental Work, Western Visions Corporation, Newport Beach, California
Collectors
Accel/KKR, Menlo Park, California
Abingworth, London, England
Adobe Systems Incorporated, San Jose, California
Advanced Micro Devices, Santa Clara, California
Apple Computer, Cupertino, California
Bank of America, San Francisco, California
William and Sonja Davidow, Woodside, California
Deloitte & Touche LLP, Santa Clara, California
Sue and John Diekman, Atherton, California
Boston Consulting group, Boston, Massachusetts
John and Ann Doerr, Woodside
Drinker, Biddle, and Reath, Washington, D. C.
Fontainebleau Miami Beach, Miami, Florida
Genetech, South San Francisco, California
Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co., Menlo Park, California
Pacific Gas and Electric, Washington D.C.
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Palo Alto, California
Nikon Incorporated, New York, New York
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Los Altos, California
Paradise Island Harbour Resort, Bahamas
Regent Bal Harbor, Miami, Florida
Rosewood Hotel, Menlo Park, California
San Francisco Water Department, Millbrae, California
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Sempervirens Fund, Los Altos, California
Stanford University Medical Center, Palo Alto, California
TOWN Restaurant, San Carlos, California
Venture Law Group, Menlo Park, California
Village Pub, Woodside, California
Xerox Corporation, Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, California
Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, Connecticut
Neil and Pegi Young, Woodside, California