Mitch Dobrowner

Storms

April 7 - May 1, 2011

The Critical Mass 2010 Solo Exhibition Award, presented in collaboration with Photolucida.

Photographer Mitch Dobrowner has always loved being caught in a storm - the more severe the better. He began shooting Storms in 2009 as an experiment to photograph dramatic thunderstorms occurring across the Great Plains and in what's known as Tornado Alley. Dobrowner has since traveled more than 19,000 miles over 14 different states in the pursuit of the most extreme weather he can find.

"The goal is to capture the structure of supercell thunderstorms, the feeling of standing in wind gusts breaching 50 MPH, the lightning, the rumble of hail. I've never seen anything like these storms before. . . . They are born everyday, they fight against their environment to stay alive, change their form as they age, they lose their strength, and eventually they die. The hope is that the images presented communicate how I feel while standing in front of these amazing forces of nature."

As a young man feeling "lost" is his late teens, photographer Mitch Dobrowner was gifted an Argus rangefinder camera by his father. Dobrowner quickly became addicted to photography, being particularly inspired by the work of Minor White and Ansel Adams. In 2005, he returned to photography after running a business and raising a family. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at galleries in the U.S., Europe, and China, and is in the permanent collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Photography Museum of China, Lishui. Among the awards he has received are The Jacob Riis Award (2010), Photolucida's Critical Mass Top 50 (2008, 2009, 2010), and IPA's Photographer of the Year, Nature (2007).   

As the recipient of The Critical Mass 2010 Solo Exhibition Award, Storms is presented at Blue Sky during Portland Photo Month in collaboration with Photolucida.