from The Forecaster, Art Review, October 27th, 2005 (Portland & Suburbs)
'Wild' Bill Curtsinger
Exhibit of his photographs takes us places most of us will never go
By Edgar Allen Beem
Though I have known photographer Bill Curtsinger and his superb underwater work for more than 20 years, I don't think I really appreciated the breadth and depth of his achievements until I saw "Extreme Nature: Images from the World's Edge," a Curtsinger retrospective at the Art Gallery at University of New England on UNE's Westbrook College Campus in Portland (through Nov. 27). Go there and you, too, will be amazed by what you see.
Perhaps because I bump into Bill all the time around Yarmouth, where we both live, my familiarity with him has gotten in the way of understanding the extraordinary nature of his work. When you see a guy in the grocery store, you tend to forget that he has been to the far corners of the globe and beneath; that he possesses the courage and skill to dive beneath polar ice caps, to swim in alien environments with whales and seals and sharks and walruses; and that, once there, he has both the eye, the ability and the presence of mind to capture the beauty and strangeness of what he finds in exquisite color photographs.
"Extreme Nature" at UNE features a generous sampling of the 300 nature photographs to be found in the 409-page book of the same title (White Star Publishers, $39.95). Many of these photographs have appeared over the years in 33 articles for National Geographic, as well as publications like Smithsonian, Outside, Time, Newsweek, Life and Audubon. And what these large-format color prints depict are places and things most of us will never see in real life.
What are these exotic sights? Frogmen descending through cracks in the ice into the black depths of the McMurdo Sound, a right whale retreating, gray reef sharks approaching, yellow fin tuna swimming free, penguins marching to sea and back, a leopard seal staring you in the face, a tiger shark attacking an albatross. We may think we know these things because we have seen them in nature documentaries on television and in photographs in books and magazines, but they are remote from our daily experience. Curtsinger has been there and back, as the perfect ring of scars around his right shoulder from a shark attack off Bikini Atoll can attest. But it is the photographs that he brings back that tell us about the richness and diversity of life in far-off places and places close at hand.
"Extreme Nature" does contain startling images of life in the Gulf of Maine, from seals and porpoises to herring, crabs and monkfish. His photograph of a rock eel entwined around a trio of vase-like tunicates adds immeasurably to my appreciation of the strange life that goes on just beneath the surface of familiar waters.
Curtsinger is perhaps best known for his photographs of whales, sharks and marine mammals, but what I found most captivating in his UNE show and in his book were his photographs of jellyfish. The fantastic form of a helmet jellyfish, red tentacles gracefully extending from its translucent skirt, floating in the inky blackness of a polar sea, spoke to me of the elegant and elaborate precision lavished on every life form.
Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, Genesis or some other cosmology, it is hard to imagine in the face of evidence such as Curtsinger has gathered in photographs that life on Earth is not wonderful, mysterious and in some way purposeful.
(This review is reprinted courtesy of The Forecaster)