Mark Amerika Nature Photography Studio

Latest News

Image Actualization

1 JANUARY 2010

What does it mean to be a "part" of nature? Too many citizens of the world know all too well what it means to be apart from nature, and as a result, they are forever in search for root connections. But having code access to the root of the system requires more than just a desire to connect. One must also be acutely aware of their constant struggle to unconsciously create the ultimate vision of contemporary lifestyle performance. This ability to "unconsciously project" or visualize the creative process you need to engage in so that you may succesfully achieve the life you want to live requires an experiential knowledge rooted in ongoing actualization. This process of image actualization is rooted in the creative potential of every artist-medium. The way toward image actualization takes place via a daily remix practice, where the artist continually reconfigures (compostproduces) their own unique model of creatively processing (remixing) the abundance of valuable source material everywhere. Image actualization requires that the artist-in-you must strategically and systematically envision the next version of your creative output by successfully scripting the lead role that was made for you. This is not meant to sound like some new-age claptrap and in fact for the contemporary avatar-on-the-go, we here at Mark Amerika Nature Photography know how difficult it must be for a lot of our clients to follow through on that search for a deep connection to nature while simultaneously side-stepping the urge to buy into all of the self-help happy talk the new age industry continuously inundates us with. There must be an alternative route toward image actualization, a DIY (do-it-yourself) prosthetic-aesthetic that feels like you are holding your eyes in the palm of your hands. That's why we have shifted our own practice from high-end digital photography to easy-to-use iPhone portraiture, landscape, and action imaging. We use our iPhone to capture images that we believe enable the artist in you to connect with nature as part of the creative process. At Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we take pictures so that you don't have to -- and these days, the images we capture are instantaneously processed using the latest in advanced iPhone technology. For those clients who are searching for a customized nature image that the artist captures so that you too can experience the ultimate in image actualization, email me at amerika [at] altx dot com for our latest [recession-friendly] commission pricing.

Speed Mating

30 MARCH 2008

The Hawaiian black-crowned night heron occasionally appears in broad daylight. Lately at the Hamakua Marsh visible from the floor-to-ceiling picture windows at the Aloha Studios of Mark Amerika Nature Photography, two locally based night herons make their daily visit to the marsh in the early morning hours ready to skip the dating and check the mating. You can tell they are ready for action by observing their plumage. The black feathers on their head have turned a glossy bluish green and the lone white strand sends a signal that there's no time like the present. There is some ritualistic stretching and hissing and then when push comes to shove their legs turn from red to pink and soon the new season's brood is upon us. At Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we fight against our temptation to exploit the sexy image reservoir provided by the ongoing origin of the species. Even big gorgeous birds, exhibitionists at heart, deserve their right to privacy. But sometimes we just can't help ourselves. Holding the DSLR in our sure hands, we train our eye on the flirtatious yet subtly cool swingers playing the field and start going trigger-happy. Would it be better if we just resisted the temptation to cash in on a split-second money shot and simply kept our lens cap on? The urge to surge without a moral prophylactic protecting us from ourselves is what it means to feel free, to totally give in to our desire, death be damned. There's plenty of time for nesting inside the MANP studios and besides, soon the brood in the hood will want a follow-up family portrait for their scrapbook memories of what life was like before the marsh itself died off from all of the killer chemicals secretly leaked into the canal during the wee hours of the night. For those clients who are feeling less narcissistic and prefer customized digital portraits of those species who in their unfabricated beauty resist all political categorization, email me at amerika [at] netspace dot org for our latest commission pricing.

The Creative Molting Process

20 JANUARY 2008

As we all continue shedding away layers of old skin with increasing gain, force, speed, and intensity, and our "outer self" keeps disappearing faster than ever before, we inevitably become hyperaware of the fact that we will never really truly get to the core of the matter because the core of the matter does not exist as a core but is an all-encompassing source material that we thrive in. These layers of past life as manifested in the skin we keep wearing and keep shedding and discarding over time, suggest a creative molting process that becomes a never-ending quest to reveal to ourselves everything we don't know and will never know until there is nothing left but the sensation of dreaming-molting, of continually searching for what hides just underneath the surface of our role-playing avatar as it shakes everything off and goes back to first skins, best skins, every only skins. Meanwhile the rumble of our deep interior anticipates our next inside-out creative eruption and somewhere in the middle of this molting-lava striptease where our inside is out and our outside is in, we ask ourselves "What is it that seeks?" At Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we use our specially formulated psychosomatic flow techniques to train you, our clients, how to creatively molt while dreaming. Do you feel like an endangered species? For customized digital portraits that will reveal how you can develop alternative personas that will defy the corporate killing machine, email me at amerika [at] netspace dot org for our latest commission pricing.

