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Synesthesia
“…his extraordinary depictions of the wild Maine landscape—images imbued with a magic, poetry, and sharp beauty that touches deep places in me, and I suspect will in you.”
- Paul Caponigro, Renowned Photographer and Author, Landscape and Megaliths
Donald DuBose Duncan set out in the early 1980s while still an undergraduate at Bowdoin College to trek ever deeper into the dense forests and the wild shores of Maine in search of scenes to photograph using a distinctive style of large format black and white pioneered by the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Don's work quickly earned the acclaim and the attention of galleries and museum curators and famed photographers like Paul Caponigro and John Sexton. Exploring Maine in an old Volvo 240 Turbo, Don would carefully choose a scene and set up his 4x5 Nikon camera mounted on a large tripod, sometimes taking a whole day or two to carefully study a waterfall or flowing stream; the mist rising off a range of mountains or an ice-chocked beach in the middle of winter. He would take and retake a shot, adjust light settings and shifting points of view in fastidious detail. Later, back in the darkroom, Don would spend countless hours patiently developing each image until he got it just right. His aim was to engage viewers with a sense of what he calls “synesthesia,” which he defines like “Synesthesia is when I’ m gazing a photograph of a waterfall and I hear the rush and feel the cold, wet spray of the water.”
In the late 1990s, Don’s health declined, and his camera went dark. In 2024, his brother, the writer David Ewing Duncan, helped him to assemble the best landscape shots among over 5000 images and negatives taken in the 1980s and 1990s into this book. Don wrote the “Artist’s Statement” and contacted his long-ago teacher, Paul Caponigro, who penned a beautiful foreword shortly before he died at the age of 91. The afterword written by his brother David is titled “The Awakening,” about Don’s partial recovery from a different kind of wilderness, that of the mind.
From the “Artist’s Statement,” by Donald DuBose Duncan from Synesthesia:
As I approach the waterfall, I begin to anticipate the task ahead. I hear the mighty roar of water falling, crashing against the granite boulders below. As I get closer, the volume increases, and becomes as loud as thunder. I recall tremendous storms on the Kansas prairie as a teenager growing up in Kansas. The rhythm of my beating heart escalates. My excitement increases with each step forward; the tension builds. I am about to experience treasure, sensory treasure. The plethora of empirical momentum climaxes. I have arrived...
All my senses are engaged. To the viewer of my work, my hope is that they, too, can hear the waterfall and feel the spray and other empirical ingredients of the image.
“I cannot think of another photographer who has so consciously dealt with transience… a fusion of experience and inclination... an extension of the school of landscape photography practiced by such master’s as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, and Paul Caponigro. “
- Philip Isaacson, Photographer, Author of Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle Like a Fish
“Duncan… perfect[s] a use of light and shadow and line that conveyed a sense of the passage of time, an ironic fluid stillness.
- Paul Caponigro, Renowned Photographer and Author, Landscape and Megaliths
Donald DuBose Duncan set out in the early 1980s while still an undergraduate at Bowdoin College to trek ever deeper into the dense forests and the wild shores of Maine in search of scenes to photograph using a distinctive style of large format black and white pioneered by the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Don's work quickly earned the acclaim and the attention of galleries and museum curators and famed photographers like Paul Caponigro and John Sexton. Exploring Maine in an old Volvo 240 Turbo, Don would carefully choose a scene and set up his 4x5 Nikon camera mounted on a large tripod, sometimes taking a whole day or two to carefully study a waterfall or flowing stream; the mist rising off a range of mountains or an ice-chocked beach in the middle of winter. He would take and retake a shot, adjust light settings and shifting points of view in fastidious detail. Later, back in the darkroom, Don would spend countless hours patiently developing each image until he got it just right. His aim was to engage viewers with a sense of what he calls “synesthesia,” which he defines like “Synesthesia is when I’ m gazing a photograph of a waterfall and I hear the rush and feel the cold, wet spray of the water.”
In the late 1990s, Don’s health declined, and his camera went dark. In 2024, his brother, the writer David Ewing Duncan, helped him to assemble the best landscape shots among over 5000 images and negatives taken in the 1980s and 1990s into this book. Don wrote the “Artist’s Statement” and contacted his long-ago teacher, Paul Caponigro, who penned a beautiful foreword shortly before he died at the age of 91. The afterword written by his brother David is titled “The Awakening,” about Don’s partial recovery from a different kind of wilderness, that of the mind.
From the “Artist’s Statement,” by Donald DuBose Duncan from Synesthesia:
As I approach the waterfall, I begin to anticipate the task ahead. I hear the mighty roar of water falling, crashing against the granite boulders below. As I get closer, the volume increases, and becomes as loud as thunder. I recall tremendous storms on the Kansas prairie as a teenager growing up in Kansas. The rhythm of my beating heart escalates. My excitement increases with each step forward; the tension builds. I am about to experience treasure, sensory treasure. The plethora of empirical momentum climaxes. I have arrived...
All my senses are engaged. To the viewer of my work, my hope is that they, too, can hear the waterfall and feel the spray and other empirical ingredients of the image.
“I cannot think of another photographer who has so consciously dealt with transience… a fusion of experience and inclination... an extension of the school of landscape photography practiced by such master’s as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, and Paul Caponigro. “
- Philip Isaacson, Photographer, Author of Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle Like a Fish
“Duncan… perfect[s] a use of light and shadow and line that conveyed a sense of the passage of time, an ironic fluid stillness.
Kindle Edition
Published June 20, 2025
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