Jeffrey Eric Rothstein is an American photographer and avid darkroom printer who is challenging and reinvigorating the American Western landscape tradition as well as exploring other non-traditional
methods of making photographs. His work revolves around the analog film process, specific periods of painting, color, mysticism, abstraction, human connectedness in the digital age, and psychedelics. Jeffrey’s practice reexamines the history of photography and recreates an altered and heightned mental state that mirrors hallucinations. He is best known for his iconic landscapes based on Chinese paintings of the 8th and 10th centuries, The Zion Series: Plateaux of Mirrors (2010-present), a project born of his love of the western United States and his fascination with the intersection of painting and photography. His new work, a continuation of the Zion series subtitled Both Directions at Once is a deeper journey through the primordial landscapes of southern Utah and his ecstatic vision of his experiences in those spaces.
As he sees it, the line between perception and hallucination is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits your perception at the moment, the bridge when one thing appears and the other disappears. This is the space he looks to find – magic by another name – to create his work.