The photography of Doug Landreth ’73 may include all manner of flora and fauna, but he is more than a nature photographer. Whether photographing the blossom on an artichoke plant or a blurred image of a Mexican matador, he employs multiple digitally composited images, laced with textural overlays and backgrounds, to create visual statements that can be bold, foreboding, or sublime.
Landreth’s love of photography started in high school, when he bought a camera with his savings and took it on a two-week trip to Europe with his twin brother, Duncan Landreth ’74.
“My brother and I shot thousands of Kodachrome slides,” he remembers. “I thought ‘This is magical.’ It determined what I was going to do with the rest of my life.”
At Puget Sound, Landreth and his brother took over the laundry room in the SAE fraternity to use as a dark room. But in the classroom, he studied marketing, rather than art. Although he graduated with honors, he still considers himself a terrible marketer: “I would much rather be creating art than marketing my work.” Landreth began his career in advertising and spent 35 years as a Seattle-based commercial photographer. But in that fast-paced world, the assignment is most often to deliver on the vision of someone else, like the art director, rather than the photographer. In the 1990s, digital technology opened up a new world.
“I was always bumping up against what you could do in analog,” he says. Digital delivered “a big box of crayons with all the colors I could ever need.”
He taught classes in Photoshop and co-founded a company called Photomorphis that, for 10 years, offered tools for artists working in that software. But after working in Seattle for many years, Landreth moved north in 2017 to Camano Island. There his waterfront home offered a new perspective on the natural world.
“You can find beauty anywhere if you take the time to look closely enough,” he says. “That’s what I love to do now.”
