For more than 20 years, master photographer Jon Ortner has walked the earth in the name of aestheticism, pilgrimage, and sacred topography.

Undaunted by the challenges of distance and terrain, accompanied by his wife, Martha, Ortner has trekked over the mountains and through the gorges of Asia to record wonders of man-made and natural glory. In 2005, he turned his focus and passion to the canyons and deserts of the American Southwest.

From the sacred temples and ancient shrines of Nepal to remote slot canyons in the Grand Staircase, Ortner has illuminated the intimate connection between nature and spirituality, creating images that are breathtaking, evocative, and reflective of his deep passion and reverence for his subject.

His most recent book, Canyon Wilderness, which represents the epitome of color panoramic film photography, was praised as the definitive pictorial to the American Southwest.

Today, Ortner continues to record the wilderness of the American Southwest with his panoramic camera, but now it’s loaded with black-and-white film.


Born of a Perfect Storm

Ortner’s decision to record the sacred geological landforms of the American Southwest in black-and-white was informed by three seemingly unrelated projects from his past.

“All through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, I was specializing in Asia,” he explains. “Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Bhutan, Nepal and India — and I was doing fairly large expeditions, including two expeditions where I lived in a tent for 50 days, and walked over 500 miles. But I was coming back to New York for assignments and commercial work to fund those expeditions.”

Interested in black-and-white photography and wanting to do something different from his spiritual photography and corporate photography, he began shooting nudes.

“I was shooting dancers and athletes from some of the top dance troupes — Pilobolus, Alvin Ailey — so I had incredible models and I was shooting medium- and large-format 4x5,” he says, adding that when he starts shooting something, he usually has a book in mind. “I was looking for a black-and-white film that I knew was going to last into the future and was going to give me nudes with a texture, quality, high resolving power, and extreme sharpness that would be book-worthy.”

Coincidentally, that was around the same time KODAK PROFESSIONAL T-MAX 100 Film was launched.

“As soon as T-MAX 100 Film came out — with its razor sharpness, invisible grain, and what they advertised as ‘maximum image quality’ — I realized it was exactly what I was looking for. I absolutely loved the creamy quality that T-MAX 100 Film would give me for skin.”

Impetus number two: during that period, Ortner was also doing quite a bit of real estate photography for big developers, one of whom happened to be Donald Trump.

“They were trying to sell these penthouses on the tops of skyscrapers,” he recalls. “They were going for fantastic amounts of money — $17 million for one penthouse — and they said, ‘We want to sell this property by showing the New York City skyline.’”

Ortner decided what they were really asking for was a panorama, so he bought a 6x17 panoramic view camera. (He had already published Manhattan Dawn and Dusk, so was well-versed in large-format and long twilight exposures from the tops of bridges and tallest skyscrapers.)

Now for the third and final impetus: “I started seeing some strange photographs of the American Southwest — landscapes that were beyond anything I had ever seen.”

They were photographs of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Southern Utah, designated a U.S. National Monument by President Bill Clinton in 1996, which spans nearly 1.9 million acres. “It’s bigger than New Jersey, bigger than Pennsylvania. It’s the largest area of preserved land in the continental U.S. Not only is it the largest entire ecosystem ever preserved in America, but no one actually knew what was in it,” Ortner said.

“I saw the photographs coming out of the Grand Staircase and from another giant preserve called Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, and the first thing I saw were these slot canyons. They’re very, very narrow canyons, some no more than 10 feet wide, with very high walls, some over 1,500 feet tall, so only at mid-day in the afternoon, when the sun is directly overhead, are they illuminated. And I started thinking how spectacular it would be to photograph these spectacular landforms, such as, The Wave and White Pocket in vermilion cliffs, or to go down into the slot canyons with a panoramic view camera.”

So in 2004 — being an explorer and trekker with an affinity for the remote and unfamiliar — that’s what he did, the result being Canyon Wilderness. Of course, being an inveterate planner, while he was shooting Canyon Wilderness, he was also planning his next book. “I wanted to do something on American wilderness that would still be panoramic,” he says, “But I wanted to do something in black-and-white.”

So in 2008, Ortner and his wife went to Yosemite, the Sierras, and Death Valley and he began shooting the area with KODAK PROFESSIONAL T-MAX 100 Film.

“When I first started shooting the color work, I was astounded by the colors. But with the black-and-white, I became more classically oriented, more interested in shape and contrast and weather and light.”


Layers of Meaning

“As soon as I went to the Southwest I was astounded at how emotionally connected I felt to the landscape of the desert,” Ortner recalls, “Its emptiness, its loneliness, its quietude.”

He and Martha would rise at 3:30 or 4 in the morning and hike 10 miles and never see another person the entire day. “Here we are in 2009 and there are places in America barely even touched. Escalante, Utah, was the last town in America to get electricity, the last town in America to have its mail delivered by mule. Right here in Utah in and Arizona, you can be alone for an entire day and hear nothing but the wind whistling through the junipers.

