Sandy King

Sandy King is known to many for his work in Carbon and carbo and as the author of the book The Carbon Print.
From: Easley, South Carolina, USA.
Shows: Carbon, Carbro, Platinum/palladium.

Sandy King is a photo historian and landscape photographer, working primarily with large format and ultra large format cameras. He prints primarily with alternative processes, including carbon, kallitype and palladium, and is the author of The Carbon Print. Sandy has a Ph.D. in Spanish Language and Literature and taught for many years at Clemson University. His research focused on the history of photography in Spain, and he has published several books in the area of Pictorialism. He recently retired from Clemson University, but still lives nearby in Easley, South Carolina.

Although Sandy’s work has been influenced by several important traditions, including Pictorialism, his current thinking about photography is much more in tune with the aesthetic principles of what was known in the earliest days of the medium as the neutral vision, that is, the idea that the lens is an artificial retina capable of revealing to us things independent of our senses, a relatively objective way of seeing defended in the 1920s and 1930s by the members of the school of straight photography, who held that photography has certain basic qualities which, derived from its technical parameters, endow it with a specific mission and impose on it certain mechanical principles. This essentially objective, mechanistic character of photography is an enduring concept that was defended in the 1960s by the French critic André Bazin, and still finds a place in the thinking of numerous contemporary artists. It recognizes that the lens is magical in its ability to gather light from objects in the world and expand this image to a detailed and precise rendering of nature. Photography always begins with something that is real, and this for Sandy is its greatest strength, though not its only one, and it is what sets it apart from other manifestations of the Visual Arts.

More about Sandy King

• Articles by Sandy
• Email: sanking (at) clemson.edu