Don Krohn began taking photographs as a child, and later went on to master the traditional photographic arts and become an expert printer in the tradition of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Although he is entirely self-taught, he has mastered virtually all aspects of the medium, ranging from photojournalistic style 35mm work to meditative large format photographic studies, working both in color and black-and-white. He has produced a highly regarded and constantly evolving body of work, and his images have been shown in numerous museums and galleries, including many one-man shows. His most recent show, Nearer Than the Eye (the title is from the poem “Marina” by T.S. Eliot), is currently on exhibit at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. Krohn’s photographs are held in collections in the United States and Europe. He has photographed in locales throughout the United States and in foreign places as diverse as Nepal, Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, among many others.

His work was recognized by Minor White, the famous mentor to a generation of photographers, as having “an absolutely overwhelming sense of humanistic and symbolic presence, always displaying the most profound understanding of the possibilities of the medium.” Davis Pratt, for years the noted photography director at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, while curating a one-man show of Krohn’s work, described him as “a photographer’s photographer — one of the most talented and innovative photographic practitioners I have ever encountered.”

In recent years, Don Krohn has selectively adopted key aspects of the digital revolution in photography, and currently produces works that are an exceptionally fortuitous hybrid of traditional film exposures and archival digital printing. The resulting images possess a tremendous expressive depth and luminosity which are immediately apparent to the viewer. His current projects include the printing of more images from Venice and the Balkans, and macrophotographic images taken from his personal collection of rare books and documents.

In the South of France, an award-winning book published by David R. Godine, is comprised of Krohn’s writings and photographs taken while living in France. He is currently working on a new book.

In addition to working as an artist, Krohn, an Orleans resident, has been active in civic preservation and educational activities. He drafted the town’s landmark Architectural Review Bylaw, and was the first president of the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School. He is a founding partner of the Orleans Whole Food Store and Orleans’ Main Street Books, and has earned degrees from Brandeis University and Harvard Law School.

	At work under the focusing cloth with his view camera.

Artist's Statement:
“Photography is an obsessive passion. So much effort to get everything right, all the technical and artistic decisions: layers of questions about composition, camera angle, format, film choice, lens and shutter settings, optics, processing, printing. And even though I have spent decades deepening and refining my knowledge about these issues, they are by far the easier things to handle in the creative process. These are the variables more or less in my control. The vast territory that is not in my control presents the greater and more exhilarating challenge: changing light, shadow patterns, a person's expression, the shape of a mountain, the time of year. In short, all the wonderful wide world. As a photographer working in natural environments, outside of the studio, I have no control over what I am looking at, but I try to see it as clearly and profoundly as possible, and to communicate, in my images, something about what I am seeing and why I want to look at it, and in turn something about myself. The lack of authority over the subject, whether animate or inanimate, is truly exciting to me. I do have some creative power, but ultimately the subject is nobly sovereign, and the anarchy of serendipity is the governing dispensation. My contribution to the ultimate image depends on my fluency in the photographer's idiom, the language of the chemistry and physics of film and camera. It is an interactive process in which I am something of a catalyst, and which I have come to call, in my personal lexicon, ‘the influence of light.’”