Stephen Johnson Photography News

June 2026

Hello to my subscribers and guest readers. Thanks for visiting this June 2026 newsletter.

This month's View From Here column explores my recent journey of renewal up to the Pacific Northwest trip via the northern California Coast. It ends with the loss of my dear friend Jeff Schewe.

A few of the stories and photographs I made along the way are featured in this Newsletter. I visited coastal towns, redwood forests, the Columbia Gorge, the rolling hills of the Palouse and four different dams and waterworks.

A video of the talk on my Urban Eden Golden Gate Park at the Odd Fellows Club in Half Moon Bay in April is now up in an early edit form. As I mentioned in the January Newsletter, with my studio/gallery closing, the existing exhibitions I have created are available for loan to museums and galleries. They include Life From, With a New Eye: The Digital National Parks Project, Exquisite Earth, selections from The Great Central Valley Project and the 50 Years of Space Photography. You can check out the exhibit loan possibilities here.

There is still much to give away, monitors, some older iMacs, and color management equipment. See below.

Having now successfully run my first class in the new studio, I have scheduled another session of my Fine Art Digital Printing class for September 17-20, 2026. An August 8-11 session is now full. I am reducing the class size to three and If you want to join me, register soon.

— Steve

As these newsletters can cover many subjects, let me know of topics you would like to see addressed.

Scholarships

As part of my ongoing commitment to photographic education, there is one student scholarship spot in many of my classes. Please pass the word along.

For discounted time studying with me, keep in mind my Mentoring Program.

Tower Three. Satsop Nuclear Plant. WA. 2026.

The Satsop Nuclear Plant came up in our Photo Chat discussions awhile back. The idea of an abandoned nuclear power plant construction site intrigued me, so it was on my growing list of Pacific Northwest destinations. As we approached the towers emerged above the forest. They were a little spooky, iconic and almost sensual.

I’m offering an un-matted 14-inch-wide print of this photograph for $195. Larger prints can be ordered. This print at this price is offered through June 30 I'll be taking orders until then, and shipping them out by July 15, 2025. The image reverts to its normal price after that, $800 for an 11x14, $1500 for a 16x20 print.

Shasta Dam. 2026

I stopped by the Shasta Dam on the way home from my Pacific Northwest trip. As it is the northernmost unit of the Federal Central Valley Project, it’s odd that I had never visited before, but it is well north of the Sacramento Valley itself. A few years back, my friend and former student David Gardner did a wonderful photograph of the spillway there and I made mental note to visit when I could. As this trip featured many “energy” sites, including three dams, it seemed like just the thing to do to break up the long 8 hour drive home. Walking out on the dam gave some wonderful perspectives on the structure and spillways. This view jumped back and forth in depth perception and I was quite happy with the result, although torn over color or black and white.

THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Stephen Johnson

A Journey of Renewal and Loss

I’ve needed to reconnect with the natural world and my photography. I had been talking with some of my students about a trip up to Washington state for awhile. In sorting through the options, I decided on a trip up the west coast through northern California, Oregon and Washington. There are many reasons to hit the road, new discoveries, breaking the routine of home, seeing old friends, and just plain shaking things up. Before long it became clear to me that I was really attempting to put together a kind of journey of renewal. At the end, the trip shifted to grief and loss with the death of my friend Jeff Schewe. (see below)

The studio/gallery closure took a lot out of me and took apart much of what I had built over 26 years of having a commercial space, room to move, to build a classroom, galleries and the ongoing process of re-imagining how to fill those gallery walls with my work. With that all gone, I am having to rethink many things. A road trip seemed like one way looking at it all anew.

This text was mostly written as I went along the journey, so it is a bit like a journal of the trip.

After a series of public facing events at the new studio, including some print sales, on Wednesday May 13 I headed north. The first stop was to see my friend/photographer Marion Patterson on the Sonoma/Mendocino coast. At 93 her spirit is good, but as she says, she is tired. Our visit was short but heartfelt.

My route north took me along the coast and up through redwood parks and forests, through the towns where I looked for character and habitability, trying go slowly and sense the vibe of these places. A single new visit has its limitations, but it does help build intuitions about a place.

I was looking forward to an immersion into the redwoods, and that I surely got–a few trails, trees taller than easy comprehension, and a sense of life and decay all around. The forest is many things, it is where the bodies return to the earth and life springs from every crevice.

As I wander, I do ponder where I’m at right now with my photography. I do need to free myself from the notion of needing to make important photographs. I need to learn again to simply be delighted by what I see. That really does need to be enough, to have a reason to move about, witness and treasure.

Driving through mile after mile of forest started to create an illusion of the forest being endless. The swatches of clear cuts kept appearing, and curious mono-cultures of the replant. Coming around the bend into Scotia California brought into view the vast lumber yard of the Humboldt Lumber Company. The vast piles of cut dead trees and neat stack of row after row of processed timber was shocking. It is the most I have seen in a single place. The air hung with the scent of cut wood.