“It was such a contrast to working in Nepal, India and other places in Asia, which are often so crowded, so many people coming up to you, and you’re constantly trying to find a serene point of view. I was used to a culture and a landscape that I would call full, that forced you to relate on many different layers. I found the emptiness of the desert to be something incredibly spiritual and the serenity to be something that really puts one’s mind in a certain place.”

And yet, as different as Asia is from the American Southwest, through Ortner’s lens and the layers of meaning he unearths, they are intrinsically connected.

“What connects them is this idea of pilgrimage, sacred topography, and the great meditative religions of Hinduism and Buddhism,” Ortner explains. “What you find with Hinduism and Buddhism is that when they build temples here on earth, these are essentially representations of the celestial temples. Every temple in India is not only a pilgrimage place, it’s the earthly home of the gods here. The gods live in the sacred peaks; the sacred peaks give forth to the sacred rivers. Just the way the Ganges flows from the Himalaya. So when they build a temple, the temples are in the shapes of the sacred mountains and they are often at the joinings of streams. The Hindus and the Buddhists have animistic relationships with the landscape, the way the American Indians do, in which peaks are sacred, rivers are sacred, caves are sacred, and certain forests are sacred. In Asia they build the shrines to commemorate these places. And in the west, Native Americans often create petroglyphs and pictographs to adorn and connect to their revered places of spiritual power.

“Not only are these temples architecturally meaningful, they are also built in places of great natural beauty and power,” Ortner adds. “After traveling as extensively as I have in Asia, I have a great affinity to the spiritual aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. But I come from a scientific point of view. In terms of photography, that gives added layers of meaning to all of my pictures, content beyond just shape and color.”


Logistics, Logistics, Logistics

Ortner learned long ago the importance of logistics.

“When you have flown 24 hours to get to Katmandu to do a trek, one missing battery, or one missing tripod screw is the difference between success and failure,” he says.

He’s always surprised when he hears people talk about waiting to get to a location and spontaneity. “I find that to be the absolutely worst way to photograph. If you don’t do your research, if you don’t know a certain formation faces east and it has to be shot at sunrise, there is nothing more frustrating than getting to a location 10 or 20 minutes too late. So I am a maniac about finding out exactly how many miles away it is, exactly how much water it takes, exactly what map I need. So when I say I do a year of research, I’m not kidding.”

Consequently, he keeps meticulous shoot notebooks. “For every book I’ve ever done, I’ve had these massive shoot notebooks. I record everything I need to know about the place. Does it need a permit, for instance? I don’t want to be wondering which direction the slot canyon faces or do I need a Navajo permit to get in there. And yes, we have a little bit of latitude; if it’s raining, we might change a location but in general every single day for a two or three month expedition is planned with these shoot notebooks.”


Research, Research, Research

“I feel that scholarship is really important,” Ortner says. “Yes, there’s a certain artistic aspect of photography, but for me, it’s research and the intellectual pursuit that sets the stage for truly great photography.”

Before Ortner went to the Himalayas, he had read every book on the exploration of the Himalayas —“Every Hillary book, every book by Shipton and Tillman, who were the mappers of the Himalayas.

“Of course, being at the right place at the right time and qualities of light are important,” he admits. “But before I take a portrait of holy men, I want to be at the most important pilgrimage place on the day before the most sacred holiday. I want to have spoken with the Shiva Sadhu for the last week and learn about where he’s at in his pilgrimage. Then I do my portrait sessions. I don’t just pop out of the car and start shooting.”

Similarly, he read everything he could before he headed to the American Southwest. “Before I went to the Grand Canyon, before I went to Bryce Canyon, I did a year of research. I read all the great works — not only the explorations of the West but all the poetic works. I wanted to know what other people who have been inspired by the West thought. What do they write about, where is their passion coming from? Again, these are layers of meaning. You can’t understand the Himalayas without understanding the geology of the Himalayas. You can’t understand the West, the canyons and the deserts, without understanding the science first. Then the additional layers are spiritual and artistic.”

“The rest,” he says, “is just the joy of shooting."

Or in our case, the joy of seeing through his magical eye what we might never see in person.


About  Ortner

Jon Ortner was born in Great Neck, on the north shore of Long Island. Throughout his youth he was fascinated with insects, plants, and animals and became an avid naturalist and wilderness hiker. He continued his studies in ecology, eastern philosophy, and photography during his university years. In 1978, he moved to Manhattan to start a commercial photo studio with his wife and business partner, Martha McGuire. They divide their time between exotic locations around the world and assignments for corporate clients. Ortner’s photography has been published in four large-format books, as well as in numerous magazines and product advertisements.