Image Rhythms / Psychic Waves

27 JULY 2007

What does it mean to get caught in the undercurrent of undulations that postulate an intoxication of autohallucinations, the kind of "time-trip" that a long solstice day can (post)produce just by letting the body simply be? Living deep inside the day that never ends, one uses all their sense data to echo impressions of rushing, violent, nervous excitations. Not violence for violence's sake, but poltergeist violence, an expelling of the demons that circulate in the rhythmic body as it latches on to an in and out state of presence we call the Infinite, an infinity on the march, an enfolding infinity that never ends, what Henri Michaux refers to as "an infinitization from which no finite can escape," situated as an oscillating tense-trigger where even the simple act of seeing, of looking at a landscape, can transform the world. If the rhythm is precipitous, the infinite will fragment. If the rhythm is circuitous, the infinite will loop in on itself and become eternal. If the rhythm is alone with its anxiety coupled with patience, the infinite will render into vision a compassion for living. These rhythms and immaterial visions of drifting through landscapes prolong everything, endlessly. In what at first feels like a wave of ecstasy, there is revealed something even more elaborate: a bowl of vibrations. "The bowl of vibrations is what he took, is what is possessing him now." (Michaux) At Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we use our new media apparatuses to autohallucinate a revolutionary lifestyle practice that puts you, our clients, into the borderless otherzone. To see how you too can participate in undermining the classic production/consumption pairing, email me at amerika [at] netspace dot org for our latest commission pricing.

Pollination Agents

20 MAY 2007

Where are the bees? Without a trace, something is causing our favorite lovers to become disoriented and lose track of their awaiting hives. At first, rumors floated that their sudden disappearance was due to harmful frequencies being transmitted from cell phone towers. Still others have conjured up stories of corporate terrorist plots with evil GMO lords taking on the role of a Monsanto-like Al-Qeada. The official term for this unsettling phenomenon is "colony collapse disorder" and it reminds us at Mark Amerika Nature Photography that Nature is starting to imitate political reality, in this case the reality of U.S. politics and the complete collapse of ethics in the first six years of the Bush/Cheney/GOP Presidency. But we at Mark Amerika Nature Photography have worked hard to not turn our environmentally-friendly nature photography practice into pure politics. Instead, we wonder aloud: is it posible that Nature is taking revenge on the pesticide-ridden, antibiotic loaded diets of the pathogenic populations who seem intent on killing themselves via turbocharged immunodeficiency disorders brought on by synthetically produced "nutrition"? If that is indeed the case, then the bees are sending us a signal, relaying crucial information that we need to swallow whole and process into imaginative solutions that will lead to the sustainability of our planet and ourselves. Without the bees, there can be no organic fruit and without organic fruit, there can be no organic fruit juice. It's as if we were willing our own impotency into being. And all in the name of abstract currrency accumulation and the forms of power it depends on to dope the populace into believing that there truly is a land of milk and honey? But the milk is contaminated with growth-hormones that morph into human disease and the real money honeys, led by their Queens, are abdicating the throne of communitarian workaholism for a quieter life in the underworld, where they are plotting the coming reign of Progressive Provisioning. "The End is Nearing," say the bees, "and we will not be here to watch it." The buzz around the woods that I walk in daily is that the bees are fed up. They would rather disappear and die than pretend they have a viable interest in perpetuating the continued erosion of life's sexually charged force field of aesthetic composition. At Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we bring you the "colors of the spirit" as a way to remind you that Nature has a way of overruling whatever procedural order the politics of technocapitalism intends to beat us down with. The image above features one of our local comrades who, like the legislator-poets of the ages before us, uses its proboscis and antennae to sense what is (or is not) in the air. At MANP, we use our digital technologies to read the signals and convert their information into environmentally-freindly photographic solutions that we hope will help save the world. For pre-apocalyptic imagery of what it still means to be a pollination agent for radical change, email me at amerika [at] netspace dot org for our latest commission pricing.

Water Babies

24nd MARCH 2007

Water babies in a beach's brew. That's how we at Mark Amerika Nature Photography see the zodiac on the horizon. Spring has barely sprung and we are already dreaming of immersing ourselves in that compositional field of play known as summer. The seasonal shift brings about an intuitive sense of what has yet to come. The secret, as we call it, is and always has been about focusing on what it is we imagine our natural way to be while unlearning the bureaucratic ways of the corporate superstructure that indifferently tries to set up a limited set of parameters for us to operate in. We call these enslaving parameters set up for us by the authoritarian regimes that try to control our lives the prison house of institutionalization. Seeing nature for what it really is requires constant experimentation and investigation into not only who we are, but who we want to be, as fictional personas stylizing a creative contribution that is uniquely our own while living our lives here on Planet Oblivion. Only by spontaneously visualizing the images we ourselves want to render into vision can we even begin to align our lifestyle practice with the discontinuous flux-flow that shape-shifts the relational environment we develop our artwork in. Nature is the is that is primordial fluxus and only when we are capable of rendering it in our bodies as a kind of digital image that feeds the unconscious processing of our "fusion experience" of the world can we even begin to position our bodies to perform the way we need them to. At Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we offer special edition artworks featuring YOU as the image you imagine yourself to be. By becoming these images you imagine yourself to be, you reveal the secret of who you are. Email me at amerika [at] netspace dot org for our latest commission pricing.

