Mars Suites was suggested by the predominant on-line format of the images downloaded from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: long rectangles of varying widths presented in black and white.

This format references traditional oriental landscape paintings – the tall rectangular form, the grisaille tones, the elevated perspective and exaggerated landforms. In addition, atmospheric conditions captured in the historic ink paintings by washes or stippling are rendered in the Mars photographs by frequent dust storms or sublimation of omnipresent carbon dioxide ice.

The Orbiter circles and records all areas of Mars, essentially looking for signs of water, valuable minerals, possible landing sites. Most areas are photographed again and again in different lighting and weather situations, much like an earthbound photographer will visit a site multiple times to photograph it in changing conditions.

Similar unusual landforms are found in disparate locations around the planet and most of the Mars Suites bring these three ‘locations’ together into one photograph.

The landmass captured in each panel in the photograph is roughly five kilometers wide by 10 to 12 kilometers long.

– EZ, 2019

Mars Suites are published in two formats as archival inkjet prints, each in an edition of 5.

Source Material: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Intrigued and inspired by landscapes and having traveled widely to photograph them, I was captivated by the images of sand dunes on Mars that appeared in various science magazines and on line at the NASA Picture of the Day site.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission, 2006 – present, has produced an extravagant quantity of high resolution images of the Martian landscape (62,000 and counting) and placed them all in the public domain. Since 2017 I have reviewed and selected images from this trove, to extend the Topographies series to include the seemingly familiar, but actually extraordinary landscapes of Mars.

My interest in photographing landscapes and other aspects of the natural world has grown to include these extra-terrestrial images that NASA and JPL have generously provided.

– EZ, 2018

Topography Mars are published as archival pigment prints, each in an edition of 5. Size is 60” x 60”.

For Zimmerman, earth, light, and atmosphere are elemental truths about our natural world that have resonated as guiding principles in her work throughout her career as a sculptor, painter and photographer. Since 2000, she has built an extensive and ongoing exploratory body of works on paper created independently in mixed drawing media and photography. These works examine the vast indeterminacy of nature and bring organization and focus to its essential dynamism between the rhythms, patterns, color and materiality.

In Zimmerman’s most recent works of the KOSMOS series, she continues exploring light, color and matter but now in the deep void of outer space. Star clusters, galaxies, nebula and planets such as in the KOSMOS: Saturn series, (1-9), are dynamic and spatially provoking constructivist compositions that evoke otherworldliness.

-Tom Moran, 2016

Kosmos/Saturn is published as a portfolio of 9 images, 33” x 33”, edition of 3 with 1 artist proof. For installation, please refer to the top of this page: Kosmos/Saturn, 2015-2017, installation model.

Individual works from Kosmos/Saturn are offered at 40” x 40”, edition of 3 with 1 artist proof.

All original Cassini images are in the public domain and downloaded from NASA websites.

My interest in natural phenomena led me to visit the Canadian Northwest Territories in February, 2017 to experience the Aurora Borealis. These curtains of light are a phenomenon caused by the solar wind interacting with the magnetic belts in the uppermost region of the Earth’s ionosphere. The ionization and excitation of atmospheric electrons and protons – also referred to as atmospheric plasma: hydrogen, oxygen, helium, etc – cause them to emit light of varying colors and intensity.

Plasma Scientists refer to aura colors and actions as forbidden transitions because they occur only in the furthest reaches of our atmosphere – they are interactions impossible near Earth’s surface.

– EZ, 2018

Zimmerman typically assembles nine to twelve images taken at about the same moment into the form of a grid which is used to convey the experience of being at the site. As the multiple images represent the shifting of the eye, or the changes in lighting at the site, the grid format also asserts the work as a mental construct.

While Zimmerman employs the camera to record real-world appearances, places and phenomena, how these records are used is subject to her interpretation of the photographic image as subject to all manner of alteration, combination, and as endlessly malleable. As a demonstration of this idea, one often finds in her work a blurring of the distinction between photography and drawing - one traditionally held to be an instrument of realism, the other of interpretation.

In the Topographies series, Zimmerman exploits the camera as a tool for both representation and abstraction and uses the camera's vision - distinct from human sight -  to freeze time, fix patterns and capture effects of light often invisible to the naked eye.

-Roni Feinstein, 2003

MATRIX    
1.  a rectangular array of expressions that is treated as a single entity and manipulated according to particular rules. 

The simple, rectangular grid is the matrix used for these photographs. Its flexibility - expanding or contracting the number of images (panels) to create the larger image - allows the orchestration of the scale of the final work and the balanced relationship of the panel images to one another.

TOPOGRAPHY    
1. the detailed mapping of the features of an area.
2. a schema of a structural entity reflecting a division into distinct areas having a specific relation relative to one another. 

This series of work began with the 2002 lake images that depict changes in the surface reflections on one area of water over a period of time. Once the images were laid on the work table, it seemed that time had not been captured, but had been liberated. Each single image told only one part of an ongoing story while together they created a different, larger more complex synoptic image.
-Elyn Zimmerman

In the series Cityscapes (1980-1984), which began shortly after her arrival in New York, Zimmerman moved away from her interest in enclosed gallery and studio spaces, and on to architectural exteriors. The black-and-white photographs of this series offer a particular view of the city, one devoid of people, modes of transportation, or billboards. The focus is upon the shadowy masses of the buildings that stand in shades of black and gray against brilliant white skies.

