Paul Higgins

Image © Paul Higgins

Artist Statement

While undertaking photography projects throughout the Pacific Northwest in recent years, I would instinctively stop and photograph Mt. Hood, the presence of which was always vaguely reassuring, a constant in the midst of varied surroundings. Starting in 2019, I began to take a more systematic focus on Mt. Hood as such, using an identical focal length throughout, and editing the final photos such that the mountain's peak would occupy precisely the same location in the frame. These photographs were taken in all four seasons, across many hundreds of square miles, from the St. John's neighborhood in Northwest Portland to the deserts of central Washington (and beyond). While I had Katsushika Hokusai's 100 Views of Mount Fuji somewhere in the back of my mind, the more immediate influences on this series were Richard Misrach's Golden Gate and Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes, where the enigmatic landscapes -- repeated, with slight variations -- ultimately express something intangible about the permanence of nature, the impermanence of life, and the relation between the two.

Paul Higgins | Vancouver, WA