Roman Loranc defected from his native Poland to escape communism in 1982. He landed in Wisconsin.
“The first winter there, I moved to California,” he says through his Eastern European accent.
He made his way to California’s Central Valley, where he lived for 20 years, then moved to Northern California, where he has lived and worked for a decade, photographing the mountains, wetlands, rivers and meadows.
The topography reminded him of Poland, where he first learned the film photography process that he still practices. The reverence with which he photographed the landscape fit well into conservation work he ended up doing with The Nature Conservancy.
“Private Road with Clouds, 1993” looks like a majestic shot of a meadow from a John Ford Western. He says his “Two-Hearted Oak, 2000” has been an extremely popular photograph.
The Center for Photographic Art has put together a retrospective exhibition, including Loranc’s photographs of old churches in Europe. He likes to live in a place for a couple of years in order to shoot and make his photos.
“I love to live in a place, wake up very early, and go explore the area,” he says. With that kind of dedication, he prefers immersive and intensive film photographs mounted on a wall over ubiquitous and versatile digital photographs viewed on a monitor or device.
“For me photography is a very important connection to nature, to the world,” he says. “It’s important how you look at the photography.”
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