Each of the Cityscapes images is softened by the motion of the camera. Zimmerman has explained that when first arriving in NYC she felt it was in constant motion and vibration from the subways, traffic etc. When she first began to take pictures of the city she purposefully blurred the shot by giving a long exposure to represent this 'vibration'.  She liked and decided to cultivate the effect, which serves the pictures in a number of ways. In many of the prints, the blurring seems to suggest either that the buildings are in motion or that the photographer is moving, a quasi-cinematic effect that implies the viewer’s mobility as well.

The camera’s movement also generates dislocations and distortions of form. Light reflecting from a tall office tower bounces off a facing building in such a way that a brilliant square of white light detaches from the building and floats off to the left. Or in another photograph a cascade of rectangular prisms runs down the surface of a building making zigzagging lines resembling pencil squiggles.

While the early New York City views tend to feature masonry buildings, the later works present unornamented modern office towers of glass and steel, dramatically massed and jutting into the sky. They changed from utilitarian structures to gridded and striated rectangular volumes that are de-materialized through the camera’s movement.

-Roni Feinstein, 2003

Zimmerman’s Cityscapes take their place in a tradition reaching back to Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of New York skyscrapers taken in the early 1930’s. But where Stieglitz’s skyscrapers rise like fantastical temples, with every cornice, molding, or girder crisply outlined by sunlight and shadow, Zimmerman moves her camera to create a sense of architecture in motion. The sunlit peaks of office towers detach themselves and float away into the sky, while the cornices of older buildings shoot sideways, leaving dark trails behind them. In Zimmerman’s hands, photography ceases to be a sober means of documentation, and becomes instead a keyboard for composing tone-poems about the city.

-Pepe Karmel, 2013

The experience of the abandoned Andean city of cyclopean stone had the force of a revelation for Zimmerman. She visited Machu Picchu in 1987, one of a series of ancient sites she has seen, photographed, drawn, and been inspired by. Ascending to its heights, she recognized that it embodied for her all the qualities of a consecrated space: a place where nature and human civilization, as expressed in landscape and architecture, are inseparably intertwined; a place where obdurate stone resounds both with the countless ages of earth and with the dimmest memories of man; a place that purifies and gives meaning to our lives, even as it iterates our mortality.

Zimmerman has been under the spell of ancient sites since at least 1977, when she visited several archaic cave temples in India. It was at Ellora, - an extraordinary complex of sixth and seventh century rock-cut shrines, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain – that she realized she wanted to work in stone: seeing the chambers carved out of solid rock, deep in the side of a mountain, she was impressed by the devotional quality of the space. She responded to the antiquity of the stone and to the magnitude of the geological processes that shaped it, as well as to the human vision that transformed it. This confirmed in her an interest in earth history, acquired in part from a geologist brother; it also made her want to work outdoors and to address an ageless human need for spiritually regenerative places.

Zimmerman’s photography should be seen as something related to but discrete from her landscape projects. She does on occasion use her photographs for informational purposes, to record some aspect of a site she might later want to study. But she clearly has ambitions for these photographs that go beyond information: she works with large-format Pentax camera, and composes every shot with care and deliberation. The resulting black and white images don’t merely convey her admiration for her subjects: in another medium, they suggest again the way our jaded modern imaginations might still be humbled before the accomplishments of the ancients. They are works of deceptive simplicity and quiet hope: hope that we might learn to live with greater sensitivity to the ecological and spiritual dimensions of our environment.

– John Beardsley, 1991

In Zimmerman’s installations of the later 1970s and early 1980s, she uses light, glass, mirrors and pools of water to transform gallery spaces, dematerializing the actual walls and floors while creating planes of light and dark that seemed to hover in the air, surrounding and confronting the viewer. This 'strategy' is also visible in her early photographic pieces. Tassajara - probably the most personal statement Zimmerman makes - comes from the natural hot pool at the San Francisco Zen Center's mountain retreat in the wilderness of Big Sur, CA that she visited frequently. Reading from left to right, the reflected image goes from very fractured in the left panel to almost perfectly reflective in the right side panel, expressing the clarity that meditation and stillness create.

The Light Studies pieces are related to some of the installation projects done in 2004 at San Francisco's SITE SPACE and at the Broxton/Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. Setting up mirrors to reflect or 'bounce' light into other mirrors or onto flat surfaces to photograph them as references to time passing.

Spatial Topography is a documentation of the elements in her San Francisco studio space: corners, edges, windows, pillars. It was a way of mapping and dissecting a given space - which was also evident in her temporary installations that were done in galleries, museums and alternative art spaces during the 1970's.

– Pepe Karmel

My Hands, 1997
Published by the artist
Poem by Pablo Neruda
Edition of 5, 22"H x 30'W

Magna Grecia, 1994
Printed by Nash Editions on Arches Watercolor Paper
Published by Gagosian Gallery
Edition of 50, 22"H x 30'W