“Bruce Mathews is a commercial and fine-art photographer. During a 25-year career in New York City, he specialized in annual reports, brochures, and corporate advertising. His client list included AT&T, American Express, ABC News, Citibank, JP Morgan, Wall Street Journal, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Columbia University, Mount Sinai Medical Center and Young & Rubicam.

Now, living year-round on Martha’s Vineyard, he focuses on themes from the natural world, searching for the same sort of abstract values that informed his commercial work.  In his recent floral series, for example, he often treats his subjects as still life objects, more akin to pressed flowers than those rooted in the backyard garden. He finds ingenious ways of manipulating flowers —suspending them in water, freezing them, tugging apart their blossoms or seed pods—even flattening them on a car windshield and shooting against a luminous sky.  In so doing, he brings out unexpected qualities of color, translucency and structure.

In a digital age, Mathews is a purist: what you see is what he saw in his viewfinder: an alternate botanical universe that was always there, waiting to be discovered.”

John Zeaman