Radical Preternaturalism

22nd JANUARY 2007

Working inside the studio environment at Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we immerse ourselves in a compositional field of play that is so fluid and virtual, that we begin to see the world outside as also being made of totally malleable binary code that we can render into transformative acts of creative visualization. We call these transformative acts of creative visualization getting into the ZONE. The ZONE is an unconscious playstation where we intuitively tap into our "readiness potential" so that we can then improvise alternative versions of what the slowpokes still call Reality (with a capital R). At Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we prefer to investigate the continuous smudge of unreality as a way to launch our politically charged image-interventions. For example, when we use our digital camera to capture an image of a Colorado sunset, we wonder aloud if it's really a Colorado sunset or just some random source material that we can use to further manipulate the environment we immerse ourselves in when creating. For special edition artworks featuring the never-seen-before colors of the "second sky" that exists beyond the one everyone else takes for granted, email me at amerika [at] netspace dot org.

Fashionably White

3rd DECEMBER 2006

The influence peddlers in the fashion industry and their loyal followers go out of their way to remind us that wearing white in winter is a big no-no. But look at Colorado over the past few days and all you see is white. Blankets of snow remind us here at Mark Amerika Nature Photography that white is the color of ultimate utopian pleasure. When we render into vision a blizzard of total whiteness, we immediately come to know this whiteness as signaling both our potential for orgasm as well as our inevitable destiny toward death. The winter landscape we are looking at is really just a subtle overwriting of our own self-portraiture, and the perceptual shift that takes over our nervous system is one that coats our "creative unconscious" with layers of blank uncertainty. At Mark Amerika Nature Photography, we know how winter can leave you feeling cold, but our mission is to use the emerging new media apparatus as a prosthetic aesthetic, something that turns you on, that seduces you into reconnecting with that long saunter back into the icy void of the endless unknown. For limited edition prints of the whiteness of being, a whiteness so hard and penetrating it actually looks molten grey with tinges of sperm blue, email me at amerika [at] netspace dot org.

Fall Colors Are IN

3 OCTOBER 2006

To purchase some simulated versions of what we still call real nature photographs, actually clicked by the artist himself, email me at amerika at netspace dot org.

I have images of:

multi-colored trees
beautiful walking trails
creeks
historic homes on open space
Colorado blue sky (some with hawks!)
cyborgian wildlife (sold out)

Is Self-Portraiture Natural?

30th SEPTEMBER 2006

Here at Mark Amerika Nature Photography we think that you yourself are an image. We call that an embodied image. You don't even have to take a picture of yourself to convince us of your absolute likeness. You are there, just as we are, and we all know it. But when we at Mark Amerika Nature Photography take a picture of you, something else begins to occur. At the very moment that we click the button on our camera, we mark your image with our uniquely branded signature-style effects which then translates into cold hard cash for us. It may not be cheap, but look who's clicking! To commission an original and totally natural portrait of yourself designed by Mark Amerika Nature Photography, email me at amerika [at] netspace dot org.

Photography Does Not Exist!

15th SEPTEMBER 2006

My classes at the University of Colorado are going well. Last semester I taught a Graduate Photography course that dared to suggest there is no such thing as photography. One of my best students challenged me by asking "Professor Amerika, what's next? Is there no such thing as Nature?" A great question, since I myself was convinced that that indeed was the case. But, if there is no such thing as nature or photography, then how do we create "nature photography"? Another good question. To purchase nature images that defy nature, email me at amerika [at] netspace dot org.

Good Investments Make Good Friends

7th SEPTEMBER 2006

Artists are like speculative stocks. Their value is heavily dependent on market psychology. I like to think of it in relation to the Law of Mosaics, that is, a way to deal with the many parts of ones life in the absence of wholes, and can lead to not only more money in your pocket, but more illumination in your soul. As our friend and colleague Guy Debord once said, spectacle is "capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image." Here at Mark Amerika Nature Photography, turning image into capital and back again is second nature.

All images by Mark Amerika Nature Photography.

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