Roman Loranc

Over the course of his or her lifetime, a reviewer encounters a wide variety of books. Most are good. Some are excellent. A select handful are cherished, forever, and are eagerly shared with family and close friends. Two-Hearted Oak is such a volume. This is, quite simply, the finest book by a contemporary artist that I have ever reviewed. I say that both as a contributing editor to TBR for some 17 years and as a landscape and wildlife photographer who has illustrated a dozen nature books myself.

Let us begin with the photographer. Roman Loranc was born in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, in 1956. He emigrated to the United States in 1981. In 1984 he moved to California, and shortly thereafter fell in love with the Central Valley. Loranc was ultimately drawn to the national wildlife refuges located in the region. He was especially attracted to the season of winter. This is the "dormant" period in middle California, when the valley oaks are bereft of leaves--revealing their baroque architecture--and the migrating birds gather in biblical flocks and the morning fog hangs long over the meadows and woodlands. It is a sorrowful, besieged time of year. For many months, the austere landscape serves as a powerful metaphor as much as it presents a particular earthly vision.

The unique suite of black-and-white landscapes from the Central Valley brings to mind the work of several other western photographers (Philip Hyde, Morley Baer, and John Sexton.) There is, however, something else at work here. Loranc's lens finds a bleakness that is more northern European than Californian in sensibility, with its characteristic brightness. The desolate images variously evoke, among other art forms, the later poetry of Theodore Roethke, a certain well-known opera by Franz Schubert, and the early tempera landscapes of Andrew Wyeth. Sadness, emptiness, dislocation--they are all here, in rather monumental form, and yet so are truth and beauty. The book is, in its visual totality, an essay on hope that, ironically, appears at first glance to be as gloomy as a chapter in an Emile Brontë novel. It is a tribute to the photographer's skill that he is able, in keeping with Pascal's maxim, to touch both extremes simultaneously, and thus achieve excellence.

A representative image is Crucified Landscape, San Joaquin Valley, 1998. The photographer presents a vast, cultured vineyard.The immaculate rows are spread out evenly beneath a tremendous sky filled with foreboding darkness and a loose scattering of electric white clouds. This might be Eden after the fall, or the last stubborn remnant of civilization. Among the selected European images included at the end of the book, Road to Home, Poland 2001 stands out. The towering birch trees along the narrow dirt road, and the certain gulf beyond, summon all the silent gravity in the poetry of Loranc's nobel-winning countryman, Czeslaw Milosz.

For those with technical interest, Loranc shoots with a 4x5 Linhof. He tones his prints with sepia and selenium. In the darkroom he has no set formula-- actively turning from the more scientific technique of Ansel Adams and others--and opts for a carefree, natural approach that, nevertheless, produces images of tremendous virtuousity.

The text by his wife, Lillian Vallee, is exquisitely written, and the book is handsomely produced. If it were easy to do, everybody would publish books like this all the time. But it is not easy, and books like this are as rare as a wild, free-ranging grizzly bear in the state that features a grizzly bear on its state flag. I eagerly look forward to the next volume of photographs by this incredible genius, and I sincerely hope that Roman Loranc exhibits his work in a fine arts gallery in Denver in the near future.

A final note: This is a work of art that is married to a practical and political purpose. In this respect, the photographer is following in the tradition of such predecessors as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, both of whom used their cameras and their reputations to document the injustices of Manzanar in the 1940s. The photographer and his wife--we learn in the afterword--have published this volume as much to alert the public to the environmental challenges facing the Central Valley wetlands as to share with us these enduring works of art. Accordingly, a significant percentage of the proceeds will be devoted to wetlands restoration at the San Luis and San Joaquin National Wildlife Refuges in Merced and Stanislaus Counties. Bravo!