Kerik Kouklis

Gates of the Valley, Yosemite National Park 2019

2019

Kerik Kouklis is a fine art photographer, filmmaker, and educator who specializes in creating handmade photographs and documentary films. Born and raised in California with a background in music and a 30-year career as an environmental geologist under his belt, Kerik combines a contemporary eye with 19th-century processes to produce work that is uniquely his own. Influenced by the pictorialists of the early 20th century, he makes images that can be at once calm and unsettling. Working in a variety of formats from small digital cameras up to large view cameras, Kerik uses both film and digital negatives to create his prints. He is known as a skilled practitioner and teacher of the platinum/palladium process and the combined gum-platinum process. He has used these processes to create his work since 1990 and has been teaching workshops in these processes since 1997, both in his home studio and at various locations around the US, Canada, and the UK. In 2004 Kerik began working with the wet plate collodion process which brought a new series of portraits and still-life images into his portfolio. These images are one-of-a-kind, made in-camera on aluminum or glass. Kerik has also dabbled making daguerreotypes and plans to continue pursuing this earliest and perhaps most difficult of the photographic processes. Kerik’s work is currently represented in California by Oficino Uno in Carmel, CA, and the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite where he has been teaching hand-made photographic techniques since 2000. His prints are held in private and corporate collections in North America and Europe as well as the Museum of Fine Art, Houston and the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, Newcastle, Pennsylvania. Kerik is also a fledgling glass-blower, another medium he plans to pursue.