Tuesday, April 08, 2014

From the Caddo Parish Penal Farm to the Sierra Nevadas: Seattle-based, Shreveport-born photographer Cody Cobb



"This series was captured during a 221-mile solo hike across the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the state of California," artist Cody Cobb told thisispaper.com. "These photos attempt to communicate the psychological shift that occurs with the disappearance of sunlight while alone in the wilderness."

Not everyone's cup of meat. But at age 29 Cobb is sounding a bit like Ansel Adams.

Born and raised in Shreveport, he is more than an extreme hiker with a camera. His photo landscape photos have have, of late, been shown in Amsterdam (De Fotohal, 2013), NYC (Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 2014), Boston (Miller Yezerski Gallery, 2013), London (Mother London Gallery, 2012) and Moscow (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2012).

He is being widely lauded as a first-rank lensman. His photos have been included in a dozen books during the past 2 years.

Cobb described himself as "A photographer and motion designer originally from Louisiana. Sometimes I live in Seattle, other times in a 1995 Subaru station wagon or tent somewhere in the American West."

As a teen he was into woods treks to see places like the abandoned Caddo Parish Penal Farm. "Growing up, I was mostly interested in abandoned buildings and urban exploration," he told Ligature.ch. "My options for this were limited after I moved to Seattle. I started spending more time outdoors and became comfortable spending days and eventually weeks at a time outside."

Cobb was a 2002 grad of Caddo Magnet HS, where he was more into computers than art classes, says his dad, painter Don Cobb. Cody and his sister Alicia, a successful designer (Fossil Watches, Pier One Imports) living in Ft Worth, watched their dad at work in his sign shop as they grew up.

Cobb, the dad, worked on the presses at The Times for 38 years but kept a sign shop on the side. Today he has a thriving business selling on Etsy and at fests like the Red River Revel.

Cody went to the Academy of Art in San Francisco and did his first digital designing for Digital FX in Baton Rouge. After Katrina, he moved to Seattle to work as a motion designer with the top-drawer shop called Digital Kitchen. The projects he worked on included the Xbox 360 game Crackdown, the miniseries The Path to 911, the movie Superman Returns, and commercials for clients such as Yoplait and AT&T.

"Today, he works for himself," says Don. "He'll work for Microsoft for a month, then take off hiking for a month."

As a landscape photog, “I usually have a vague idea of the topography and a detailed understanding of my route and orientation, but the light and landscape is always unexpected. I shoot when I feel moved by that sense of discovery" the artist explains.

His current favorite artists? ?He told globalyodel.com they are Henri Rousseau, Andrei Tarkovsky, Xeno & Oaklander.

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