Moving further up the coast it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be much of a detour to look up my cousin Abby who I hadn’t seen in decades. In our family Abby was kind of a legend who with his wife Connie built a chain of 24 pizza joints across Oregon. It was very good to connect, share some family legends and stories, grounding my heritage a little better. Abby and his wife Connie were so welcoming that I said I would try to stop back by on my way home.

I am in a wander, at the moment camping at Cape Lookout on the central Oregon coast, I’m seeing places I’ve never stopped to visit. I am stopping in Portland for a few days and am lucky to get to see some old friends, but discovered one had died, my old college friend and roommate photographer Bill Washburn.

I’ve spent a few days with my friend photographer Joshua Green who has moved on from managing his father Milton Green’s vast celebrity photo archive. It was good to see Joshua breathing in the air of his own path again, imagining his future, Our two days together was filled with good food we made, conversations circuitous and damned interesting. Joshua has lived a rich life and it will be interesting to see how it evolves from here. He too has just closed down a huge space, and both our stories and consequent storage challenges resonated with each other.

As I made my way up the Oregon coast I looked for reasonable distances, time to wander and the next likely campground. The app HipCamp made the camping much easier. This was not a carefully planned trip, it was an improvisation with some friend touch points along the way.

Cape Lookout. 5/20/16

The water is shallow here and the tide was out, so the beach stretched to the sunset, making long reflecting surfaces with sand dollars scattered among the inch deep water. An orange cloud reflected in that shallow surf to the south. It was beautiful.

I mapped out a route to the high point of the Palouse, Steptoe Butte, concentrating on getting there to be able to spend a few hours before sunset. I knew this wasn’t the most dramatic time of year to be photographing the Palouse, that the fall harvest was more dramatic, but I had the opportunity and after all, I could be nearby. The compositions and design came easy, the place is already abstraction waiting to be recorded. I felt at home.

South of Seattle I met up with friends for a few days from my Photo Chats, Tom Morrill and Jim Bracher. We went to the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge, the 70% completed nuclear power plant Satsop, and the Cushman Dams, all places connected with water in this water surrounded south Puget Sound.

In low tide at Nasqually there were all sorts of birds. Amazingly, at one point I had six Great Blue Herons in a single frame. It almost doesn’t matter that the photograph was soft, it was so very cool to see.

The Cushman Dams projects were built in 1928 and 1930, both for hydroelectric power and both still running after almost 100 years.

The Satsop site was bizzarre. An ambitious array of nuclear power plants were planned for southwest Washington in the 1970s. The construction at Satsop stopped when they ran out of money and public opposition grew. One Tower was nearly complete, the other is only a shell. The reactor was quite far along. Now the site is attempting to rebirth itself as an industrial park. It felt as though we were walking among some sort of post apocalyptic ruins.

I am slowly working through the photographs I made as there is more there visually than easily understood.

Those last two days were a good cap on the trip before I turned south for home. But the last day out was when the news came about the loss of my good friend Jeff Schewe and a dark cloud descended.

I brought along a few books on the trip. Among them was my treasured hardbound copy of Robert Adams Beauty in Photography. A business card of mine was bookmarking a section in the essay collection called Making Art New..

… the only thing that is new in art is the example;· the. message is, broadly speaking, the same–coherence, form, meaning. The example changes profitably, I think, because the span of our interest is fleeting, our imaginations are weak, and our historical perspectives are short; we respond best to affirmations that are achieved within the details of life today, specifics that we can, to our surprise and delight and satisfaction, recognize as our own.

Many passages from this book have inspired me…from the essay: Truth and Landscape

from the essay: Beauty in Photography

Quoting William Carlos Williams… “poets write for a single reason - to give witness to spender.”

I’ve decided to keep this book in my van.

The trip was good, reflective and I got in some good wandering. More photographs to follow.

Jeff Schewe

My dear friend Jeff Schewe has died. Jeff was a deeply talented photographer with an eye for irony, design, balance and beauty in many forms. He had a sharp wit, and an occasional gruff demeanor that could sometimes mask the caring man inside. He liked the hard-ass biker persona he had perfected, and some of it was true, but he was so much more complex and tender than that. His sarcasm was well trod ground and he loved being a smart-ass. I loved him.

On Friday May 22 I had set up a visit with my friend Mac Holbert who was recovering from a health issue in Vancouver, WA. On my arrival Mac walked me to a garden area and we called Jeff who we knew was in the hospital with breathing difficulties. It was great to talk with Jeff, but he had the bad news that lung cancer had been found. A new treatment was planned and I started exploring airline tickets to Chicago. Mac and I were obviously very concerned, while I was also relieved Mac was doing so well. Jeff had told another close friend not to fly in yet, that he was going to fight this. It seemed we had some time. We did not, Jeff died on Wednesday. A wave of devastation swept across the photo community we had all built over the last 30 years.

It’s impossible to sum up the way you know and love a friend in a few words. The emotional loss is very heavy and the friendship we shared precious.

Jeff was a man of self confidence and ego, that also had no problem taking classes and doing portfolio reviews with people far earlier in their career than he was. He was curious, wanted to learn, sought perspective on his work and had taken his commercial career and transformed it into a body of truly special fine-art work. To say he was an accomplished photographer would be an understatement, he was a very fine photographer, of great sensitivity and skill. He was also my friend of 30 years.

