University of New Mexico. Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hodgin_Hall,_University_of_New_Mexico.jpg)
Career
Gallery of Eric Johnson
California Polytechnic State University. Photo: Gregg Erickson (Farwestern), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cal-Poly-from-outback.jpg)
University of New Mexico. Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hodgin_Hall,_University_of_New_Mexico.jpg)
California Polytechnic State University. Photo: Gregg Erickson (Farwestern), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cal-Poly-from-outback.jpg)
Eric B. Johnson is an American photographer and educator whose work spans fine-art photography, digital imaging, photograms, landscape studies, and photographic history. He is also known for researching, printing, exhibiting, and writing about composer Ernest Bloch’s photography, and for a long teaching career at California Polytechnic State University.
Background
Eric B. Johnson was born on August 5, 1949, in Portland, Oregon. He became interested in photography during the 1960s, developing an early practice that later encompassed large-format work, journalistic and street photography, landscape photography, photograms, and digital image-making.
While an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, Johnson was encouraged to investigate the photographic archive of composer Ernest Bloch. Beginning in 1970, he worked with Bloch’s family to research, edit, and print images from more than 6,000 negatives, an undertaking that became a lasting strand of his artistic and scholarly career.
Education
Johnson earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Oregon’s honors program in 1971. The University of Oregon, founded in 1876 in Eugene, was the state’s principal public research university and had an established tradition in journalism, art, and photographic education. During his undergraduate years, Johnson also developed his research on Ernest Bloch’s photography.
He received a Master of Arts in 1975 and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography in 1978 from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The university’s College of Fine Arts provided a major institutional setting for photographic study in the American Southwest, where photographic education was closely connected with experimental and fine-art practices.
Johnson began teaching photography at the University of New Mexico as a graduate teaching fellow from 1975 to 1977. He then taught photography at Western Washington University in Bellingham from 1978 to 1979 and served as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Photography and Cinema at Ohio State University in Columbus in 1979. These appointments placed his early professional work within the expansion of photography programs in American higher education during the 1970s.
In 1980, Johnson joined the faculty of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where he taught photography and photographic history for more than three decades and later held the status of professor emeritus. Cal Poly’s applied, project-oriented educational tradition shaped a department in which photographic practice, design, technology, and visual communication were taught together. Johnson advised photography students and contributed to the development of the university’s photography curriculum.
His artistic work developed through several bodies of photographs and photographic objects. In the 1970s he explored large-format photography in the f.64 tradition, small-camera journalistic work, street photography, and photograms. His later projects included the California landscape series Abandoned Highways, Scenes of the Pacific War, the digital work Videoglyphs, Ireland golf-course landscapes, Shrines & Altars, The Myth of Choice, and other digitally produced still-life and landscape series.
Johnson’s photographs have appeared in national exhibitions and are held in collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the GTE Collection. His work was included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art survey Photographs from the Last Decade in 1987 and in the exhibition New Realities: Hand-Colored Photographs 1839 to the Present.
Johnson researched, edited, and printed photographs from Ernest Bloch’s archive, producing prints from the composer’s extensive collection of negatives and helping bring Bloch’s photographic work to museums, libraries, exhibitions, and scholarly audiences.
Johnson donated approximately 105 prints made from Ernest Bloch’s negatives to the Library of Congress in 2009. The Eric Johnson Collection of Ernest Bloch Photographs became part of the Library’s Music Division holdings.
Johnson’s photographic work was included in major exhibitions and entered permanent collections including those of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
(A collaborative book with text by Paul J. Zingg and photo...)
2008
Views
Johnson’s photographic practice treats photography as a medium that can move between documentation, visual interpretation, cultural commentary, and poetic expression. His series and writings connect photographic images with questions of memory, landscape, technology, music, and the relationship between ordinary objects and larger cultural meanings.
His sustained work with Ernest Bloch’s photographs reflects an interest in the relationship between artistic media. By preserving and interpreting Bloch’s images, Johnson presented photography as an important part of the creative life of a composer better known for music.
Membership
Johnson was a member of the Society for Photographic Education, a professional organization devoted to photographic teaching, scholarship, criticism, and the exchange of ideas among educators and practitioners.
Society for Photographic Education
,
United States
Interests
Landscape, photographic history, digital imaging, photograms, golf-course landscapes, and the visual relationship between photography and music.
Artists
Ernest Bloch and Alfred Stieglitz, in connection with Johnson’s research into the relationship between music and photography.
Sport & Clubs
Golf, particularly as a subject of landscape photography.
Music & Bands
Johnson has a documented interest in the relationship between photography and music, especially through his research, exhibitions, lectures, and publications on Ernest Bloch.
Connections
Johnson’s long professional connection with Ernest Bloch began while Johnson was an undergraduate at the University of Oregon. Bloch’s children gave him access to the composer’s photographic archive, enabling Johnson to research the images and produce prints from the negatives.
Bernard Freemesser, a University of Oregon photography educator and university photographer, was identified in Johnson’s biographical record as a mentor. Freemesser taught photography at Oregon from 1955 until his death in 1977 and helped establish the Photography at Oregon Gallery.
University of Oregon photography educator and university photographer who taught at Oregon from 1955 until 1977 and helped establish the Photography at Oregon Gallery.
