Pikes Peak: On Common Ground

On July 14, 1820 Edwin James performed the first documented climb to the summit of Pikes Peak. July 14, 2020 will mark the bicentennial year of Edwin’s achievement. Mark James is Edwin’s ancestor. The common ground in the title is based, not on ancestral provenance, but on hiking and standing on the summit of Pikes Peak exactly 200 years after Edwin. Mark has been photographing Pikes Peak and the surrounding area to create a timeless, unspoiled landscape likely encountered by Edwin James and the Major Stephen H. Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountain West. In this program you will relive the adventure of Edwin James and the Major Long Expedition through story and photographs.

Photographing in black and white, Mark uses a pinhole camera which produces a soft and ethereal image. The photographs avoid mere documentary. Rather, the photographs erase the fine details of the landscape while leaving behind form and light. Mark James has been a photographer for over 50 years. He has served as a photojournalist, documentarian, commercial photographer, gallery owner, curator, landscape photographer, and presently, an emerging historian. Since 1995, Mark’s landscape photography has been closely associated with the underlying ideas of photography as well as the history of American Western expansion. In 1995, Mark was awarded a residency at Rocky Mountain National Park and thus began his present field of study: black & white landscape photography using a pinhole camera – a study that has spanned twenty-four years. Mark exhibits almost exclusively in museums. Currently, an exhibit titled Remnants of the West: Edward Curtis and Mark James was curated by the Dubuque Museum of Art and is on tour. Twenty photographs from Mark James are paired with twenty photographs of the legendary photographer, Edwin Curtis.