Together with Seth Resnick and John Paul Caponigro, Jeff and I taught three workshops together in Antarctica. Those experiences sharpened some of our differences, but also strengthened our bond in great adventure. In 1997 he rode his motorcycle out from Chicago to visit me in South Dakota as I was working on With a New Eye, my national parks project. He made a portrait of me on that trip that he continued to refer as the only photograph he ever had in Life Magazine, that picture of me.

Over the last five years, I got to see Jeff most every week in the virtual Photo Chat community I started at the beginning of the pandemic. Jeff attended most all of my 200 or so Photo Chats since. That weekly interaction, became a kind of joint teaching, expressions of our different perspectives and workflows, ongoing view of his own evolving work, and deepened our connection and friendship.

Jeff accepted my invitation in 2025 to show his Black and White in Antarctica work as the last Guest Photographer show in my gallery at the Pacifica Center for the Arts. Working with him on that show, its opening and closing events, and the people that it gathered together made us closer still. I was proud and honored to show his work. We interviewed each other about our work, mine is here, and I am working to get Jeff’s online.

In 2006, when our mutual friend Bruce Fraser was in his last days also fighting cancer, on a phone call in front a big Pixel Mafia dinner in New York, Bruce extracted a promise from Jeff to quit smoking. He did. Perhaps we had Jeff in our lives for another twenty years because of the promise made and kept.

There are so many stories to share, but I am still too sad to detail them now. I will try to share more later.

There is a deep unreality to a friend’s death. It is hard to believe that someone you love, have had decades of friendship and conversations with, someone you counted as a close friend, is simply gone. Of course, there is nothing simple about it. It is a complex set of shared values, trust, respect, affection, revelation, no longer with us. It is true, our memories, his photographs, Jeff’s many friends will continue to hold him in their minds and hearts, but knowing that the living Jeff is gone is so deeply heartbreaking that I feel more lost in this complex world and that the world is much emptier without him.

My heart opens and goes out to Jeff’s wife Becky, and to all of his friends whose lives were also enriched by this complex, good, and talented man. Jeff, I will always hold you in my heart.

Webpages about Jeff

Luminous Landscape

The new studio walls carry forward the display of larger prints from from the previous studio/gallery drawn from various projects in my career.

Currently my up on the walls are my Trees, Firtzgerald Reserve, Last Light on Half Dome Yosemite, Wildflowers Carrizo Plain, Carrizo Flowers and Storm, the Hale Telescope Palomar Observatory, the Life Form featured print Staghorn Fern, prints from the new and forming Organic Landscapes work and Point Reyes Aurora. I seem to always find a place for my 20 inch print of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. Four print bins remain browsable through subjects ranging from Rock and Roll, Ireland, Iceland, parks, and local photographs as well as my library of books I’ve created over the last 44 years..

Virtual Educational Experiences

Virtual Classes and Lectures, online live classes on various topics with limited space and Q&A sessions, are now a regular part of my workshop program. Critiques are now virtual.

Virtual Classes

My virtual classes program, launched in 2020, has allowed me to reach students around the world. I remain committed to offering great courses whether in person or virtually. See what satisfying experiences students have had on my workshops by exploring Workshop Testimonials. 

Virtual Mentoring

Set up time for me to help with your photographic work, remote or in-person. Mentoring Program.

Virtual Consulting

With all of our busy schedules and limited budgets, destination workshops or classes become a challenge, but many of you still have questions you need answered, or feedback on some new work. I want to remind you of my Virtual Online Consulting Program. This service allows all of you out there around the globe to consult online, live, on technical, aesthetic and workflow issues.

Virtual Mentoring/Consulting

Existing Online Tutorials

My Essays and Tutorials from the past couple of years can now be found on my Newsletter Archive.

Photo Chats

I’ve been doing weekly virtual Photo Chats with groups of photo friends to keep everyone encouraged to keep working, creating a forum to share and problem-solve. I’ve now built a webpage on the chats. Let me know if you would like to join us.

Most every Tuesday morning since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have been doing weekly virtual Photo Chats on Zoom with groups of photo friends. They are casual, virtual get-togethers, and have created a little community with regular sharing, guest presentations, demos, and photo feedback. Let me know if you would like to join us.

Many of my mentoring students have wanted help with their printing, often to make sure they can produce a specific print. Consequently, my Print Mentoring Program sets up a 2-hour time slot and the production of a finished print, all with the tutorial video of how we produced the print together. Prints can be up to 16x20 and on either Hahnemühle Museum Etching or Photo Rag Pearl paper. Fee is $500. Email for more information and to set up times. 

Print On Demand Book Projects over the last few years

Click on the book covers above to learn more and purchase.

I finished three new books in 2023. Water: A Photographic Portrait launched the winter, and the new Cliffside Peregrines and Fauna books were finished at the end of the year.

I sold out of the first run of the Fauna book and have reordered all three of the new books for the studio stock.

The links here go to my printer Magcloud, where you can order them directly.